The term which applies was coined by the excellent David Wong (whose talents are wasted writing dick jokes for cracked.com), and is FArtS (ha ha! "farts!" get it): it stands for "Forced ARTificial Scarcity."
To be honest, there is a perfectly logical chain of events, enabled by technology which already exists, and is in wide use, which effectively eliminates printers, publishers, bookstores, all the shipping of books, and so on. If it costs nothing to make a digital copy and deliver it to my reader, why should I pay for one? The entire publishing industry hasn't figured out the answer to that question, but they're going to have to, fast. One way or another, the print media economy is going to come crashing down in the next few years, wiping out anything that hasn't adapted to the new model (whatever that is).
Publishers know this, and they're terrified. So, they are trying to impose (force) limits (scarcity) on the distribution and use of digital media where no scarcity exists (the artificial part). That's what this "friction" is: an effort by an industry whose days are numbered to prolong - even if for just a little while, and at great inconvenience to the rest of us - the economic model upon which they depend.
FVWM is my favorite, too. ButtonBar allows me to run any of the applications I use with a single mouseclick (with one icon launching any of several apps depending on which button I pressed), jumping between virtual screens is super fast, and gkrellm serves as all the system management I need. It's highly configurable, very lightweight, and stable. I don't think I've changed the config files in... ten years? except to update wallpapers.
Have a look at it. If you care, the devs are also all cat enthusiasts, so the homepage is full of pics of their cats.
This is an analogous situation to war crimes regarding POWs, you know. The reason there are treaties against torture isn't so much because we want to prove our moral superiority (to be pussies, to use your language regarding vegans), but because we want the moral authority to denounce our opponents in a conflict should they torture *our* soldiers.
By your logic, an alien race - most assuredly technologically/socially/whatever superior to human beings, should they arrive tomorrow - would be perfectly justified morally to use and abuse humans as they see fit.
The root of moral eithics is a sense of empathy. If you deny that, then you assent to your own enslavement/torture/death at the hands of whoever the bigger fish is.
As for medically necessary, a lot of the US's biological weapons program, and a lot of its medical knowledge, comes from the atrocities of the Nazis in Europe, and - much more thoroughly - from the Japanese in China. You would be astonished at the amount of horror that can be explained away as "necessary for the greater good."
Yeah, I read TFA. It's rubbish. Really?
Wiki-freaking-pedia was handmaiden to the whole financial meltdown, by whitewashing articles about naked shorting? And they have some emails to prove that some guy didn't like some other guy, and edited some articles about him, and the admins tried to keep him anonymous, and the other guy's company went bankrupt because of it, the end! Really, every article I read in The Register about the Great Wikispiracy just feeds stereotypes about British journalism, which is a real shame because those page three girls are really sweet.
I'm specifically talking about the story arcs of both, the generic outlines of the main characters, and so forth; visually, and in terms of pacing, they're totally different. But I prefer Tarkovsky to most other directors, and the Polish brothers are in that vein. If you've been dining on minimal film for a while, seeing something like PL feels like eating a four-course meal at Applebee's after subsisting on sushi. It's way too much, and feels unnecessary to tell basically the same story.
If I can go out on a limb here: I actually thought Pan's Labyrinth was mostly a very over-saturated (read: tarted up) retelling of Northfork. If you've seen that, Pan's Labyrinth is basically the same story. Except that it's full of eyecandy. There are points in Northfork that are stunning in their simple beauty, and it comes with a surprisingly sober Nick Nolte.
After that, Pan's Labyrinth seems kinda derivative.
This does not change my opinion on the awesomeness of Hellboy, though that's mostly because I'm a Ron Perlman fan, and Selma Blair is totally hot (no pun intended).
One of my favorite sections in America (The Book) was on the future of our nominal democracy. One of the questions in the activity section went something like this:
Make a list of five things about our society that seem like they couldn't possibly get any worse, which we'll look back on ten years from now with quaint nostalgia for those better times. Pure genius that book.
Well, yes: that's exactly the point. Name any other field where all the developments since around 1900 are covered in two single-semester courses. I got my BM from Indiana, my MA from UCSD, and did my doctoral work at SUNY Buffalo. Those are each centers for twentieth-century music. But outside some of the courses in the composition department, it was almost all Common Practice. The few analysis courses on 20th century music were almost always on the music of Schönberg or Stravinsky, who were both very closely related to the 19th century. Go to one of the more traditional conservatories (Julliard, Eastman, never mind Peabody or Curtis) and it's much worse.
These schools aren't intended to train people to break new ground: they're intended to train them to sustain the current classical music concert system, which is still grounded in the 19th century.
See, now I feel bad for being snippy. Sorry. I happen to like occultism sometimes (Scriabin, a friend of Ouspensky's, is pretty interesting), but I don't think it's a good basis for interpreting music. That said, I don't think TFA is really good at it either. Too many times a mathematician or music theorist tries to generalize Western music of the Common Practice - specifically in the case where he is working off of a 12-note equal-tempered scale characterized by pitch-classes - and ends up making a bunch of pretty pictures and equations with little or no bearing on how humans interpret music, or even how music functions in general. Heck, all he seems to be doing is illuminating structural similarities between different chords, much the way Riemann did two centuries ago. But it falls apart completely if you don't assume pitch-class equivalence: That is, if the pitches aren't tuned the same in every context, and equidistant - and they were neither until around the 20s - you can't map them the same way, and the pretty pictures turn into mush.
