A good dose of the Cosmos mini-series, both old and new, may be in order. Countless people of my generation were enlightened and educated by the first series. I would love to lock both houses of Congress in the House chambers, lock the door, and make them watch both series. Many scientific ignoramuses there may be enlightened, especially when they learn just how much good science has been government funded. But then there will be the religious fundamentalists who are thump their bibles and declare it all to be blasphemy. Those who are enlightened should be congratulated; those who cling to their religion despite the facts before them need to be put into a nuclear fusion torus and vaporized. That'll give them a bit of religion!
End result - people's will overturned by a few activist judges.
Wrong. It was overturned because Prop. 8 was clearly unconstitutional. Study civil rights law as I have and you'll understand. These are the facts: Marriage may be considered by some people as a holy thing but as far as the government is concerned, it's nothing more than a civil contract. When the government prohibits certain persons from entering into such a contract simply because of their sexual orientation or gender without there being a rational reason for that prohibition, it's unconstitutional because it's then considered to be arbitrary. There is no good reason for that prohibition that makes any sense. The excuses used by religious conservatives in the past have been shown to be crap. Gay marriage is almost a fait accompli in the U.S. and there is very little anyone can do about it.
Prop 8 was a slam dunk vote in which CA clearly voted in one direction, despite being pro Democrat since Reagan stopped being president.
Incidentally, recent polls show that California voters would not pass an initiative like Prop. 8 today and that a majority support gay marriage.
Some believe that it's not possible that life arose from simple organic compounds. Sure, there are people who believe a lot of things. There are the Mormons and the Scientologists who have their space alien fantasies. There are those who think that Jews and black people are inherently inferior to those of "Aryan" ancestry. There are those who still cling to the idea that Obama was not born in Hawaii, that he is a Muslim, etc. etc. etc. Yet, nearly everyone to actually analyzes such beliefs can find no credence for them. "Cosmos" is science, after all, what has been demonstrated to be true or seems to be so based upon the evidence.
If the lunatic fringe want equal time, they can make their own damned show and show it on one of the Christian nutcase cable channels.
Those companies better be careful when pouring sludge containing heavy metals like lead over poor, easily irritated people. Those people might send back the lead in a more refined form.
Oh yes. Such as being asked to give someone a gun and the person complies, starting with the bullets.
Oh, we've learned something. We've learned that this is something the government doesn't want to deal with. How much sludge does a company have to pour into a river before the government not only takes notice but does something about it?
This rover has been running ten years and has been used to do great science, far more than anyone ever anticipated. All the rovers have far exceeded their intended lifetimes. In other words, they're cheap. X number of dollars was spent to delivery Y amount of science and they got far more than they bargained for. Continuing the funding for the the rover means that this science gets even cheaper.
What Congress really ought to do is give NASA $10 billion, tell them to build and launch more rovers of this type, and send them all over Mars. $10 billion will pay for a lot of rovers.
Well, more specifically, why airlines won't install this device unless they're made to do it... and they won't.
If you were Malaysian Airlines right now you might wish you had one of these devices installed on the plane because it would resolve much of the public relations headache they are currently facing by letting them know NOW what was happening to that plane before it disappeared.. But that's about all it would save them. It won't save them anything else.
An airline is only going to want to install such a device if it directly benefits them financially and this device offers very little.
I doubt the FAA is going to require US carriers to install it because it offers very little the black boxes don't offer. It doesn't happen very often that a black box is unreadable or unrecoverable after a crash. It happens, but probably not often enough for installation of this device to be worth the cost and the trouble, especially that when those boxes are unavailable investigators have almost always been able to figure out what went wrong by using other evidence.
It's an amazing place. They have a large wall covered with dire wolf skulls, just to show off how many dire wolf skeletons have been dug up.
It is an amazing place and easy to get to without a car. They also have either a woolly mammoth, a mastodon, or both on display, or did the last time I was there. The museum is evidence that the Los Angeles area was a kind of Garden of Eden during the last Ice Age. Of course, every Eden has to have its serpent to spoil it. In that place, the serpent was the saber-toothed lion.
