You are one of the few! So am I. It had a ponderous majesty and a curious, enquiring spirit - it was about exploring this enigmatic object and trying to figure out what it was. There are not a lot of films like that, certainly none of the other Trek films "explored strange new worlds" etc etc.
And my appreciation of the film only increased when I later that the director of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Robert Wise, also directed two other great SF films, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain (well, that's only borderline SF, but for my money it's the best cinematic depiction of actual science ever). The man is a legend.
I couldn't get into Brazil precisely because of the weirdness... it just seemed that Gilliam was throwing in weird stuff because it looked cool, rather than because it was plausible in any sense. (The future scenes in 12 Monkeys had this feel too.) But I only saw it once and that was many years ago, I should probably give it another shot.
the definition of science fiction basically says "set in space". I looked it up before making that post.
Good grief. That's a totally asinine definition of science fiction. Otherwise The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fahrenheit 451, The Caves of Steel, Timescape and many, many other science fiction classics don't qualify. Try again (and no, the definition is not "set in space OR the future OR both"!)
God no, as I recall that was a crappy film (I've seen it at least twice, haven't had the pleasure of watching the series yet) - luckily I'm fond of bad sci-fi. It's not too bad until they break out of the city, then it just gets stupid.
Of course, I'm 32, I would say that...
Ruthless compassion: that's not obviously the same as what Leary suggested, it's suggesting that angels are compassionate even though they are ruthless, not compassionate because they are ruthless. What you are talking about is understanding, which might aid but is certainly not identical with compassion, which the OED defines as pity, sympathy, grief - all emotional states, not objective observations.
Definition of species: yes, the definition I use is the accepted scientific one, that of being able to reproduce viable offspring. In practice, DNA would suffice. Your speculations about what happens to the definition of a species when the tech exists for extreme body upgrades are interesting but completely irrelevent because we do not have that tech yet and so you cannot be non-human in that sense. And your further speculations about at what point different behavourial characteristics constutute a new species or at least subspecies are unscientific; no scientist defines species according to mental characteristics. You are biologically human according to the scientific definition, ergo whatever behavourial characteristics you have are by definition within the human range. (Terence would have approved.) You are manifesting an extreme desire to be counted as other than human that goes beyond logic and science, and yes, this puts you in the same category as "otherkin". Your body is just as human as theirs, and your belief that you are nonhuman is just as erroneous as theirs.
Transhuman: a medical student may be "in the medical profession", but they can't call themselves "doctor" until they graduate. You can't call yourself a "transhuman" until you have actually become a transhuman. Surely this is only logical. Similarly, what does it matter that you may become transhuman 40 years from now? I will be a senior citizen 40 years from now, does that mean I can call myself one now? I cannot believe that somebody who claims to value logic would use such arguments. Why be so sloppy over language when it so easy to be precise? You're a transhumanist human, not a transhuman. Again, I put this down to wish fulfilment, not logic.
The logicality thing: personally I find the idea of the Singularity makes me very uneasy. I freely admit that and try not to let it colour my analysis. I don't think the Singularity won't come because I don't want it to. (The Universe doesn't obey me, unfortunately!) I don't think it will definitely come either, which many transhumanists and extropians seem to. That, coupled with their evident desire for it to come, triggers alarm bells for me. Too many people in the past have been oh-so-certain about what the future will bring, and some even claimed a scientific basis for their claims. Marxists, for one. Yes, we can laugh at them now, it's so obviously absurd, but that never stops people from making similar mistakes. I'll believe the Singularity when I see it (or at least unmistakeable evidence for its imminence); the future will surprise all of us, even transhumanists.
The Middle East: interesting about the flamewars amongst the transhumanists. But I think it is sensible for transhumanists to care about such things for several reasons: most importantly, you are still living in a pre-transhuman world which can still affect you (no Singularity for you if you get killed by a terrorist bomb tomorrow).
Human as insult: OK, I think this is the basis of my objection. What else would you rather be? A cuttlefish? A spore? Deep Blue? I can understand that you want to transcend the limitations of the human body; clearly it has many. But since you can't yet do so, humans are the best there are, on this planet at least, and so it in no way makes sense as an insult. (NB. nigger/redneck/punk are not comparable terms, because they were originally insults, sometime later ironically adopted by their targets as an proud self-label. "Human" was never an insult but a neutral or implicity positive descriptive term.) A bacterium has no desire to become a transbacterium. You should be grateful to be human, not sneering and dismissive.
