The beginnings of capitalism: after 90 thousand years of everybody who got hungry taking an apple off a tree in the apple grove, Ogg and his family realized that if they clubbed to death everybody who took an apple from the tree without giving them a dead animal, then they could just sit in the apple grove all day and wouldn't have to go wander through the forest looking for animals to club to death. This became known as private property, entrepreneurship, and the best system ever developed.
It is important to realize that objectively, this whole modern era is so far just a flash in the pan; for 90% of our species' history we lived as hunter-gatherers. There was no chance of travel to other planets, but on the other hand there was no chance of seriously damaging the climate, either. The well-studied Khoisan (aka !Kung) work only a few hours a day to fulfill all their needs; this seems to be true of hunter-gatherer societies in general. http://books.google.com/books?...
This along with other ethnographic and anthropological studies suggest that the long standing view of such societies as "inferior" is a biased artifact of our current society. It's quite clear that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculture resulted in a lower standard of living, i.e. a less varied and nutritious diet, an decrease in average lifespan (from agricultural accidents and a jump in epidemic diseases from constant exposure to animals and "species-jumping" of their endemic diseases). http://books.google.com/books/...
"The most important challenges to economic orthodoxy that come from the descriptions of life in hunter-gatherer societies are that (1) the economic notion of scarcity is a social construct, not an inherent property of human existence, (2) the separation of work from social life is not a necessary characteristic of economic production, (3) the linking of individual well-being to individual production is not a necessary characteristic of economic organization, (4) selfishness and acquisitiveness are aspects of human nature, but not necessarily the dominant ones, and (5) inequality based on class and gender is not a necessary characteristic of human society." http://libcom.org/history/hunt...
Similarly, and more familiarly, the industrial revolution resulted in a wave of hunger, poverty, disease, accidents, etc. as we adapted from agriculture.
In general the modern studies of hunter-gatherer societies resemble the suggestions of futurists regarding an "era of abundance" more than those long standing pictures of primitive savagery: egalitarianism, sexual equality, mutual sharing, a social safety net, etc. etc. etc. along with a decent standard of living regarding physical needs. As usual with anthropologists, the remaining time and effort of these societies is arbitrarily assigned to spiritual, social and religious activities. Of course, all this idyllic behavior was largely within the tribe, with its complex net of kinship. However, although there were and are many warlike societies, it appears that the majority of interactions between tribes over history was more a system of trade and mutual recognition of territories.
All this shouldn't be surprising; again, this describes a system which was stable for almost ten times as long as recorded human history, so it's axiomatic that destabilizing influences would be relatively few and weak.
It appears that the destabilizing influence that has led to the current system is mainly a desire for more than subsistence affluence, whether you view that as a legitimate desire for a better standard of living or an illegitimate tendency towards avarice and greed. Either way, it does not seem to be the inescapable part o
And that leads to those robots intelligent enough to join a union, thinking about how humans would create and slaughter their ancestors at whim, not to mention vivisecting them.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Buckminster Fuller
Your first question is just idiocy, if you really care go read about censorship and it's dangers. Yelling "I KILL YOU" does not kill you, and yelling "EVERYONE KILL THAT GUY" does not make everyone kill that guy. Any claim that it does cause harm ignores facts. Maybe in your fantasy world magic words do exist, but to the rest of society we know better.
To your second part I gave a great example and you ignored it. You also can't seem to grasp the difference between facts and not facts, such as theory and opinion. Since you can't seem to grasp those differences everything else you state is useless recap of what you already said that I objected to.
I'm smelling a troll at this point.
Ah, the theory that in the 30s, the majority of normal German citizens just all spontaneously decided to up and massacre Jews, Gypsies, gays, anybody else..... It wasn't the speech at all.
No! Speech is not dangerous. The only exception we could possibly argue is yelling "FIRE! Save yourself!" in a crowded theater. That is not dangerous in reality because of the words, it is dangerous because the cramped space and resulting stampede. Yell "FIRE! Save Yourself!" in an open field and people will wonder how mentally handicapped you really are. It is perfectly legal to look like an idiot.
You do not seem to have basic grasp of what science is, let alone politics or subjects that are purely opinion based on world view. Science, at least the majority, is an opinion based on facts. The more facts, the better the opinion. Those opinions change over time, sometimes using the same exact facts. Take the Expanding Quantum Vacuum theory as an example, a theory which runs contrary to the more prevalent Big Bang.
