Until the word "marriage" loses it's legal definitions, being anti-gay marriage is, by your own statements, being anti-gay. Reality is that civil unions don't exist in most states in the US and many places where they do exist aren't legally identical to marriage. I agree with you, marriage should be a religious ceremony, the problem is that according to the laws of the land it also is a legal agreement. Until the two concepts are separated you can't be for one and against the other. And besides, the pro/anti-gay marriage debate is focused exclusively on the legal aspects, there's absolutely nothing stopping a gay couple having a religious marriage ceremony, it just wouldn't be legally binding.
The real problem is that the word "marriage" has a religious meaning. I propose we remove the word from all federal, state, and local laws and documents, replacing it with civil unions (with rights and responsibilities identical to those currently attributed to marriage). All current marriages are automatically converted over to the (functionally identical) civil unions and any couple of legal age and standing (neither member already part of a civil union) may fill out the paper work and be legally joined. Leave the word marriage to mean "joined by a church"; which, of course, any couple, gay or straight, could also have performed as part of forming their civil union.
There, everyone has their religious freedoms, everyone has identical rights, everyone is happy right? Oh wait no, the religious wackos (and no, I don't mean that to be everyone who is religious is wacko) will throw an ever loving hissy fit, yelling at the top of their lungs that "the gays won" and "you're destroying marriage!".
You do realize that if you ask a Mexican what race he is 68% will say white, right? And if you ask about his culture 90+% will say either Mexican or Hispanic. Hispanic is an identification of culture, specifically, cultures connected with Spain and the old Spanish Empire. White is a description of skin color. Saying white Hispanic is no different than saying white African.
It's DARPA, quite probably the one sub-branch of the US military which has actually improved the human condition. I could list all the research that DARPA has supported over the years, but I suspect I'd be wasting my breath (or fingers as the case may be).
You realize of course that big rocks really do hit the earth from time to time. I'm not just talking about dinosaur killers and cataclismic events, but 'smaller' impacts too. In fact, there's a rather famous one that happened barely a hundred years ago. There aren't many places on left on dry land that an impact like that can occur without it causing massive devastation. And that's even ignoring the damage that could be done if an impact occurred in a large body of water; cartoonishly large tsunami's are a real, actual possibility.
But hey, keep worrying about the latest doom and gloom predictions. Not that there isn't anything to them, but people have been making them for hundreds of years and human civilization keeps ticking over somehow. I'm not even sure what you mean by "matters closer to home", the only thing I can think of is the kind of catastrophic climate change that no one really takes seriously anymore (and I don't mean a 2 meter rise in sea level, yes that would be devastating but not cataclysmic.)
He's not passing judgement on Zimmerman, he's passing judgement on a DA who refuses to put the existing evidence in front of a grand jury and on a police department that let a man walk out the front door based solely on his word that he felt threatened.
0.25% lifetime probability that your kid will ever need it in their entire lifetime. The math just doesn't work out to make it worth it (IMO) to collect it for their own use, especially given that there are many circumstances where peripheral blood stem cells or bone marrow could be used just as easily and harvested when needed (cutting down that 0.25% even further).
In any case, how does that stop someone from whipping up 5 lbs of thermite in their garage, looking up the train schedule online, and melting a 1m chunk out of the track? Bonus points if they can aim the derailment for some other secondary target. Oh wait, don't worry, we'll just monitor every meter of railroad that any train ever runs on. Stopping terrorism through searches and monitoring is impossible. There are tens of thousands of targets, hundreds of thousands of miles of infrastructure, and hundreds of millions of travelers. It just doesn't work, it's a waste of time, money, and effort. At least the warrantless wiretapping had a prayer of stopping terrorist activity, these endless checks are nothing more than, you guessed it, security theater.
You're not understanding. 1/2 of an inch off the longest finger of an adult male is right at the limit of what the human body will regrow, his recovery was not unusual in any way and almost certainly would have happened with or without the magic powder. He lost his finger just millimeters away from the growth plate, but in such a way that the growth plate wasn't damaged. So long as the growth plate is intact, the finger tip will regrow normally.