I don't know what context Leary said that in, but it makes no sense to me. The basis for compassion is the recognition that one shares characteristics with other humans. That's why "dispassionate" is a synonym for the coldly logical stance you favour. As a secular humanist, I personally would look instead to Terence, who wrote that "I am human, so nothing human is strange to me." We are all predators and prey, poets and perverts.
Thanks for your personal perspective, I hadn't been aware of such a viewpoint previously. But firstly, it's not relevant to my point, which is that (unless my assumptions about who I'm talking to are waaaaaay off!) biologically you are human, whether you like it or not. Whether you feel nonhuman, or whether you feel you have been treated as a human by others is irrelevant. (That's cold logic for you!) You can look for the extremes of any population and label that "sufficiently different from the "average" human to (almost) constitute a different species", if you like, but it's got nowt to do with biological species. Which, after all, is surely a huge part of the point of transhumanism - to leave behind these imperfect biological vessels. (There's a growing number of people who claim that they are not humans at all, but shapeshifting animals ("otherkin"). Well, good for them if they want to claim such, but I'm not required to accept their claims if they contradict scientific evidence, which they do.)
Secondly, you may think transhumanists are just applying cold logic. But when I look at transhumanism I don't see a group of people dispassionately turning the possibilities over in their minds, I see a group of people who deeply yearn for the singularity to come. They may be right, and maybe it will come - but they aren't wholly logical about it, and often they deny that they have any motives other than rationality. And this leaves plenty of room for others to doubt the whole thing - the "rapture for nerds" label is quite apposite.
Finally, I still don't quite understand why you still think "human" is an insult? "Well, if you don't accept me, I don't have to accept you." Sorry to break it to you, but having an unhappy childhood doesn't make you non-human; it's very human indeed, unfortunately. And just because some other humans don't "accept" you does not mean that all other humans wouldn't (and in fact you have found such a group - the transhumanists! Which goes to my point above about the non-logical motivations for transhumanism), nor is it logical (except to a child) to conclude that therefore you have no need to "accept" them. You should be rational enough to formulate bases for interactions with other sophonts that are more sophisticated than tit for tat.
One can be resolutely secular and still recoil from the end of the human race. I'm an example of that. (Although at the midpoint of my veering between "The Singularity is the end of humanity! Run for the hills!" and "Yeah, yeah, yet another prediction of a technological utopia which will surprisingly never come to pass", I tend to think that there will be humans who can't, or won't transcend and they will be "left behind", with massively dislocated societies and technologies, but still recognisably human. So overall, I don't think it would mean the end of the human race.)
Oh, and my advice is to drop the puerile device of using the word "human" as an insult. You're still one too, meatbag.
Actually, of those three only Benford is actually employed as a scientist. Brin quit science for full-time writing a couple of decades ago (although he still seems to dabble a bit in various fields), and Reynolds recently did the same.
Oh, yeahhh. More and more, I find I cannot stand John Woo's overblown, stylised movies. I cannot see what the big deal about him is. They are all garbage, but Face/Off was the worst.
Yes but... that Scary Movie was so bad that Scary Movie 2 could not possibly be worse in no way implies that Scary Movie 2 would actually be worth seeing. In fact, assuming that Scary Movie 2 was in any way similar to Scary Movie beyond the name, I would have assumed the opposite.
Yeah, I think you're right about that. I expected SF, too, first time around, and hated it. (Also didn't help that my then-gf got severely pissed at me for dragging her along to a horror movie! She'd tolerate SF, but generally found horror far too intense.) But I watched it on TV earlier this year, and you know, it wasn't so bad as I remembered. Certainly not great, but not terrible either. So I guess my beef is with the way the film was marketed in the first place.
Oh yes, 2001 is sooooo hard to understand. It's like you need a PhD or something to figure it out.
Where do they find people like you? Maybe you should stick to something with more explosions and gunfire in it? Perhaps something from the John Woo collection.