You also completely ignore the possibility that a Government may provide false information for various reasons. Who watches the watchers? Oh, nobody because we can't even discuss unapproved opinion right? Only a government can be qualified to discuss government things in your view?
I have said this before and I'll say it again.
You can not prevent people from saying things you don't like, and the only way to learn to defend against bad arguments is to hear the bad arguments. You can only protect your ability to hear the arguments and defend your own opinion. If you are mute, that protection is gone.
Thank goodness for that as well, because if contrary opinions were silent the world would still be flat and lightning would come from some angry guy living in the sky.
There are all kinds of speech which is not legally protected. "Give me your money or I will kill you", for example. "Hey everybody, let's go beat up a Mexican" for another. In Europe, their somewhat recent experience has led them to extend the latter to "Hey everybody, the....... are the enemies of the rest of humanity". In the US we haven't decided to go that far yet.
claiming to be qualified in these professions when you are not is then against the law.
First Amendment.
You can claim anything you want with no trouble.
You can even take money for it, if you can find someone to pay you.
claiming to be qualified in these professions when you are not is then against the law.
First Amendment.
You can claim anything you want with no trouble.
You can even take money for it, if you can find someone to pay you.
And you can be sued for it with no trouble. And you have to pay your legal fees, even if you "win"
In all states the unauthorized practice of medicine is a serious criminal offense and makes you liable for big civil liability. The unauthorized practice of medicine occurs whenever someone gives medical advice or treatment without a professional license. It is not restricted to hanging up a shingle and calling yourself doctor. Just giving specific medical advice has been considered to be unauthorized practice of medicine when the advice is specific to a particular person. Thus, you can safely write an article that says that beating yourself on the head with a hammer is the best thing when you get a common cold, but if you answer somebody's comment about his/her cold by suggesting they beat themselves on the head with a hammer and they do, you could find yourself in hot water. Which would have been a better remedy.
Trust me. I'm just like you and I'm an expert. You can believe my comments when I tell you that this story is bogus. You and I, we're like peas in a pod and we know when a slashdot story is misleading. Less savvy readers believe stories like this but not us. NYT, WSU, what do they know? As long as we stick together we will know the truth. Right on bro!
"I come before you to stand behind you
to tell you something I know nothing about."
It does work, and you see it used all the time on TV. When some opinion mouthpiece masquerading as news wants to convince you of something they will often find an "expert" with some dubious credentials. How often do you hear phrases like "scientists believe" without reference to who those people, or if they are just claiming to be scientists without any real credentials.
Claiming false credentials is one of the most basic and effective tactics used by people trying to manipulate public opinion, such as astroturfers and criminal security services like GCHQ. The Intercept has some leaked info on how they do it.
And of course, the related:
"I'm not a...... (usually climatologist) but I am an........ (often engineer, or physicist, or scientist) and....."
and the corollary "Linus pauling says..."
The public, as a whole, is comprised of people who are of less than average intelligence 50% of the time.
It's a bell curve, not a V. People with IQ "the exact number considered average" are the most populous compared to all other points on the chart. If IQ "average" was a score impossible to achieve, then your "50% below, 50% above" concept would make sense. As it is, it's a little less than 50% for both. And if "average" is a range rather than a precise number (most people consider it to be so with intelligence), then the percentages of population above and below drop considerably.
And yet, it seems like at least 80% of the population are subaverage.
all humor aside, what this has taught me over the years is that our illusions regarding average are much higher than reality.
I'm an expert commentator!! No, I'm not necessarily an expert on any particular subject; I'm simply an expert at commenting.
This comment should be modded "expert".:)
Not me, I'm just a regular common tater.
Oh come on! you know damn well if I didn't say it somebody else would. And probably will anyway.
Third, you can spend hours fact checking the claim in order to eventually, finally, reassure yourself that yes, they are lying sacks of shit and no part of what they said was representative of the truth.
How often do you actually take the third option? How often can you, really? That's like asking someone how many EULAs they read.
All the time, actually.
Before the internet was so comprehensive, not very much, I'll admit. But now I can search for information on just about anything, and within a minute (not "hours"), I can be reading professional journal articles on the topic.