And while you're there, the county art museum is next door if you like that kind of thing.
This is very interesting. You aren't going to find clams and sea lion heads in the La Brea tar pits. The most unusual thing I can recall they've found in there was a human skeleton of a native American woman who was bashed on the head and her body dumped in a pit.
Cats are at an evolutionary disadvantage compared to other domesticated animals, which are almost all social and equipped with the biological tools for living in a pack or herd.
Ordinary domestic pussycats do just fine living in groups. That's one of the reasons why they do well living with humans and with other cats and dogs as well. But cats are solitary hunters, unlike dogs and wolves which hunt in packs.
'cause cats couldn't care less what your mood is:-)
That actually is not true. My experience is that my evil cat knows when I'm in a evil mood myself. She stays away. She also knows when I'm sick or feeling sad.
This study was the first to actually look for a "voice center" in a non-primate. It seems more likely a great many animals have one, much as it may disappoint exceptionalists.
I am pretty sure that my beloved evil black cat knows my voice quite well. Indeed, she not only has figured out my voice, she's figured out everything else. She's highly manipulative. While I have trouble training her, she's got me well-trained.
As I sometimes say to my evil black cat when she gets a bit crazy and decides to sink her claws into me, "Cat, the other white meat." So far she hasn't worked.
Is it really so hard to just grind the beans and brew it yourself? I do this every morning.
Grind the beans? Well, I don't drink coffee that much so I'll stick with the ground coffee I buy from Starbucks or Peets. But I use a small four-cup drip drip maker I've had for well over a decade. It's not quite as simple as the Keurig system but it's pretty simple. Empty old filter and grounds into trash, insert filter, scoop in coffee, pour in water, turn on switch, wait.
Historically, there have been easier and cleaner ways of making coffee not dissimilar to the Keurig system. I have vivid memories of my Ohio grandparent's coffee percolator gurgling and growling early in the morning. Those machines used circular filter pouches not unlike oversized tea bags and many coffee producers sold them. What they poured out smelled wonderful and tasted awful. Coffee making as gotten better.
Being a person who was born and raised on the Los Angeles ares, I came to know the awfulsmog that once existed there. People sometimes would wear gas masks when the sky was very black. It's interesting how the Chinese have failed to learn from history. The air in Los Angeles is wonderful these day. It's still polluted, of course, to a certain extent but nothing like like it was in the 1950-1980 period and nothing like what you see in China now.
But Bitcoins do not exist physically. There is nothing I can stuff under the mattress. And there lies the ultimate problem I think.
You can print out your private key and put it under your mattress. In fact many people do precisely this. This removes the possibility of your private key being discovered by malware on a computer you might use to access your wallet. But if you do this, you need to make sure that this private key is kept safe, because if you lose it or it burns in a fire, those bitcoins are lost forever.
I don't see why physical manifestation matters, especially since all your bitcoins can be converted to a physical thing (piece of paper with a long number on it), in the same way that a digital picture can be converted to a physical picture by printing it at CVS.
Ah, an excellent point. This makes Bitcoins no more stable in value theoretically than precious metals or stocks and bonds. But I trust those more than I trust Bitcoins at present.
Money, or more specifically, currency has value only because others will accept it in exchange for goods or services. The reason why these pieces of paper, plastic, and base metal the governments of the world call dollars, euros, yuan, yen, francs, etc., etc. have value is not because those governments say they do but rather because those governments will accept them in payment of taxes, fees, and other amounts of money owed to them. From that one fact all else follows.
So, let's follow the logic, Bitcoins are not issued by any governments. Furthermore, as far as I know, no government will accept them as payment for taxes or fees. However, because there exists an exchange for the buying and selling of Bitcoins using government-issued currencies, they have value but only relative to the values of the other currencies. You can think of it in another way, Bitcoin is almost exactly the same as buying gold and silver bullion coins. Because no government uses the gold standard anymore or issues gold or silver coins for general circulation, the value of gold and silver in relation to the dollar or the euro, for example, also varies.