Yo, people, just bear in mind that Dyson spheres don't have to be solid objects; in fact, Dyson's original concept was of a sufficient number of objects (ie a lot!) in orbit to completely absorb the star's light. A solid Dyson sphere is more of a sf fetish than a real-world possibility.
Many may believe that, but historians don't seem to. Eg, Richard Evans' recent "The Coming of the Third Reich" definitely didn't; I'm 95% sure Ian Kershaw's Hitler biography also didn't. Van der Lubbe, the Communist who was executed by the Nazis for starting the fire, was definitely involved. But it is possible he was manipulated into doing so by Nazis, though frankly I doubt they would have gone to such ends - they could have just set the fire themselves and blamed anyone they wanted to for it.
I agree. Why do we always have to see things from the Starfleet point of view? Doesn't anything interesting ever happen in the ST universe that doesn't involve Starfleet?
Not that I think the ST writers would do any better at, say, a legal drama... "Your honour, I object on the grounds that my client just disappeared into a polaron-induced wormhole." "Bailiff, rotate phase by 90 degrees and fire on that mysterious entity! Bench to sickbay, medical emergency... and somebody get the courtroom engineer up here immediately!" "Judge, I move for an immediate mistrial - the DA is distracting the jury by decontaminating herself with with body gel again!"
Nobody's ignoring it, because it's not true. (Did you have to link to a creationist website?) Physicists and mathematicians were NOT required to be ordained. The requirement was that any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be ordained. If you had a patron or were independently wealthy, then you did not have to be ordained, because you then didn't need a position at a university to do science. AFAICT, what happened with Newton was that he used a loophole - the terms of the Lucasian professorship (which he held) required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the normal ordination requirement, and Charles II accepted this argument. Sure, Newton did this because of his scepticism of the trinity, and religion and science were far more intermingled then than they are today, but you are waaaay overstating the amount of control religion had over science.
Originally it certainly was, but in the US it's also an honorific title for a lawyer, and has lost its gender-specifity in that usage. See, eg here for more detail than you probably want...
Very good points. OTOH, if you figure a 3 or 4 year rolling upgrade cycle for the Windows machines then over the cycle the costs will be similar on the OP's figures - still not exactly a big argument for moving to Solaris. And of course hardware is more expensive for the Suns, as well.
The nuclear-powered railroad switch lamp. The New York Central actually built some prototypes.
Ummm... why? How could this ever be seen as a practical solution to any real world problem? Was it just naive atomic boosterism (anything will be better if you make it atomic-powered - after all, it's futuristic)? The mind boggles!
A very interesting read on such things (though I don't recall the switch lamp!) is Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture
at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
Yes, and even Gollum travels some way towards goodness before reverting to his bad old ways. In fact, there is a significant amount of "inner life" for Gollum, we get to see something of his internal struggles and come to acquire some sympathy for his plight. So yeah, I agree, the GP is greatly overstating the case.
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And my appreciation of the film only increased when I later that the director of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Robert Wise, also directed two other great SF films, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain (well, that's only borderline SF, but for my money it's the best cinematic depiction of actual science ever). The man is a legend.
I couldn't get into Brazil precisely because of the weirdness ... it just seemed that Gilliam was throwing in weird stuff because it looked cool, rather than because it was plausible in any sense. (The future scenes in 12 Monkeys had this feel too.) But I only saw it once and that was many years ago, I should probably give it another shot.
Good grief. That's a totally asinine definition of science fiction. Otherwise The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fahrenheit 451, The Caves of Steel, Timescape and many, many other science fiction classics don't qualify. Try again (and no, the definition is not "set in space OR the future OR both"!)
God no, as I recall that was a crappy film (I've seen it at least twice, haven't had the pleasure of watching the series yet) - luckily I'm fond of bad sci-fi. It's not too bad until they break out of the city, then it just gets stupid. Of course, I'm 32, I would say that ...