If I see a post I know is right (or at least includes a bunch of stuff I know is right already), I generally skim it or pass by. If I see a post that I know is wrong, I may reply with what I know, or I may just ignore it depending on how much I care.
But if I see a post making assertions that seem more speculative or which make strong claims that contradict what I thought I knew, I want to know the truth. So, I often go a-searching. Generally within a couple minutes, I can either locate a reputable source that seems to verify it, or a reputable source that shows the poster was an idiot -- or, I often find both the spurious claims the poster was making along with someone else who has better credentials or better data debunking it.
That's a primary way I learn new stuff in the internet age. You should try it sometime. Sure, I don't fact-check comments on things I don't care about at all, because I don't often read comments or stories I don't care about (or only briefly skim comments looking for anything interesting).
Anyhow, that's about the main reason I read comments -- I want someone to tell me something new. And if it seems legitimately new, I generally want to know more about it -- not just accept it as truth and go around telling people, "Yeah, I heard a guy on the internet talking about X, and you won't believe what he said! Let me tell you about it..."
That's useless and a waste of everyone's time. My default assumption is skepticism. If you're going to believe any useless crap on the internet without checking it yourself, then I have a bridge to sell you. What I often like about discussion here on Slashdot is that people don't have a lot of patience for that kind of nonsense. Yes, it gets modded up sometimes, but then someone else frequently comes along who does know something and can provide better citations. It's not a perfect system, but it works better than most.
Absolutely. works well with chrome browser, where you just highlight what the commenter says and hit "search google for" whatever the guy was claiming. Honest people do it with claims with which they agree as well as with which they disagree. Either way, as you say, you learn something you didn't know. Most people don't; they just vaguely remember the ones they like and next month say something like "I saw a report last month that said" and get whatever it was 50% wrong, and the next guy reads it and carries on the chain. Completely unjustifiable in the era of the Internet and the Web and Google.
Useful internet comment section advice:
if it doesn't have a reference to a primary source, it's probably BS
suspicious phrases:
"I saw a report"; meaning, somebody said in a comment section, I think, assuming I remember it rightbr.
"Surveys demonstrate"; meaning, somebody said in a comment section, I think, assuming I remember it rightbr.
etc
Mr. Romney was talking about the number of ships in the US Navy.
It was Mr. Obama who offered the snark about "horses and bayonets."
At the outset of the Afghan War, our Special Forces learned to ride horses so they could cover terrain to designate targets for PGMs. The bayonet or knife or some form of edged weapon is the last-ditch defense when the enemy appears within arm's length. Which is not an unusual tactic for enemies our forces have faced, given our ability to pound them from the air when they separated from us by rifle distance.
The Commander-and-Chief was showing his usual ignorance of military affairs, and Mr. Romney was showing his awkward inexperience for letting this remark ride.
"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed."
So you're saying we should keep our horse and bayonet capability at 1916 levels so we can fight in Afghanistan, rather than switch to these newfangled faddish drones and missiles and assault rifles (term correctly used here) and nuclear bombs and helicopters. Thank you for correcting our ignorant Commander and Chief (sic).
The issue isn't "The End of War" or even MAD. The issue is that we are very quickly approaching the technological threshold where unmanned vehicles will outperform all manned vehicles at a fraction of the cost. (And needless to say, reduced risk to our military personnel).
To put a finer point on it: How well will the latest Virginia-class sub fare in a combat scenario against 150 different 2-meter long drone vessels?
Want to bet that the 150 drones can be produced for less than $1.8 billion?
the next step of course being that the majority of combat will be conducted automatically, computer reflexes being so much faster than human. For instance firing one of those super duper gun things at an incoming missile. which for all i know is already automated.
the mighty airship, hovering silently among the clouds under its vast bag of helium, its deadly cargo of bombs poised to drop on any nation which dares to threaten our island democracy.
Which medical models are you referring to? I know of no computer model designed to predict how long a person will live. Or did you just get confused by the meaning of the word model?
