IIRC, Copernicus' theory was only published posthumously, and with a disclaimer to the effect that he wasn't saying this is how the universe ACTUALLY is, but was only presenting a mathematical model which could be used for more accurate ephemerides. So he was hardly exposing himself to the same criticism as Galileo.
Larry Niven writes about sex with the vocabulary of a 14 year old boy. (Least favorite line in Ringworld: "She impaled herself on him in ecstacy." Sheesh, that's forever lodged in my brain like an evil splinter)
Ahh! Thank you. Someone else shares my pain... I never finished Ringworld, which as a hard sf geek I am ashamed of. But it was that exact line which caused me to throw down the book in disgust, and never pick it up again. Not because I was prudish - I was a randy adolescent myself, and quite enjoyed certain aspects of Heinlein's later trash. I think I just thought, "This is stupid. I've got better things to do with my time", and then probably went back to generating yet another AD&D character I never played.
Having said that, the specifics of Kyoto are not exactly endearing, such as the carbon sink offsets and emissions credit trading. Countries coud pump CO2 like crazy by buying emissions credits to countries that have large forests.
Erm, that's exactly the point. You allocate every country a CO2 quota. Those that don't need theirs sell it to a country that needs to produce more CO2. You can still reduce the overall CO2 emissions (which afterall is what matters) by lowering those quotas in future years; besides which, the countries buying quotas have an incentive to become cleaner themselves. This lessens the economic pain by efficiently reallocating resources where they are most needed and using the market to properly price those resources.
Cap and trade has been shown to work in more limited contexts, eg in the US with SO2. It's a good thing about Kyoto, not a bad thing.
Re:Talking about insanely short-sighted...
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It seems pretty clear that there is very little evidence for Heisenberg actively fudging his calculations, other than self-serving post-war accounts. The evidence suggests that he wanted to make the bomb, thought very little about the moral implications of his work, was very patriotic and wanted Germany to win the war, and was genuinely shocked and disbelieving when he heard about Hiroshima - he didn't think it was possible (not did the other German physicists he was interned with at the time - the British were eavesdropping). Even after the war he made comments to the effect that Nazi Germany and the Allies were effectively morally equivalent. It's hard to see why he would have wanted to prevent a German atomic bomb,
See: Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Re:What happens when life IS found
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Ok, so I went off on a big tangent/rant - sorry. But your logic is still flawed; just because the Bible doesn't talk about life on other worlds doesn't mean that there's no problem, because it could still implicitly contradict other Christian doctrines - just of the top of my head, the idea that animals were created to serve/be useful to man. What would be the use of a world full of animals orbiting Omicron Persei, that we will never get to utilise?
Re:What happens when life IS found
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No contradiction means no problem.
Comments like this demonstrate how clueless you are about the history of this question. Just because the Bible (or whathaveyou) is neutral on the existence of extraterrestrial life does NOT necessarily mean that there are no theological implications. Theologians and other interested parties have been arguing for centuries about what it would mean for their particular revealed religion. Just one example: did Christ die once, thereby saving all sentient beings, or did he need to die (or perhaps do something else, or nothing) on each world with intelligent life? If the latter, is our redemption event to be accorded any special significance over the rest? If the former, can aliens be "saved" if they weren't aware of Christ? How much of Christianity then is "accidental", specific to a terrestrial context, and how much is "universal"? YOU may think the answer to these questions is pretty obvious, or indeed irrelevant, but historically that wasn't so. Tom Paine used this sort of question in his Age of Reason as a reductio ad absurdum to ridicule revealed religion.
A fantastic historical overview of this is Michael Crowe's The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900; it considers the debate generally but given the way the debate was often framed in this period, focuses a lot on (Christian) theology.
PS For the record I'm an agnostic with strong atheistic tendencies, and I don't care myself one way or the other about what the implications are for religion... but the debates are interesting.
Thank you! I'm glad somebody else thinks so too... surely one period War of the Worlds is not too much to ask. Though I don't know how Spielberg would go with that... clearly when he thinks "history", he thinks "1933-1945".
The Working Class - (aka "the working poor") All the other working schmoes.
Proletariat - the poor. the homeless. the illegal aliens (excuse me, "undocumented workers"). the disenfranchised.
Good post, but aren't the proletariat and the working class more or less the same thing (modulo class consciousness, perhaps)? I think you mean lumpenproletariat.
Agreed. Magnolia is another one you could throw in there - a very challenging role and he pulled it off very well (although from one perspective you could say it's just a variation on his usual cocky, smarmy character.)
It's a bit like Mel Gibson's directing - you can say what you like about how good his films are, but nobody can say he is sticking to safe, familiar territory - otherwise he'd be directing himself in Lethal Weapon 9, rather than films like Hamlet and that Jesus thing. Gotta give them both points for trying.