Definition of species: yes, the definition I use is the accepted scientific one, that of being able to reproduce viable offspring. In practice, DNA would suffice. Your speculations about what happens to the definition of a species when the tech exists for extreme body upgrades are interesting but completely irrelevent because we do not have that tech yet and so you cannot be non-human in that sense. And your further speculations about at what point different behavourial characteristics constutute a new species or at least subspecies are unscientific; no scientist defines species according to mental characteristics. You are biologically human according to the scientific definition, ergo whatever behavourial characteristics you have are by definition within the human range. (Terence would have approved.) You are manifesting an extreme desire to be counted as other than human that goes beyond logic and science, and yes, this puts you in the same category as "otherkin". Your body is just as human as theirs, and your belief that you are nonhuman is just as erroneous as theirs.
Transhuman: a medical student may be "in the medical profession", but they can't call themselves "doctor" until they graduate. You can't call yourself a "transhuman" until you have actually become a transhuman. Surely this is only logical. Similarly, what does it matter that you may become transhuman 40 years from now? I will be a senior citizen 40 years from now, does that mean I can call myself one now? I cannot believe that somebody who claims to value logic would use such arguments. Why be so sloppy over language when it so easy to be precise? You're a transhumanist human, not a transhuman. Again, I put this down to wish fulfilment, not logic.
The logicality thing: personally I find the idea of the Singularity makes me very uneasy. I freely admit that and try not to let it colour my analysis. I don't think the Singularity won't come because I don't want it to. (The Universe doesn't obey me, unfortunately!) I don't think it will definitely come either, which many transhumanists and extropians seem to. That, coupled with their evident desire for it to come, triggers alarm bells for me. Too many people in the past have been oh-so-certain about what the future will bring, and some even claimed a scientific basis for their claims. Marxists, for one. Yes, we can laugh at them now, it's so obviously absurd, but that never stops people from making similar mistakes. I'll believe the Singularity when I see it (or at least unmistakeable evidence for its imminence); the future will surprise all of us, even transhumanists.
The Middle East: interesting about the flamewars amongst the transhumanists. But I think it is sensible for transhumanists to care about such things for several reasons: most importantly, you are still living in a pre-transhuman world which can still affect you (no Singularity for you if you get killed by a terrorist bomb tomorrow).
Human as insult: OK, I think this is the basis of my objection. What else would you rather be? A cuttlefish? A spore? Deep Blue? I can understand that you want to transcend the limitations of the human body; clearly it has many. But since you can't yet do so, humans are the best there are, on this planet at least, and so it in no way makes sense as an insult. (NB. nigger/redneck/punk are not comparable terms, because they were originally insults, sometime later ironically adopted by their targets as an proud self-label. "Human" was never an insult but a neutral or implicity positive descriptive term.) A bacterium has no desire to become a transbacterium. You should be grateful to be human, not sneering and dismissive.
Thanks for your personal perspective, I hadn't been aware of such a viewpoint previously. But firstly, it's not relevant to my point, which is that (unless my assumptions about who I'm talking to are waaaaaay off!) biologically you are human, whether you like it or not. Whether you feel nonhuman, or whether you feel you have been treated as a human by others is irrelevant. (That's cold logic for you!) You can look for the extremes of any population and label that "sufficiently different from the "average" human to (almost) constitute a different species", if you like, but it's got nowt to do with biological species. Which, after all, is surely a huge part of the point of transhumanism - to leave behind these imperfect biological vessels. (There's a growing number of people who claim that they are not humans at all, but shapeshifting animals ("otherkin"). Well, good for them if they want to claim such, but I'm not required to accept their claims if they contradict scientific evidence, which they do.)
Secondly, you may think transhumanists are just applying cold logic. But when I look at transhumanism I don't see a group of people dispassionately turning the possibilities over in their minds, I see a group of people who deeply yearn for the singularity to come. They may be right, and maybe it will come - but they aren't wholly logical about it, and often they deny that they have any motives other than rationality. And this leaves plenty of room for others to doubt the whole thing - the "rapture for nerds" label is quite apposite.
Finally, I still don't quite understand why you still think "human" is an insult? "Well, if you don't accept me, I don't have to accept you." Sorry to break it to you, but having an unhappy childhood doesn't make you non-human; it's very human indeed, unfortunately. And just because some other humans don't "accept" you does not mean that all other humans wouldn't (and in fact you have found such a group - the transhumanists! Which goes to my point above about the non-logical motivations for transhumanism), nor is it logical (except to a child) to conclude that therefore you have no need to "accept" them. You should be rational enough to formulate bases for interactions with other sophonts that are more sophisticated than tit for tat.