You can lose everything up to the growth plate in the first joint and it will grow back. This guy just got as close as is physically possible to that boundary, unless the miracle powder can regrown joints and whole bones, I won't be holding my breath.
"Never" is a long time, and quite frankly, the source of the article strikes me as a techno-optimist "singularity is near" kind of guy. I'd be willing to bet if you asked him what the world would look like in general in 50 years time you'd receive some answers that would make this prediction seem like someone saying "the next generation of processors will be faster and more energy efficient". I'd guess part of his "eliminating disabilities" dream includes an end to scarcity in general, which is the kind of thing that might be possible if brain computer interfaces develop to the point that all physical disabilities are cured.
I'm inclined to wonder what people will do given the choice between a truly advanced robotic prosthesis and regrowing a limb.
"Well Mr Johnson, we can fit you with a robotic hand with full tactile feedback via a 2 way neural link, wireless charging (though a mat that we put under your mattress), and have you back to 90% functional with a couple weeks training and therapy and greater than before your accident long term. Of course, as technology improves we can upgrade your arm accordingly. We even offer a "utility" mode with greater than human strength, durability, and dexterity, though for safety reasons this is disabled through limiters during normal use.
Or, we can give you a series of treatments to regrow you arm. It'll be a long, and probably painful process as the bones and muscles regrow. You'll need months, if not years of physical therapy to tone the muscles and strengthen the joints. But in the end, you'll have an arm that is actually "you" in every way, right down to the genetic level (minus a few tweaks we made to make the arm grow in faster).
My home and my diary contains plenty of information that they can't legally ask. Someone going through my home, diary, or facebook page could easily determine my race, sex, sexual orientation , religion, national origin, age, disability status, and marital status. All of which are protected information, which they can't legally request (though obviously some of that will be apparent when you show up for an interview also).
Including Inspire magazine (Al Qaeda's English-language publication), the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, and sites sympathetic to the Oklahoma city bombing.
Terrorist!
I want to understand what motivates these people; I want to think about what sort of public policy creates the most freedom, prosperity, safety; I want to understand the enemy and figure out why they're the enemy in the first place.
Ah, you see this is the heart of the matter. It's easier for everyone to just pretend that evil people don't have motives, they just do evil things because they're evil. Many people have a problem understanding that a terrible, unacceptable act could have a valid motivation.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of tokamak designs is that the bigger they are, the more energy efficient they are. A tokamak that uses more energy than it produces is relatively small, fitting in a single lab. A design that reaches ignition is much large (slightly smaller than ITER). In theory, the only thing stopping you from making a commercially viable reactor is that the complexity increases with increased size.
but once it has reached a certain level of certainty and repeatability, it is usually referred to as a law ('The law of gravity', etc.)
This misconception fuels all kinds of others so lets just get it settled. What you say is, in fact, incorrect. Theories do not become laws when they get enough evidence behind them, because theories and laws are two different things.
Theories are models that try to explain an observation. A theory of gravity would be general relativity: gravity is caused by the warping of 4 dimensional spacetime, objects that appear to be falling are in fact following a straight line through 4d space. It explains why objects are seen to fall. A law of gravity is based strictly on empirical evidence and describes what happens.
A law of gravity would be the law of universal gravitation which says that any two objects are attracted to each other in proportion to their masses and the inverse squares of the distance between them. It says nothing about why that should be the case, only that this is what has been seen in the universe so far.
In fact, we know that the theory of special relativity is closer to reality than the law of universal gravitation. That doesn't mean that the law of universal gravitation shouldn't be a law anymore, nor does it mean that special relativity should be.
In fact your professors are quite wrong, there is nothing that says that a scientific law has to be correct, or that a theory must have less evidence than a law. The terms describe different things. A theory is an explanation as to how and why something happens. A primitive rodent becomes a rabbit. How? Via changes to it's genetic code. Why? Because natural selection chose attributes that increased the chances of survival. A law, on the other hand, is just an expression, usually based in math, of what happens. I drop a weight and it falls to the floor with constant acceleration. It says nothing of what causes the weight to fall.
Haven't tried or looked much at the Avadon game yet. Also be aware that it won't run on Android phones, only on Android tablets. Supposedly it's some kind of RPG type of game.