But the value of Bitcoins also is dependent upon the security of the place they are stored. If your Bitcoin wallet can be easily picked, you are going to value them less. You will view dollars deposited in a bank whose deposits are not backed by the government in a similar light. This happened during the Great Depression when people kept their money in their mattresses and other places. While a mattress may not be a secure place to store money, people viewed their mattresses as more secure than the banks that were going bust left and right at that time. The same can be said about gold. You can buy gold and pay someone else to store it securely, someone with insurance. But I can keep it myself under my proverbial mattress if I choose. And the same can be said about my 401K retirement account. It's with a reputable brokerage (well, if you can use that word to describe Wall Street shysters) and my account is backed by insurance. I expect it to be there when I need it. But I can if I choose get everything on paper and put it with the gold to keep it company. But Bitcoins do not exist physically. There is nothing I can stuff under the mattress. And there lies the ultimate problem I think.
Well, the largest Bitcoin exchange is dead, 3/4 million Bitcoins have gone missing, and those who owned them are now out of luck. Do I trust them? What do you think?
Banning something like Google Glass may be premature and therefore does not make a lot of sense. The logic behind this is similar to that which will be used by those who will challenge local and state laws that are banning the use of electronic cigarettes in places where smoking is ordinarily banned. There is a great deal of scientific evidence that proves second-hand smoke is dangerous to those who inhale it. However, there is no such evidence regarding the vapor exhaled by those using e-smokes.
Alturism is one-way. No reciprocation. What I give out for free is gone forever.
Hogwash. Let me tell you a story. A much older first cousin of mine, a rather pleasant fellow, spend his entire career at General Motors, starting as an engineer. On the way to the interview, a woman carrying a large pile of papers dropped them in an elevator. He put down his briefcase, crouched down, and helped her pick them up. When he was led into the conference room for the interview, I found the woman was in the room. He later learned that she was an administrative assistant for one of the members of the interview committee and that she told her boss about his simple act of courtesy. He got the job. It is quite possible that this one act of courtesy made him stick out in a field of many qualified candidates and it was the ultimate deciding factor.
He retired about ten years ago as the vice-president for fuel cell technology. Now who says that altruism one-way?
This book reminds me of a favorite sci fi story from the 1950's by Clifford B. Simak that was dramatized by NBC Radio in the old X Minus One radio series titled "Courtesy". I've never read the story but have listened to the dramatization many times.
The premise of the story is a human expedition arrives on an alien planet that is inhabited but shows ample evidence of an older civilization that was destroyed by a plague. The humans, arrogant to a man save one, know about the plague and have a vaccine for the plague, except that the ship's doctor's bad eyes misread the expiration date and the vaccine is no good. The crew is doomed to die, yet the natives seem to have an antidote, and the humans are determined to beat it out of them if necessary.
The ship's doctor goes out to meet with the natives to see if he can learn about their immunity. However, he falls off a cliff and dies on his way back. After the crew recovers the body, they find a piece of paper with a single word written on it: Courtesy. In the mean time the crew starts to die of the plague... except for one man, the man who has some humility and stepped out of the way of a native they'd captured as a matter of courtesy.
Too late, the captain of the expedition realizes that the natives survived the plague by abandoning their cities and started to live simply and with humility. He and his men, save the one, are going to die because they were not willing to display courtesy.
In some ways, the way we live now is a kind of a plague that is slowly killing us. Wouldn't life be a lot easier if we simply were respectful to each other without exception?
Okay, let me rephrase. The original series used music that existed BEFORE the series was even thought of, which maybe a couple exceptions, such as the Vangelis pieces.
You know, after I wrote this post, I looked at the Wikipedia entry of Neil de Grasse Tyson and saw a photo of him signing one of his books. He's using a blue expensive-looking (maybe Waterman) fountain pen. My opinion of his success of his version of Cosmos has improved. As a fellow fountain pen user, anyone recent user of one of these anachronisms comes up a notch in my estimate.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: I fear Greeks bearing gifts.
A reference to the Trojan horse.