The scale and amounts of energy expended over the time periods that any of those changes took are far beyond the capability of humans for the foreseeable future
Just for a reality check, it's easy to calculate that the continual energy increase in the atmosphere caused by the increase in CO2 thus far, ~120 ppm, is.261 Watts/m2 of the earth's surface. Not a large scale or amount, definitely. Imagine a quarter watt light bulb heating up a square yard of earth. haha,
Except that the earth is a rather large place, with a lot of square yards. Given the size of the earth, that represents 250 trillion Watts, operating 24/7, including weekends and weekdays, on land and sea. This means that the total excess energy the earth has absorbed just over the past 50 years is 2~3*10^22 joules. That might not impress you, but let me point out that that is the equivalent of 6*10^9 tons of TNT per day. That's 400,000 Hiroshima-size (1.5 kiloton) nuclear explosions every day for the past 50 years. Or 5,000 modern, large (1.2 megaton) strategic weapon nuclear bombs per day, every day. That's approximately the total megatonnage of the entire world's nuclear arsenal, being expended every day. That's just the CO2 direct effect, mind you, without any consideration of feedback by H2O, or other.
Might I suggest that this is not a negligible consideration. Sure, the entire world arsenal of nuclear weapons might not be much, but day after day that tiny amount adds up.
higher temps means more water vaporizes meaning the water is more mobile. The "more snow/ice in Antarctica now" so fondly mentioned by the denialists has to be coming from somewhere. Is it the surface of the ocean, or the American midwest? Or, more accurately, what proportion from each, at any given time? Sadly, at this point we really don't know. We just know that more energy into the system means things will change, and faster than they would change otherwise. Look at any weather phenomenon and ask yourself, will it be good if this particular phenomenon is 1) more energetic and 2) has more variability? I find when I do that, the answer is almost always "Not at all" to both.
You're saying that corporations can't profit from building mega projects, infrastructure, dams, reservoirs, pipelines, desalinization plants, etc. on the pubilc dime? You'd think that the corporations that purportedly control all government decisions would be order them to open the floodgates of public money into these projects.
Oil companies cannot profit from this. Therefore, it is axiomatic that it is bad.
Never offer explanations as to why releasing significant amounts of known greenhouse gasses won't disrupt the climate society is adapted to.
Thats not how it works. You dont prove a negative. Its like a creationist asking me to PROVE god doesnt exists. Your side has not proven that the CO2 heats the planet to death theory holds water. If they did, there wouldnt be a debate. Simple as that. Calling sceptical scientists deniers, shutting them out of debates. Refusing to debate, is a sure fire sign that you actually DONT have the truth on your side.
Do your own research, you obviously havent.
I learned this from the global warming skeptics:
While it is true that CO2 in any amount of domesticated air will absorb IR, that may not be true of wild, free range air, which has not been specially bred for laboratory conditions, and must be proved by studies done on the atmosphere when it is not being studied.
While the law of conservation of energy is true in the laboratory and absorbed IR results in higher temperatures, that might not be true in the earth's atmosphere when we're not keeping an eye on it to make sure it follows the law.
While it is true that CO2 in the atmosphere raises the earth's average temperature a good 30 degrees C over the black body theory temperature as it has for all human history, that's exactly where the effect stops and any additional CO2 refuses to participate in this primitive behavior.
While it's true that burning carbon generates CO2 in the laboratory, there is no proof that this also is true in power plants or automobiles because as we all know, the proper scientific hypothesis is that nothing has any effect anywhere at any time unless it can be specifically observed to be occurring, even if it always occurs in every other situation that has been observed.
While it's true that adding half a billion tons of carbon dioxide to air in the laboratory results in there being more carbon dioxide in the air, there is no proof that this is true in the atmosphere, merely a mathematical theory which has not been properly proved.
1. If it snows less than a weatherman predicts, it means climatologists are full of shit.
2. If it snows more than a weatherman predicts, it means climatologists are full of shit.
3. If it snows exactly as much as a weatherman predicts, invite him on your show as an expert to explain why climatologists are full of shit.
I learned this from the global warming skeptics: It has stopped warming, it never was warming, it warm and cools randomly, and the warming is because of the Sun. Oh, and the climatologists are conspiring in the world's greatest hoax.
When these past megadroughts are compared side-by-side with computer model projections of the 21st century,
How about we fix the climate models before using them to predict things? If they can't predict things, they can't predict things.