Because the additional cost of a few comsats is going to be trivial compared with the cost of putting a radio telescope and associated infrastructure on the Moon in the first place. It would only cost a few hundred million tops for a few comsats (and why is it elaborate? We have dozens of these orbiting Earth, there's nothing difficult about it) - an observatory will cost a few billion (at least!). Assuming you are going to spend that money in the first place, why not spend a little extra and get the full benefit out of it? They'd also have other uses - eg communicating with spacecraft in lunar orbit while they are over the farside.
And speaking as an astronomer, yes, the benefits would be worth it. Of course, the comsats themselves will generate some radio noise... what would be better (and has been suggested) would be a shielded landline to the nearside. I think that would be a lot more expensive than comsats though...
You'd think that people are too cynical and worldly-wise to fall for this sort of thing, but as recently as 1988 some radio listeners in Portugal fell for the old War of the Worlds trick - there were earlier episodes in 1944, 1949 and 1973, mostly from Latin America. In fact, I seem to recall something about the ads for the film Independence Day being taken for real in Spain, but I can't dig up any online references.
What do you mean, you don't know if it's true? Of course there are no backup satellites for lunar orbit comsats. Because there aren't any lunar orbit comsats. The point is that if we had to rely on comsats to maintain contact with a farside observatory, then we would put backups in place then. What difference does it make what's there now?
What do you think the "Democratic" in "Democratic Republic of Korea" means? National Socialism was not meant to be a different kind of socialism: it was a rebuttal to socialism: a national socialism that privileged race above class. That is, it doesn't matter what class you are from, all this class warfare nonsense distracts us from the real struggle - the racial one. Right there this should tell you that Hitler was not a socialist in any sense that the term is commonly used.
The Nazis consistently opposed (physically and politically) left-wing parties in Germany and tended to ally with the right-wing ones. When Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933 it was with the connivance of right-wing politicians like Hindenburg and von Papen. There were some interesting socialist leanings in the Strasserite left-wing of the party but these did not long survive the seizure of power.
With respect to Vikings, I submit that both sides are right. Most Vikings were indeed peaceful farmers, traders and even colonists. A few Vikings - the ones most people think of when they use the word - were violent raiders, rapists and pillagers, who attacked and plundered many isolated coastal areas in northern Europe and beyond. I don't see how the bad name of those people derives from "bad PR"; they did afterall do those things. But what is unfortunate is that the rest of the Vikings were tarred with the same brush.
Yes, it'd be a bugger of a time pointing the damn thing though. "OK, next target is Sgr A*... please wait 350 years while we move the mirror to a new orbit."
Of couse you could just do a drift scan and pick up whatever happens to float across the field of view...
So I guess Vietnam was just a police action, huh. And Barbarossa was just a few panzer armies turning right at Brest-Litovsk instead of left... I could go on; do you want me to?
I think a more workable definition of war vis a vis terrorism would emphasise its state-to-state nature.
Oh, nice link... I loved Space Cadet when I was about twelve; must have read it about a dozen times. The only Heinlein juvenile I loved more was Space Family Stone (aka The Rolling Stones , both crap titles), with Time for the Stars an honourable third. (Those were the only Heinlein juveniles the public library had; then I discovered his adult books... let's not go there - certainly I shouldn't have at my tender age!) Yes, Heinlein was good for teaching you "astrogation"; bet I was the only kid in school who knew what a Hohmann transfer orbit was!
Hmmm, yes, but theorists are great at discarding their theories and coming up with new explanations after the fact as to why they should have known all along that result X was going to be obtained, if only they had taken into account factor Y... which is as it should be, really. Maybe Dawkins is wrong and abiogenesis is not all that unlikely. The Universe is the final arbiter in science.
But I agree, there would be a definite possibility that any Martian life was related to life on Earth.
Well, no, because it's not just about number crunching, there are other cultural factors. As I said, movie-going was a far more popular pastime back then. It's something nearly everybody did, under a certain age, every week, sometimes more than once. There was a lot less competition for your entertainment time: no tv, no dvd, no internet, no computer games... people went out to the movies, or they went dancing, or they stayed home and listened to the radio. So people saw a LOT of movies. It's nothing like that today. Popular movies had much longer runs too - Casablanca came out in what, 1942? But I know it was still being shown weekly in London in 1944, maybe even 1945. Today even popular movies are gone after a couple of months. And people went to see their favourite movies again and again, because they had no other way to see them once they had finished their run - nowadays if you miss seeing a movie in the cinema, you can catch it on on video or dvd, pay, on tv... download it from kazaa even. It was a different world, and a simple head count does not take that into account.