A good dose of the Cosmos mini-series, both old and new, may be in order. Countless people of my generation were enlightened and educated by the first series. I would love to lock both houses of Congress in the House chambers, lock the door, and make them watch both series. Many scientific ignoramuses there may be enlightened, especially when they learn just how much good science has been government funded. But then there will be the religious fundamentalists who are thump their bibles and declare it all to be blasphemy. Those who are enlightened should be congratulated; those who cling to their religion despite the facts before them need to be put into a nuclear fusion torus and vaporized. That'll give them a bit of religion!
End result - people's will overturned by a few activist judges.
Wrong. It was overturned because Prop. 8 was clearly unconstitutional. Study civil rights law as I have and you'll understand. These are the facts: Marriage may be considered by some people as a holy thing but as far as the government is concerned, it's nothing more than a civil contract. When the government prohibits certain persons from entering into such a contract simply because of their sexual orientation or gender without there being a rational reason for that prohibition, it's unconstitutional because it's then considered to be arbitrary. There is no good reason for that prohibition that makes any sense. The excuses used by religious conservatives in the past have been shown to be crap. Gay marriage is almost a fait accompli in the U.S. and there is very little anyone can do about it.
Prop 8 was a slam dunk vote in which CA clearly voted in one direction, despite being pro Democrat since Reagan stopped being president.
Incidentally, recent polls show that California voters would not pass an initiative like Prop. 8 today and that a majority support gay marriage.
Some believe that it's not possible that life arose from simple organic compounds. Sure, there are people who believe a lot of things. There are the Mormons and the Scientologists who have their space alien fantasies. There are those who think that Jews and black people are inherently inferior to those of "Aryan" ancestry. There are those who still cling to the idea that Obama was not born in Hawaii, that he is a Muslim, etc. etc. etc. Yet, nearly everyone to actually analyzes such beliefs can find no credence for them. "Cosmos" is science, after all, what has been demonstrated to be true or seems to be so based upon the evidence.
If the lunatic fringe want equal time, they can make their own damned show and show it on one of the Christian nutcase cable channels.
Those companies better be careful when pouring sludge containing heavy metals like lead over poor, easily irritated people. Those people might send back the lead in a more refined form.
Oh yes. Such as being asked to give someone a gun and the person complies, starting with the bullets.
Oh, we've learned something. We've learned that this is something the government doesn't want to deal with. How much sludge does a company have to pour into a river before the government not only takes notice but does something about it?
This rover has been running ten years and has been used to do great science, far more than anyone ever anticipated. All the rovers have far exceeded their intended lifetimes. In other words, they're cheap. X number of dollars was spent to delivery Y amount of science and they got far more than they bargained for. Continuing the funding for the the rover means that this science gets even cheaper.
What Congress really ought to do is give NASA $10 billion, tell them to build and launch more rovers of this type, and send them all over Mars. $10 billion will pay for a lot of rovers.
Well, more specifically, why airlines won't install this device unless they're made to do it... and they won't.
If you were Malaysian Airlines right now you might wish you had one of these devices installed on the plane because it would resolve much of the public relations headache they are currently facing by letting them know NOW what was happening to that plane before it disappeared.. But that's about all it would save them. It won't save them anything else.
An airline is only going to want to install such a device if it directly benefits them financially and this device offers very little.
I doubt the FAA is going to require US carriers to install it because it offers very little the black boxes don't offer. It doesn't happen very often that a black box is unreadable or unrecoverable after a crash. It happens, but probably not often enough for installation of this device to be worth the cost and the trouble, especially that when those boxes are unavailable investigators have almost always been able to figure out what went wrong by using other evidence.
It's an amazing place. They have a large wall covered with dire wolf skulls, just to show off how many dire wolf skeletons have been dug up.
It is an amazing place and easy to get to without a car. They also have either a woolly mammoth, a mastodon, or both on display, or did the last time I was there. The museum is evidence that the Los Angeles area was a kind of Garden of Eden during the last Ice Age. Of course, every Eden has to have its serpent to spoil it. In that place, the serpent was the saber-toothed lion.
And while you're there, the county art museum is next door if you like that kind of thing.
Actually, most of LA's subways are above ground.
You are probably confusing the subway with the trolley lines and the Metro Link trains, all of which run above ground for the most part.