FYI, I have it up and running on my Nexus without any problems. Some of the text is a bit small but it's legible and the game runs fine. Probably not recommended if your farsighted, but it's playable.
There is nothing in the linked article about any kind of cover up. It talks exclusively about Ender's game, only mentioning two "other books" in passing. The closest thing to a coverup mentioned is the parent filing a police complaint because the school didn't notify the police about "illegal activity". And if reading Ender's Game to 14 year old's is criminal then something is wrong with the world.
Different strokes for different folks. Don't be ashamed because you don't like something that other people do. As a middle schooler I loved Ender's game, as an adult it's 'meh', mostly because I've been exposed to all the tropes a hundred times over by now, there's little in Ender's game that hasn't been covered by other, arguably better literature. That said, it's a great introduction to Scifi for kids around that age, or even adults with less... shall we say, confidence in their reading abilities?
Shocking I know, but stores can actually still process credit transactions when the phone lines are down. It isn't fun for anyone involved, and some small number of people actually freak out when you go to put their card the the "ka-chunker", but it isn't as if the older way of doing things are completely gone.
Google's interests align with mine about 100x more often then the MPAA or RIAA's do, and this case is no exception. That may not make them less evil, but it does mean that in cases like these, where I feel they are unequivocally correct in their arguments, they'll have my support. In fact, the most evil thing Google's ever done to me is collect my information and use it to sell advertising space, which given the quantity and quality of the software and services I receive in return I fell is well worth it. If only congress would enact legislation that guaranteed my right to a delete button on that information (in case Google's behavior changes in the future) I'd be 100% happy with the arrangement.
They're really not supposed to do it according to the rules, but yeah, I had the same thing growing up. Every so often the whole house would shake, and we didn't even live all that close to an airforce base (just in the middle of nowhere so I imagine they liked to do training there). I imagine some people got dressed down pretty thoroughly whenever it happened. But the only thing cooler was the mock dogfights (only ever saw those twice the whole time I was growing up though).
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Until the word "marriage" loses it's legal definitions, being anti-gay marriage is, by your own statements, being anti-gay. Reality is that civil unions don't exist in most states in the US and many places where they do exist aren't legally identical to marriage. I agree with you, marriage should be a religious ceremony, the problem is that according to the laws of the land it also is a legal agreement. Until the two concepts are separated you can't be for one and against the other. And besides, the pro/anti-gay marriage debate is focused exclusively on the legal aspects, there's absolutely nothing stopping a gay couple having a religious marriage ceremony, it just wouldn't be legally binding.
The real problem is that the word "marriage" has a religious meaning. I propose we remove the word from all federal, state, and local laws and documents, replacing it with civil unions (with rights and responsibilities identical to those currently attributed to marriage). All current marriages are automatically converted over to the (functionally identical) civil unions and any couple of legal age and standing (neither member already part of a civil union) may fill out the paper work and be legally joined. Leave the word marriage to mean "joined by a church"; which, of course, any couple, gay or straight, could also have performed as part of forming their civil union.
There, everyone has their religious freedoms, everyone has identical rights, everyone is happy right? Oh wait no, the religious wackos (and no, I don't mean that to be everyone who is religious is wacko) will throw an ever loving hissy fit, yelling at the top of their lungs that "the gays won" and "you're destroying marriage!".
You do realize that if you ask a Mexican what race he is 68% will say white, right? And if you ask about his culture 90+% will say either Mexican or Hispanic. Hispanic is an identification of culture, specifically, cultures connected with Spain and the old Spanish Empire. White is a description of skin color. Saying white Hispanic is no different than saying white African.
It's DARPA, quite probably the one sub-branch of the US military which has actually improved the human condition. I could list all the research that DARPA has supported over the years, but I suspect I'd be wasting my breath (or fingers as the case may be).
You realize of course that big rocks really do hit the earth from time to time. I'm not just talking about dinosaur killers and cataclismic events, but 'smaller' impacts too. In fact, there's a rather famous one that happened barely a hundred years ago. There aren't many places on left on dry land that an impact like that can occur without it causing massive devastation. And that's even ignoring the damage that could be done if an impact occurred in a large body of water; cartoonishly large tsunami's are a real, actual possibility.