I'm not defending grosses over ticket sales. I'm saying you want to replace one simplistic measure with another simplistic measure. (It's almost like comparing voter turnout in the US with that in Australia: yes, it's much higher here, but it's also compulsory so comparisons are meaningless.) Yes, you could probably do a more sophisticated analysis (but more than simple weights though) but as I said, why bother? What would it prove? There's no objective criterion for saying one movie is better than another anyway. If you like GwtW more than LotR then great. If you need to have your subjective choices "objectively" validated then... not great.
It's interesting that so far the massive success of LOTR doesn't seem to haved kicked off a wave of imitators. As you mention there have been a lot of superhero films of late, and Gladiator has inspired a few sword and sandal historical epics: Troy, a biopic of Alexander the Great, and King Arthur (which I count as historical rather than fantasy, because that's the spin of this particular production). Granted, Gladiator came out over a year before FOTR, which gives it a head start, but OTOH it's been 3 years since FOTR, so there should be some fantasy films in development by now. But I haven't even heard much in the way of rumours, except the obligatory Hobbit ones. Anyone know any better?
Except that the size of the movie-going public has changed over the decades, up and down, for a number of reasons - eg popularity of movie-going in general (high in 1939) and sheer size of population (obviously lower in 1939). Not to mention other factors like numbers of screens, numbers of films being shown, national coverage, etc. So you can just compare ticket sales for a film shown in 1939 and a film shown in 2004. Let's face it, there's no single objective basis for comparison. And why should there be?
IIRC American universities seem to call most academics professors of one sort or another, whereas in British (and Australian) universities it's a much valued sign of distinction. So I'd say the NYT is just following standard US practice.
You've nailed it on the head; but it's utter awfulness is why we should never forget it. You know, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, and so on:)
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IIRC, Copernicus' theory was only published posthumously, and with a disclaimer to the effect that he wasn't saying this is how the universe ACTUALLY is, but was only presenting a mathematical model which could be used for more accurate ephemerides. So he was hardly exposing himself to the same criticism as Galileo.
Ahh! Thank you. Someone else shares my pain ... I never finished Ringworld, which as a hard sf geek I am ashamed of. But it was that exact line which caused me to throw down the book in disgust, and never pick it up again. Not because I was prudish - I was a randy adolescent myself, and quite enjoyed certain aspects of Heinlein's later trash. I think I just thought, "This is stupid. I've got better things to do with my time", and then probably went back to generating yet another AD&D character I never played.
ObList of Culture ship names
Jousting sticks!
Sorry, I just had to.
Erm, that's exactly the point. You allocate every country a CO2 quota. Those that don't need theirs sell it to a country that needs to produce more CO2. You can still reduce the overall CO2 emissions (which afterall is what matters) by lowering those quotas in future years; besides which, the countries buying quotas have an incentive to become cleaner themselves. This lessens the economic pain by efficiently reallocating resources where they are most needed and using the market to properly price those resources.
Cap and trade has been shown to work in more limited contexts, eg in the US with SO2. It's a good thing about Kyoto, not a bad thing.
See: Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Ok, so I went off on a big tangent/rant - sorry. But your logic is still flawed; just because the Bible doesn't talk about life on other worlds doesn't mean that there's no problem, because it could still implicitly contradict other Christian doctrines - just of the top of my head, the idea that animals were created to serve/be useful to man. What would be the use of a world full of animals orbiting Omicron Persei, that we will never get to utilise?
Comments like this demonstrate how clueless you are about the history of this question. Just because the Bible (or whathaveyou) is neutral on the existence of extraterrestrial life does NOT necessarily mean that there are no theological implications. Theologians and other interested parties have been arguing for centuries about what it would mean for their particular revealed religion. Just one example: did Christ die once, thereby saving all sentient beings, or did he need to die (or perhaps do something else, or nothing) on each world with intelligent life? If the latter, is our redemption event to be accorded any special significance over the rest? If the former, can aliens be "saved" if they weren't aware of Christ? How much of Christianity then is "accidental", specific to a terrestrial context, and how much is "universal"? YOU may think the answer to these questions is pretty obvious, or indeed irrelevant, but historically that wasn't so. Tom Paine used this sort of question in his Age of Reason as a reductio ad absurdum to ridicule revealed religion.
A fantastic historical overview of this is Michael Crowe's The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 ; it considers the debate generally but given the way the debate was often framed in this period, focuses a lot on (Christian) theology.
PS For the record I'm an agnostic with strong atheistic tendencies, and I don't care myself one way or the other about what the implications are for religion ... but the debates are interesting.
Thank you! I'm glad somebody else thinks so too ... surely one period War of the Worlds is not too much to ask. Though I don't know how Spielberg would go with that ... clearly when he thinks "history", he thinks "1933-1945".
Proletariat - the poor. the homeless. the illegal aliens (excuse me, "undocumented workers"). the disenfranchised.
Good post, but aren't the proletariat and the working class more or less the same thing (modulo class consciousness, perhaps)? I think you mean lumpenproletariat.