This is very interesting. You aren't going to find clams and sea lion heads in the La Brea tar pits. The most unusual thing I can recall they've found in there was a human skeleton of a native American woman who was bashed on the head and her body dumped in a pit.
Cats are at an evolutionary disadvantage compared to other domesticated animals, which are almost all social and equipped with the biological tools for living in a pack or herd.
Ordinary domestic pussycats do just fine living in groups. That's one of the reasons why they do well living with humans and with other cats and dogs as well. But cats are solitary hunters, unlike dogs and wolves which hunt in packs.
'cause cats couldn't care less what your mood is :-)
That actually is not true. My experience is that my evil cat knows when I'm in a evil mood myself. She stays away. She also knows when I'm sick or feeling sad.
This study was the first to actually look for a "voice center" in a non-primate. It seems more likely a great many animals have one, much as it may disappoint exceptionalists.
I am pretty sure that my beloved evil black cat knows my voice quite well. Indeed, she not only has figured out my voice, she's figured out everything else. She's highly manipulative. While I have trouble training her, she's got me well-trained.
As I sometimes say to my evil black cat when she gets a bit crazy and decides to sink her claws into me, "Cat, the other white meat." So far she hasn't worked.
Is it really so hard to just grind the beans and brew it yourself? I do this every morning.
Grind the beans? Well, I don't drink coffee that much so I'll stick with the ground coffee I buy from Starbucks or Peets. But I use a small four-cup drip drip maker I've had for well over a decade. It's not quite as simple as the Keurig system but it's pretty simple. Empty old filter and grounds into trash, insert filter, scoop in coffee, pour in water, turn on switch, wait.
Historically, there have been easier and cleaner ways of making coffee not dissimilar to the Keurig system. I have vivid memories of my Ohio grandparent's coffee percolator gurgling and growling early in the morning. Those machines used circular filter pouches not unlike oversized tea bags and many coffee producers sold them. What they poured out smelled wonderful and tasted awful. Coffee making as gotten better.
Being a person who was born and raised on the Los Angeles ares, I came to know the awful smog that once existed there. People sometimes would wear gas masks when the sky was very black. It's interesting how the Chinese have failed to learn from history. The air in Los Angeles is wonderful these day. It's still polluted, of course, to a certain extent but nothing like like it was in the 1950-1980 period and nothing like what you see in China now.
But Bitcoins do not exist physically. There is nothing I can stuff under the mattress. And there lies the ultimate problem I think.
You can print out your private key and put it under your mattress. In fact many people do precisely this. This removes the possibility of your private key being discovered by malware on a computer you might use to access your wallet. But if you do this, you need to make sure that this private key is kept safe, because if you lose it or it burns in a fire, those bitcoins are lost forever.
I don't see why physical manifestation matters, especially since all your bitcoins can be converted to a physical thing (piece of paper with a long number on it), in the same way that a digital picture can be converted to a physical picture by printing it at CVS.
Ah, an excellent point. This makes Bitcoins no more stable in value theoretically than precious metals or stocks and bonds. But I trust those more than I trust Bitcoins at present.
Money, or more specifically, currency has value only because others will accept it in exchange for goods or services. The reason why these pieces of paper, plastic, and base metal the governments of the world call dollars, euros, yuan, yen, francs, etc., etc. have value is not because those governments say they do but rather because those governments will accept them in payment of taxes, fees, and other amounts of money owed to them. From that one fact all else follows.
So, let's follow the logic, Bitcoins are not issued by any governments. Furthermore, as far as I know, no government will accept them as payment for taxes or fees. However, because there exists an exchange for the buying and selling of Bitcoins using government-issued currencies, they have value but only relative to the values of the other currencies. You can think of it in another way, Bitcoin is almost exactly the same as buying gold and silver bullion coins. Because no government uses the gold standard anymore or issues gold or silver coins for general circulation, the value of gold and silver in relation to the dollar or the euro, for example, also varies.