Oh, and my advice is to drop the puerile device of using the word "human" as an insult. You're still one too, meatbag.
Actually, of those three only Benford is actually employed as a scientist. Brin quit science for full-time writing a couple of decades ago (although he still seems to dabble a bit in various fields), and Reynolds recently did the same.
Oh, yeahhh. More and more, I find I cannot stand John Woo's overblown, stylised movies. I cannot see what the big deal about him is. They are all garbage, but Face/Off was the worst.
Yes but ... that Scary Movie was so bad that Scary Movie 2 could not possibly be worse in no way implies that Scary Movie 2 would actually be worth seeing. In fact, assuming that Scary Movie 2 was in any way similar to Scary Movie beyond the name, I would have assumed the opposite.
Yeah, I think you're right about that. I expected SF, too, first time around, and hated it. (Also didn't help that my then-gf got severely pissed at me for dragging her along to a horror movie! She'd tolerate SF, but generally found horror far too intense.) But I watched it on TV earlier this year, and you know, it wasn't so bad as I remembered. Certainly not great, but not terrible either. So I guess my beef is with the way the film was marketed in the first place.
Where do they find people like you? Maybe you should stick to something with more explosions and gunfire in it? Perhaps something from the John Woo collection.
You idiot.
Yo, people, just bear in mind that Dyson spheres don't have to be solid objects; in fact, Dyson's original concept was of a sufficient number of objects (ie a lot!) in orbit to completely absorb the star's light. A solid Dyson sphere is more of a sf fetish than a real-world possibility.
Many may believe that, but historians don't seem to. Eg, Richard Evans' recent "The Coming of the Third Reich" definitely didn't; I'm 95% sure Ian Kershaw's Hitler biography also didn't. Van der Lubbe, the Communist who was executed by the Nazis for starting the fire, was definitely involved. But it is possible he was manipulated into doing so by Nazis, though frankly I doubt they would have gone to such ends - they could have just set the fire themselves and blamed anyone they wanted to for it.
Neelix? Interesting even for an episode? Surely you jest!
Not that I think the ST writers would do any better at, say, a legal drama ... "Your honour, I object on the grounds that my client just disappeared into a polaron-induced wormhole." "Bailiff, rotate phase by 90 degrees and fire on that mysterious entity! Bench to sickbay, medical emergency ... and somebody get the courtroom engineer up here immediately!" "Judge, I move for an immediate mistrial - the DA is distracting the jury by decontaminating herself with with body gel again!"
Nobody's ignoring it, because it's not true. (Did you have to link to a creationist website?) Physicists and mathematicians were NOT required to be ordained. The requirement was that any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be ordained. If you had a patron or were independently wealthy, then you did not have to be ordained, because you then didn't need a position at a university to do science. AFAICT, what happened with Newton was that he used a loophole - the terms of the Lucasian professorship (which he held) required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the normal ordination requirement, and Charles II accepted this argument. Sure, Newton did this because of his scepticism of the trinity, and religion and science were far more intermingled then than they are today, but you are waaaay overstating the amount of control religion had over science.
`if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'
Oh, and Carroll has 2 "l"s!
Originally it certainly was, but in the US it's also an honorific title for a lawyer, and has lost its gender-specifity in that usage. See, eg here for more detail than you probably want ...
Looks like somebody's karma whoring for that +5, Informative post.
Very good points. OTOH, if you figure a 3 or 4 year rolling upgrade cycle for the Windows machines then over the cycle the costs will be similar on the OP's figures - still not exactly a big argument for moving to Solaris. And of course hardware is more expensive for the Suns, as well.
Ummm ... why? How could this ever be seen as a practical solution to any real world problem? Was it just naive atomic boosterism (anything will be better if you make it atomic-powered - after all, it's futuristic)? The mind boggles!
A very interesting read on such things (though I don't recall the switch lamp!) is Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
Yes, and even Gollum travels some way towards goodness before reverting to his bad old ways. In fact, there is a significant amount of "inner life" for Gollum, we get to see something of his internal struggles and come to acquire some sympathy for his plight. So yeah, I agree, the GP is greatly overstating the case.