It's a bit like Mel Gibson's directing - you can say what you like about how good his films are, but nobody can say he is sticking to safe, familiar territory - otherwise he'd be directing himself in Lethal Weapon 9, rather than films like Hamlet and that Jesus thing. Gotta give them both points for trying.
going to be trivial compared with the cost of putting a radio telescope and associated infrastructure on the Moon in the first place. It would only cost a few hundred million tops for a few comsats (and why is it elaborate? We have dozens of these orbiting Earth, there's nothing difficult about it) - an observatory will cost a few billion (at least!). Assuming you are going to spend that money in the first place, why not spend a little extra and get the full benefit out of it? They'd also have other uses - eg communicating with spacecraft in lunar orbit while they are over the farside.
And speaking as an astronomer, yes, the benefits would be worth it. Of course, the comsats themselves will generate some radio noise
You'd think that people are too cynical and worldly-wise to fall for this sort of thing, but as recently as 1988 some radio listeners in Portugal fell for the old War of the Worlds trick - there were earlier episodes in 1944, 1949 and 1973, mostly from Latin America. In fact, I seem to recall something about the ads for the film Independence Day being taken for real in Spain, but I can't dig up any online references.
What do you mean, you don't know if it's true? Of course there are no backup satellites for lunar orbit comsats. Because there aren't any lunar orbit comsats. The point is that if we had to rely on comsats to maintain contact with a farside observatory, then we would put backups in place then. What difference does it make what's there now?
The Nazis consistently opposed (physically and politically) left-wing parties in Germany and tended to ally with the right-wing ones. When Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933 it was with the connivance of right-wing politicians like Hindenburg and von Papen. There were some interesting socialist leanings in the Strasserite left-wing of the party but these did not long survive the seizure of power.
There's a good Wikipedia page on this subject.
With respect to Vikings, I submit that both sides are right. Most Vikings were indeed peaceful farmers, traders and even colonists. A few Vikings - the ones most people think of when they use the word - were violent raiders, rapists and pillagers, who attacked and plundered many isolated coastal areas in northern Europe and beyond. I don't see how the bad name of those people derives from "bad PR"; they did afterall do those things. But what is unfortunate is that the rest of the Vikings were tarred with the same brush.
Of couse you could just do a drift scan and pick up whatever happens to float across the field of view ...
So I guess Vietnam was just a police action, huh. And Barbarossa was just a few panzer armies turning right at Brest-Litovsk instead of left ... I could go on; do you want me to?
I think a more workable definition of war vis a vis terrorism would emphasise its state-to-state nature.
Oh, nice link ... I loved Space Cadet when I was about twelve; must have read it about a dozen times. The only Heinlein juvenile I loved more was Space Family Stone (aka The Rolling Stones , both crap titles), with Time for the Stars an honourable third. (Those were the only Heinlein juveniles the public library had; then I discovered his adult books ... let's not go there - certainly I shouldn't have at my tender age!) Yes, Heinlein was good for teaching you "astrogation"; bet I was the only kid in school who knew what a Hohmann transfer orbit was!
But I agree, there would be a definite possibility that any Martian life was related to life on Earth.
I'm not defending grosses over ticket sales. I'm saying you want to replace one simplistic measure with another simplistic measure. (It's almost like comparing voter turnout in the US with that in Australia: yes, it's much higher here, but it's also compulsory so comparisons are meaningless.) Yes, you could probably do a more sophisticated analysis (but more than simple weights though) but as I said, why bother? What would it prove? There's no objective criterion for saying one movie is better than another anyway. If you like GwtW more than LotR then great. If you need to have your subjective choices "objectively" validated then ... not great.
It's interesting that so far the massive success of LOTR doesn't seem to haved kicked off a wave of imitators. As you mention there have been a lot of superhero films of late, and Gladiator has inspired a few sword and sandal historical epics: Troy , a biopic of Alexander the Great, and King Arthur (which I count as historical rather than fantasy, because that's the spin of this particular production). Granted, Gladiator came out over a year before FOTR, which gives it a head start, but OTOH it's been 3 years since FOTR, so there should be some fantasy films in development by now. But I haven't even heard much in the way of rumours, except the obligatory Hobbit ones. Anyone know any better?
Except that the size of the movie-going public has changed over the decades, up and down, for a number of reasons - eg popularity of movie-going in general (high in 1939) and sheer size of population (obviously lower in 1939). Not to mention other factors like numbers of screens, numbers of films being shown, national coverage, etc. So you can just compare ticket sales for a film shown in 1939 and a film shown in 2004. Let's face it, there's no single objective basis for comparison. And why should there be?
IIRC American universities seem to call most academics professors of one sort or another, whereas in British (and Australian) universities it's a much valued sign of distinction. So I'd say the NYT is just following standard US practice.
You've nailed it on the head; but it's utter awfulness is why we should never forget it. You know, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, and so on :)