And while we're at it, let's fix the medical models. They're always off by predicting how long you will live with any given disease, sometimes by decades, so it's clear that we should stop with the medical treatments until we have it perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
The beginnings of capitalism: after 90 thousand years of everybody who got hungry taking an apple off a tree in the apple grove, Ogg and his family realized that if they clubbed to death everybody who took an apple from the tree without giving them a dead animal, then they could just sit in the apple grove all day and wouldn't have to go wander through the forest looking for animals to club to death. This became known as private property, entrepreneurship, and the best system ever developed.
It is important to realize that objectively, this whole modern era is so far just a flash in the pan; for 90% of our species' history we lived as hunter-gatherers. There was no chance of travel to other planets, but on the other hand there was no chance of seriously damaging the climate, either. The well-studied Khoisan (aka !Kung) work only a few hours a day to fulfill all their needs; this seems to be true of hunter-gatherer societies in general. http://books.google.com/books?...
This along with other ethnographic and anthropological studies suggest that the long standing view of such societies as "inferior" is a biased artifact of our current society. It's quite clear that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculture resulted in a lower standard of living, i.e. a less varied and nutritious diet, an decrease in average lifespan (from agricultural accidents and a jump in epidemic diseases from constant exposure to animals and "species-jumping" of their endemic diseases). http://books.google.com/books/...
"The most important challenges to economic orthodoxy that come from the descriptions of life in hunter-gatherer societies are that (1) the economic notion of scarcity is a social construct, not an inherent property of human existence, (2) the separation of work from social life is not a necessary characteristic of economic production, (3) the linking of individual well-being to individual production is not a necessary characteristic of economic organization, (4) selfishness and acquisitiveness are aspects of human nature, but not necessarily the dominant ones, and (5) inequality based on class and gender is not a necessary characteristic of human society." http://libcom.org/history/hunt...
Similarly, and more familiarly, the industrial revolution resulted in a wave of hunger, poverty, disease, accidents, etc. as we adapted from agriculture.
In general the modern studies of hunter-gatherer societies resemble the suggestions of futurists regarding an "era of abundance" more than those long standing pictures of primitive savagery: egalitarianism, sexual equality, mutual sharing, a social safety net, etc. etc. etc. along with a decent standard of living regarding physical needs. As usual with anthropologists, the remaining time and effort of these societies is arbitrarily assigned to spiritual, social and religious activities. Of course, all this idyllic behavior was largely within the tribe, with its complex net of kinship. However, although there were and are many warlike societies, it appears that the majority of interactions between tribes over history was more a system of trade and mutual recognition of territories.
All this shouldn't be surprising; again, this describes a system which was stable for almost ten times as long as recorded human history, so it's axiomatic that destabilizing influences would be relatively few and weak.
It appears that the destabilizing influence that has led to the current system is mainly a desire for more than subsistence affluence, whether you view that as a legitimate desire for a better standard of living or an illegitimate tendency towards avarice and greed. Either way, it does not seem to be the inescapable part o
And that leads to those robots intelligent enough to join a union, thinking about how humans would create and slaughter their ancestors at whim, not to mention vivisecting them.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” Buckminster Fuller
i for one welcome........
Your first question is just idiocy, if you really care go read about censorship and it's dangers. Yelling "I KILL YOU" does not kill you, and yelling "EVERYONE KILL THAT GUY" does not make everyone kill that guy. Any claim that it does cause harm ignores facts. Maybe in your fantasy world magic words do exist, but to the rest of society we know better.
To your second part I gave a great example and you ignored it. You also can't seem to grasp the difference between facts and not facts, such as theory and opinion. Since you can't seem to grasp those differences everything else you state is useless recap of what you already said that I objected to.
I'm smelling a troll at this point.
Ah, the theory that in the 30s, the majority of normal German citizens just all spontaneously decided to up and massacre Jews, Gypsies, gays, anybody else..... It wasn't the speech at all.
No! Speech is not dangerous. The only exception we could possibly argue is yelling "FIRE! Save yourself!" in a crowded theater. That is not dangerous in reality because of the words, it is dangerous because the cramped space and resulting stampede. Yell "FIRE! Save Yourself!" in an open field and people will wonder how mentally handicapped you really are. It is perfectly legal to look like an idiot.
You do not seem to have basic grasp of what science is, let alone politics or subjects that are purely opinion based on world view. Science, at least the majority, is an opinion based on facts. The more facts, the better the opinion. Those opinions change over time, sometimes using the same exact facts. Take the Expanding Quantum Vacuum theory as an example, a theory which runs contrary to the more prevalent Big Bang.