But the value of Bitcoins also is dependent upon the security of the place they are stored. If your Bitcoin wallet can be easily picked, you are going to value them less. You will view dollars deposited in a bank whose deposits are not backed by the government in a similar light. This happened during the Great Depression when people kept their money in their mattresses and other places. While a mattress may not be a secure place to store money, people viewed their mattresses as more secure than the banks that were going bust left and right at that time. The same can be said about gold. You can buy gold and pay someone else to store it securely, someone with insurance. But I can keep it myself under my proverbial mattress if I choose. And the same can be said about my 401K retirement account. It's with a reputable brokerage (well, if you can use that word to describe Wall Street shysters) and my account is backed by insurance. I expect it to be there when I need it. But I can if I choose get everything on paper and put it with the gold to keep it company. But Bitcoins do not exist physically. There is nothing I can stuff under the mattress. And there lies the ultimate problem I think.
Well, the largest Bitcoin exchange is dead, 3/4 million Bitcoins have gone missing, and those who owned them are now out of luck. Do I trust them? What do you think?
Banning something like Google Glass may be premature and therefore does not make a lot of sense. The logic behind this is similar to that which will be used by those who will challenge local and state laws that are banning the use of electronic cigarettes in places where smoking is ordinarily banned. There is a great deal of scientific evidence that proves second-hand smoke is dangerous to those who inhale it. However, there is no such evidence regarding the vapor exhaled by those using e-smokes.
Alturism is one-way. No reciprocation. What I give out for free is gone forever.
Hogwash. Let me tell you a story. A much older first cousin of mine, a rather pleasant fellow, spend his entire career at General Motors, starting as an engineer. On the way to the interview, a woman carrying a large pile of papers dropped them in an elevator. He put down his briefcase, crouched down, and helped her pick them up. When he was led into the conference room for the interview, I found the woman was in the room. He later learned that she was an administrative assistant for one of the members of the interview committee and that she told her boss about his simple act of courtesy. He got the job. It is quite possible that this one act of courtesy made him stick out in a field of many qualified candidates and it was the ultimate deciding factor.
He retired about ten years ago as the vice-president for fuel cell technology. Now who says that altruism one-way?
This book reminds me of a favorite sci fi story from the 1950's by Clifford B. Simak that was dramatized by NBC Radio in the old X Minus One radio series titled "Courtesy". I've never read the story but have listened to the dramatization many times.
The premise of the story is a human expedition arrives on an alien planet that is inhabited but shows ample evidence of an older civilization that was destroyed by a plague. The humans, arrogant to a man save one, know about the plague and have a vaccine for the plague, except that the ship's doctor's bad eyes misread the expiration date and the vaccine is no good. The crew is doomed to die, yet the natives seem to have an antidote, and the humans are determined to beat it out of them if necessary.
The ship's doctor goes out to meet with the natives to see if he can learn about their immunity. However, he falls off a cliff and dies on his way back. After the crew recovers the body, they find a piece of paper with a single word written on it: Courtesy. In the mean time the crew starts to die of the plague... except for one man, the man who has some humility and stepped out of the way of a native they'd captured as a matter of courtesy.
Too late, the captain of the expedition realizes that the natives survived the plague by abandoning their cities and started to live simply and with humility. He and his men, save the one, are going to die because they were not willing to display courtesy.
In some ways, the way we live now is a kind of a plague that is slowly killing us. Wouldn't life be a lot easier if we simply were respectful to each other without exception?
That series used existing music
And so will this one. It just doesn't exist yet.
Okay, let me rephrase. The original series used music that existed BEFORE the series was even thought of, which maybe a couple exceptions, such as the Vangelis pieces.
"Contact" was the worst movie ever (and I've seen "Plan 9 from outer space")
Oh, it was not that bad. It was reasonably faithful to the novel except ....
- the central premise of the book (the digits of PI) was totally removed from the movie.
... which was a bummer for me as well, but I could live with it. I would have liked it if they got rid of Bill Clinton, though.
You know, after I wrote this post, I looked at the Wikipedia entry of Neil de Grasse Tyson and saw a photo of him signing one of his books. He's using a blue expensive-looking (maybe Waterman) fountain pen. My opinion of his success of his version of Cosmos has improved. As a fellow fountain pen user, anyone recent user of one of these anachronisms comes up a notch in my estimate.