But hey, keep worrying about the latest doom and gloom predictions. Not that there isn't anything to them, but people have been making them for hundreds of years and human civilization keeps ticking over somehow. I'm not even sure what you mean by "matters closer to home", the only thing I can think of is the kind of catastrophic climate change that no one really takes seriously anymore (and I don't mean a 2 meter rise in sea level, yes that would be devastating but not cataclysmic.)
He's not passing judgement on Zimmerman, he's passing judgement on a DA who refuses to put the existing evidence in front of a grand jury and on a police department that let a man walk out the front door based solely on his word that he felt threatened.
0.25% lifetime probability that your kid will ever need it in their entire lifetime. The math just doesn't work out to make it worth it (IMO) to collect it for their own use, especially given that there are many circumstances where peripheral blood stem cells or bone marrow could be used just as easily and harvested when needed (cutting down that 0.25% even further).
Also, smaller dams means smaller, shallower reservoirs. Which in turn means that they tend to silt up pretty quickly.
In any case, how does that stop someone from whipping up 5 lbs of thermite in their garage, looking up the train schedule online, and melting a 1m chunk out of the track? Bonus points if they can aim the derailment for some other secondary target. Oh wait, don't worry, we'll just monitor every meter of railroad that any train ever runs on. Stopping terrorism through searches and monitoring is impossible. There are tens of thousands of targets, hundreds of thousands of miles of infrastructure, and hundreds of millions of travelers. It just doesn't work, it's a waste of time, money, and effort. At least the warrantless wiretapping had a prayer of stopping terrorist activity, these endless checks are nothing more than, you guessed it, security theater.
You're not understanding. 1/2 of an inch off the longest finger of an adult male is right at the limit of what the human body will regrow, his recovery was not unusual in any way and almost certainly would have happened with or without the magic powder. He lost his finger just millimeters away from the growth plate, but in such a way that the growth plate wasn't damaged. So long as the growth plate is intact, the finger tip will regrow normally.
You can lose everything up to the growth plate in the first joint and it will grow back. This guy just got as close as is physically possible to that boundary, unless the miracle powder can regrown joints and whole bones, I won't be holding my breath.
"Never" is a long time, and quite frankly, the source of the article strikes me as a techno-optimist "singularity is near" kind of guy. I'd be willing to bet if you asked him what the world would look like in general in 50 years time you'd receive some answers that would make this prediction seem like someone saying "the next generation of processors will be faster and more energy efficient". I'd guess part of his "eliminating disabilities" dream includes an end to scarcity in general, which is the kind of thing that might be possible if brain computer interfaces develop to the point that all physical disabilities are cured.
I'm inclined to wonder what people will do given the choice between a truly advanced robotic prosthesis and regrowing a limb.
"Well Mr Johnson, we can fit you with a robotic hand with full tactile feedback via a 2 way neural link, wireless charging (though a mat that we put under your mattress), and have you back to 90% functional with a couple weeks training and therapy and greater than before your accident long term. Of course, as technology improves we can upgrade your arm accordingly. We even offer a "utility" mode with greater than human strength, durability, and dexterity, though for safety reasons this is disabled through limiters during normal use.
Or, we can give you a series of treatments to regrow you arm. It'll be a long, and probably painful process as the bones and muscles regrow. You'll need months, if not years of physical therapy to tone the muscles and strengthen the joints. But in the end, you'll have an arm that is actually "you" in every way, right down to the genetic level (minus a few tweaks we made to make the arm grow in faster).
The choice is yours."
My home and my diary contains plenty of information that they can't legally ask. Someone going through my home, diary, or facebook page could easily determine my race, sex, sexual orientation , religion, national origin, age, disability status, and marital status. All of which are protected information, which they can't legally request (though obviously some of that will be apparent when you show up for an interview also).
Including Inspire magazine (Al Qaeda's English-language publication), the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, and sites sympathetic to the Oklahoma city bombing.
Terrorist!
I want to understand what motivates these people; I want to think about what sort of public policy creates the most freedom, prosperity, safety; I want to understand the enemy and figure out why they're the enemy in the first place.