You also completely ignore the possibility that a Government may provide false information for various reasons. Who watches the watchers? Oh, nobody because we can't even discuss unapproved opinion right? Only a government can be qualified to discuss government things in your view?
I have said this before and I'll say it again.
You can not prevent people from saying things you don't like, and the only way to learn to defend against bad arguments is to hear the bad arguments. You can only protect your ability to hear the arguments and defend your own opinion. If you are mute, that protection is gone.
Thank goodness for that as well, because if contrary opinions were silent the world would still be flat and lightning would come from some angry guy living in the sky.
There are all kinds of speech which is not legally protected. "Give me your money or I will kill you", for example. "Hey everybody, let's go beat up a Mexican" for another. In Europe, their somewhat recent experience has led them to extend the latter to "Hey everybody, the ....... are the enemies of the rest of humanity". In the US we haven't decided to go that far yet.
First Amendment.
You can claim anything you want with no trouble.
You can even take money for it, if you can find someone to pay you.
First Amendment.
You can claim anything you want with no trouble.
You can even take money for it, if you can find someone to pay you.
And you can be sued for it with no trouble. And you have to pay your legal fees, even if you "win"
In all states the unauthorized practice of medicine is a serious criminal offense and makes you liable for big civil liability. The unauthorized practice of medicine occurs whenever someone gives medical advice or treatment without a professional license. It is not restricted to hanging up a shingle and calling yourself doctor. Just giving specific medical advice has been considered to be unauthorized practice of medicine when the advice is specific to a particular person. Thus, you can safely write an article that says that beating yourself on the head with a hammer is the best thing when you get a common cold, but if you answer somebody's comment about his/her cold by suggesting they beat themselves on the head with a hammer and they do, you could find yourself in hot water. Which would have been a better remedy.
Trust me. I'm just like you and I'm an expert. You can believe my comments when I tell you that this story is bogus. You and I, we're like peas in a pod and we know when a slashdot story is misleading. Less savvy readers believe stories like this but not us. NYT, WSU, what do they know? As long as we stick together we will know the truth. Right on bro!
"I come before you to stand behind you to tell you something I know nothing about."
It does work, and you see it used all the time on TV. When some opinion mouthpiece masquerading as news wants to convince you of something they will often find an "expert" with some dubious credentials. How often do you hear phrases like "scientists believe" without reference to who those people, or if they are just claiming to be scientists without any real credentials.
Claiming false credentials is one of the most basic and effective tactics used by people trying to manipulate public opinion, such as astroturfers and criminal security services like GCHQ. The Intercept has some leaked info on how they do it.
And of course, the related: ...... (usually climatologist) but I am an ........ (often engineer, or physicist, or scientist) and ....."
"I'm not a
and the corollary "Linus pauling says..."
The public, as a whole, is comprised of people who are of less than average intelligence 50% of the time.
It's a bell curve, not a V. People with IQ "the exact number considered average" are the most populous compared to all other points on the chart. If IQ "average" was a score impossible to achieve, then your "50% below, 50% above" concept would make sense. As it is, it's a little less than 50% for both. And if "average" is a range rather than a precise number (most people consider it to be so with intelligence), then the percentages of population above and below drop considerably.
And yet, it seems like at least 80% of the population are subaverage.
all humor aside, what this has taught me over the years is that our illusions regarding average are much higher than reality.
I'm an expert commentator!! No, I'm not necessarily an expert on any particular subject; I'm simply an expert at commenting. This comment should be modded "expert". :)
Not me, I'm just a regular common tater.
Oh come on! you know damn well if I didn't say it somebody else would. And probably will anyway.
Third, you can spend hours fact checking the claim in order to eventually, finally, reassure yourself that yes, they are lying sacks of shit and no part of what they said was representative of the truth.
How often do you actually take the third option? How often can you, really? That's like asking someone how many EULAs they read.
All the time, actually.
Before the internet was so comprehensive, not very much, I'll admit. But now I can search for information on just about anything, and within a minute (not "hours"), I can be reading professional journal articles on the topic.
If I see a post I know is right (or at least includes a bunch of stuff I know is right already), I generally skim it or pass by. If I see a post that I know is wrong, I may reply with what I know, or I may just ignore it depending on how much I care.
But if I see a post making assertions that seem more speculative or which make strong claims that contradict what I thought I knew, I want to know the truth. So, I often go a-searching. Generally within a couple minutes, I can either locate a reputable source that seems to verify it, or a reputable source that shows the poster was an idiot -- or, I often find both the spurious claims the poster was making along with someone else who has better credentials or better data debunking it.
That's a primary way I learn new stuff in the internet age. You should try it sometime. Sure, I don't fact-check comments on things I don't care about at all, because I don't often read comments or stories I don't care about (or only briefly skim comments looking for anything interesting).
Anyhow, that's about the main reason I read comments -- I want someone to tell me something new. And if it seems legitimately new, I generally want to know more about it -- not just accept it as truth and go around telling people, "Yeah, I heard a guy on the internet talking about X, and you won't believe what he said! Let me tell you about it..."
That's useless and a waste of everyone's time. My default assumption is skepticism. If you're going to believe any useless crap on the internet without checking it yourself, then I have a bridge to sell you. What I often like about discussion here on Slashdot is that people don't have a lot of patience for that kind of nonsense. Yes, it gets modded up sometimes, but then someone else frequently comes along who does know something and can provide better citations. It's not a perfect system, but it works better than most.
Absolutely. works well with chrome browser, where you just highlight what the commenter says and hit "search google for" whatever the guy was claiming. Honest people do it with claims with which they agree as well as with which they disagree. Either way, as you say, you learn something you didn't know. Most people don't; they just vaguely remember the ones they like and next month say something like "I saw a report last month that said" and get whatever it was 50% wrong, and the next guy reads it and carries on the chain. Completely unjustifiable in the era of the Internet and the Web and Google.
Useful internet comment section advice:
if it doesn't have a reference to a primary source, it's probably BS
suspicious phrases:
"I saw a report"; meaning, somebody said in a comment section, I think, assuming I remember it rightbr. "Surveys demonstrate"; meaning, somebody said in a comment section, I think, assuming I remember it rightbr. etc
John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Face it, it explains everything.
Same principle as roadrage.
Mr. Romney was talking about the number of ships in the US Navy.
It was Mr. Obama who offered the snark about "horses and bayonets."
At the outset of the Afghan War, our Special Forces learned to ride horses so they could cover terrain to designate targets for PGMs. The bayonet or knife or some form of edged weapon is the last-ditch defense when the enemy appears within arm's length. Which is not an unusual tactic for enemies our forces have faced, given our ability to pound them from the air when they separated from us by rifle distance.
The Commander-and-Chief was showing his usual ignorance of military affairs, and Mr. Romney was showing his awkward inexperience for letting this remark ride.
"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed." So you're saying we should keep our horse and bayonet capability at 1916 levels so we can fight in Afghanistan, rather than switch to these newfangled faddish drones and missiles and assault rifles (term correctly used here) and nuclear bombs and helicopters. Thank you for correcting our ignorant Commander and Chief (sic).
The issue isn't "The End of War" or even MAD. The issue is that we are very quickly approaching the technological threshold where unmanned vehicles will outperform all manned vehicles at a fraction of the cost. (And needless to say, reduced risk to our military personnel).
To put a finer point on it: How well will the latest Virginia-class sub fare in a combat scenario against 150 different 2-meter long drone vessels?
Want to bet that the 150 drones can be produced for less than $1.8 billion?
the next step of course being that the majority of combat will be conducted automatically, computer reflexes being so much faster than human. For instance firing one of those super duper gun things at an incoming missile. which for all i know is already automated.
the mighty airship, hovering silently among the clouds under its vast bag of helium, its deadly cargo of bombs poised to drop on any nation which dares to threaten our island democracy.
PS that wasn't supposed to sound as obnoxious as it came out.
Which medical models are you referring to? I know of no computer model designed to predict how long a person will live. Or did you just get confused by the meaning of the word model?
First of all, "computer" is extraneous to modeling. Newton was modeling objects in motion as point masses quite a while back.
Second of all, all science is modeling.
Third of all, what world do you occupy? Or are you posting from the past? Start here: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/c... and work your way down. http://dmm.biologists.org/ http://idmod.org/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... http://www.intellectualventure... and keep going.