Ah, you see this is the heart of the matter. It's easier for everyone to just pretend that evil people don't have motives, they just do evil things because they're evil. Many people have a problem understanding that a terrible, unacceptable act could have a valid motivation.
Is the ITER project good science?
Or, is it a politically motivated, pork laden boondoggle?
Yes. To both.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of tokamak designs is that the bigger they are, the more energy efficient they are. A tokamak that uses more energy than it produces is relatively small, fitting in a single lab. A design that reaches ignition is much large (slightly smaller than ITER). In theory, the only thing stopping you from making a commercially viable reactor is that the complexity increases with increased size.
but once it has reached a certain level of certainty and repeatability, it is usually referred to as a law ('The law of gravity', etc.)
This misconception fuels all kinds of others so lets just get it settled. What you say is, in fact, incorrect. Theories do not become laws when they get enough evidence behind them, because theories and laws are two different things.
Theories are models that try to explain an observation. A theory of gravity would be general relativity: gravity is caused by the warping of 4 dimensional spacetime, objects that appear to be falling are in fact following a straight line through 4d space. It explains why objects are seen to fall. A law of gravity is based strictly on empirical evidence and describes what happens.
A law of gravity would be the law of universal gravitation which says that any two objects are attracted to each other in proportion to their masses and the inverse squares of the distance between them. It says nothing about why that should be the case, only that this is what has been seen in the universe so far.
In fact, we know that the theory of special relativity is closer to reality than the law of universal gravitation. That doesn't mean that the law of universal gravitation shouldn't be a law anymore, nor does it mean that special relativity should be.
In fact your professors are quite wrong, there is nothing that says that a scientific law has to be correct, or that a theory must have less evidence than a law. The terms describe different things. A theory is an explanation as to how and why something happens. A primitive rodent becomes a rabbit. How? Via changes to it's genetic code. Why? Because natural selection chose attributes that increased the chances of survival. A law, on the other hand, is just an expression, usually based in math, of what happens. I drop a weight and it falls to the floor with constant acceleration. It says nothing of what causes the weight to fall.
Haven't tried or looked much at the Avadon game yet. Also be aware that it won't run on Android phones, only on Android tablets. Supposedly it's some kind of RPG type of game.
FYI, I have it up and running on my Nexus without any problems. Some of the text is a bit small but it's legible and the game runs fine. Probably not recommended if your farsighted, but it's playable.
There is nothing in the linked article about any kind of cover up. It talks exclusively about Ender's game, only mentioning two "other books" in passing. The closest thing to a coverup mentioned is the parent filing a police complaint because the school didn't notify the police about "illegal activity". And if reading Ender's Game to 14 year old's is criminal then something is wrong with the world.
Different strokes for different folks. Don't be ashamed because you don't like something that other people do. As a middle schooler I loved Ender's game, as an adult it's 'meh', mostly because I've been exposed to all the tropes a hundred times over by now, there's little in Ender's game that hasn't been covered by other, arguably better literature. That said, it's a great introduction to Scifi for kids around that age, or even adults with less... shall we say, confidence in their reading abilities?
Shocking I know, but stores can actually still process credit transactions when the phone lines are down. It isn't fun for anyone involved, and some small number of people actually freak out when you go to put their card the the "ka-chunker", but it isn't as if the older way of doing things are completely gone.
Google's interests align with mine about 100x more often then the MPAA or RIAA's do, and this case is no exception. That may not make them less evil, but it does mean that in cases like these, where I feel they are unequivocally correct in their arguments, they'll have my support. In fact, the most evil thing Google's ever done to me is collect my information and use it to sell advertising space, which given the quantity and quality of the software and services I receive in return I fell is well worth it. If only congress would enact legislation that guaranteed my right to a delete button on that information (in case Google's behavior changes in the future) I'd be 100% happy with the arrangement.
They're really not supposed to do it according to the rules, but yeah, I had the same thing growing up. Every so often the whole house would shake, and we didn't even live all that close to an airforce base (just in the middle of nowhere so I imagine they liked to do training there). I imagine some people got dressed down pretty thoroughly whenever it happened. But the only thing cooler was the mock dogfights (only ever saw those twice the whole time I was growing up though).