The scale and amounts of energy expended over the time periods that any of those changes took are far beyond the capability of humans for the foreseeable future
Just for a reality check, it's easy to calculate that the continual energy increase in the atmosphere caused by the increase in CO2 thus far, ~120 ppm, is .261 Watts/m2 of the earth's surface. Not a large scale or amount, definitely. Imagine a quarter watt light bulb heating up a square yard of earth. haha,
Except that the earth is a rather large place, with a lot of square yards. Given the size of the earth, that represents 250 trillion Watts, operating 24/7, including weekends and weekdays, on land and sea. This means that the total excess energy the earth has absorbed just over the past 50 years is 2~3*10^22 joules. That might not impress you, but let me point out that that is the equivalent of 6*10^9 tons of TNT per day. That's 400,000 Hiroshima-size (1.5 kiloton) nuclear explosions every day for the past 50 years. Or 5,000 modern, large (1.2 megaton) strategic weapon nuclear bombs per day, every day. That's approximately the total megatonnage of the entire world's nuclear arsenal, being expended every day. That's just the CO2 direct effect, mind you, without any consideration of feedback by H2O, or other.
Might I suggest that this is not a negligible consideration. Sure, the entire world arsenal of nuclear weapons might not be much, but day after day that tiny amount adds up.
higher temps means more water vaporizes meaning the water is more mobile. The "more snow/ice in Antarctica now" so fondly mentioned by the denialists has to be coming from somewhere. Is it the surface of the ocean, or the American midwest? Or, more accurately, what proportion from each, at any given time? Sadly, at this point we really don't know. We just know that more energy into the system means things will change, and faster than they would change otherwise. Look at any weather phenomenon and ask yourself, will it be good if this particular phenomenon is 1) more energetic and 2) has more variability? I find when I do that, the answer is almost always "Not at all" to both.
You're saying that corporations can't profit from building mega projects, infrastructure, dams, reservoirs, pipelines, desalinization plants, etc. on the pubilc dime? You'd think that the corporations that purportedly control all government decisions would be order them to open the floodgates of public money into these projects.
Oil companies cannot profit from this. Therefore, it is axiomatic that it is bad.
Never offer explanations as to why releasing significant amounts of known greenhouse gasses won't disrupt the climate society is adapted to. Thats not how it works. You dont prove a negative. Its like a creationist asking me to PROVE god doesnt exists. Your side has not proven that the CO2 heats the planet to death theory holds water. If they did, there wouldnt be a debate. Simple as that. Calling sceptical scientists deniers, shutting them out of debates. Refusing to debate, is a sure fire sign that you actually DONT have the truth on your side. Do your own research, you obviously havent.
I learned this from the global warming skeptics:
While it is true that CO2 in any amount of domesticated air will absorb IR, that may not be true of wild, free range air, which has not been specially bred for laboratory conditions, and must be proved by studies done on the atmosphere when it is not being studied.
While the law of conservation of energy is true in the laboratory and absorbed IR results in higher temperatures, that might not be true in the earth's atmosphere when we're not keeping an eye on it to make sure it follows the law.
While it is true that CO2 in the atmosphere raises the earth's average temperature a good 30 degrees C over the black body theory temperature as it has for all human history, that's exactly where the effect stops and any additional CO2 refuses to participate in this primitive behavior.
While it's true that burning carbon generates CO2 in the laboratory, there is no proof that this also is true in power plants or automobiles because as we all know, the proper scientific hypothesis is that nothing has any effect anywhere at any time unless it can be specifically observed to be occurring, even if it always occurs in every other situation that has been observed.
While it's true that adding half a billion tons of carbon dioxide to air in the laboratory results in there being more carbon dioxide in the air, there is no proof that this is true in the atmosphere, merely a mathematical theory which has not been properly proved.
I learned this from the global warming skeptics:
I learned this from the global warming skeptics: It has stopped warming, it never was warming, it warm and cools randomly, and the warming is because of the Sun. Oh, and the climatologists are conspiring in the world's greatest hoax.
When these past megadroughts are compared side-by-side with computer model projections of the 21st century,
How about we fix the climate models before using them to predict things? If they can't predict things, they can't predict things.
And while we're at it, let's fix the medical models. They're always off by predicting how long you will live with any given disease, sometimes by decades, so it's clear that we should stop with the medical treatments until we have it perfect.