I happen to write music characterized as "microtonal" (though I think that term bespeaks prejudice), and I don't think any of the harmonic structures I write would work in this analysis. If he managed to get this to work for the music of Harry Partch, even, that would be interesting. But to date, there's nothing in the literature that says anything about geometric expression of harmonic structures in music with any arbitrary number of arbitrarily-tuned pitches. Most of it, alas, is rehashing the music of the Common Practice - which died a century ago - and its popular derivatives. It reeks of the sort of incestuous academicism that far too often permeates music theory.
What the...? His teachings - as far as I can tell - are along the same lines as Ouspenky. That is, mostly occultist nonsense that has little if anything to do with music or science. Are you being serious?
I realize this is probably whiny of me, but it would have been nice if he hadn't built his entire freaking page as a Flash object. Since I run Firefox3 on 64bit Linux, the only way to see swf content is through an ugly hack that rarely works. This is one case where it does not: I just get a big white page. Is there another link to the article? /rant
Like I said about the month you're born in, it' largely contextual. Second, you're still assuming causality, which I'm specifically arguing against. I'm arguing that it's a convenient shorthand for keeping track of anything that occurs in cycles. Arguing for causality makes the whole thing spiritualist, since there is obviously no way for planetary positions to influence human affairs. And I didn't say "because there was once an economic recession;" my argument is that if you observe a continuing and persistent correlation between recessions and some arbitrary planetary alignment, then that alignment make for a convenient timekeeper. Your argument - that there must be a causal relationship for there to exist a correlative one - is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I don't believe anything causes recessions other than the macroeconomic processes here on Earth, but I'd be a fool to think that those processes don't follow predictable cycles. If some people choose to keep track of them with one type of calendar versus another, it really makes no difference, and I don't think one timekeeper is inherently any more valid than the other.
If I can play (ahem) Devil's advocate for a minute... No serious - that is, the sorts who take themselves seriously and don't work for movie stars or newspapers - astrologists believe that there is any kind of causal relationship between celestial bodies and us here. Rather, it's more like a correlative relationship: the various objects on a starchart are shorthand for archetypes (of the Jungian sort, I guess) that happen to occur in corresponding cycles. I can imagine a completely empirical approach: "I notice that the red dot in the sky is always near the horizon when we get invaded by the tribe in the next valley. That red dot must be a god of war, and he comes near to earth to bring war in predictable cycles."
There is nothing unscientific in saying that economic cycles, for example, follow a general rhythm: that's what any economist knows. If you find that, say, Pluto and Saturn fall into a certain orientation in a similar rhythm, it's a convenient shorthand to say, "watch out for Pluto-Saturn conjunctions: they correlate to recessions." It's anthropomorphizing, but can be far from spiritualist nonsense.
I also find nothing unscientific in asserting that the metabolic and hormonal changes our mothers experienced while carrying us - which also depend on where the various stages of pregnancy fall in the seasons - can have a predictable impact on our psyche (though largely contextual).I think the pop-psych astrology you find in newspapers is nonsense, but I also think that it's possible to see perfectly valid ways of describing the basic principle: that certain archetypes have corresponding rhythms, and that your birth month has nontrivial consequences. And I think the basic thrust of the article is offensive, sexist, and stupid. It is itself distastefully illogical.
What's number four? Well, if we get all Biblical on this, the original four inflicted Strife/Persecution/Conquest, War, Famine/iniquity, and Pestilence/Death on the mortal world. So...
1. Terrorism --> War
2. kiddie pr0n --> Iniquity
3. fraud --> Pestilence
That leaves Strife/Conquest. If I could channel how the post-9/11 technology-oriented security official might see things, I would guess, um, Microsoft.
But then, we've already extended this metaphor too far.
yes, but Hawking radiation is somewhat different, and requires no material in the vicinity. It works like this: there are always opposite particles (say, positron-electron pairs) that spontaneously appear at the subatomic level. But in the normal universe, they immediately re-collide, giving back to the local space whatever energy was used to create them. That's a bad explanation (because I'm not a physicist), but it gives a rough picture. At the edge of an event horizon, however, there is a small - though nonzero - chance that one or the other particle will get sucked down the gravity well before it can remerge with its opposite. Thus the one that survived ambles off into space, no doubt pondering its cosmic parthenogenesis. The energy of the particle is - for reasons unknown to me - taken from the black hole. Also, this process steadily accelerates as the black hole continues to lose mass through the process: it eventually pops out of existence in a burst of gamma radiation.
So, it's a little more complicated/interesting than you described; I'm sure it would be even better if someone here could describe it from an actual background in physics, instead of the armchair variety I can muster.
Actually, so far as I can tell, that's basically what they do in Germany. There are no jetways at some airports: they park all the planes out on the tarmac, and use buses. People board and exit from both front and back (at least, they did the couple times I saw), and in basically any weather. The stairs are covered, but once you hit the tarmac, you're in the open air. It was pleasantly old-school: I think I even saw a couple business-traveler types wearing fedoras.
Sorry, that information is classified for reasons of national security. You have an inappropriately strong interest in questioning the Terrorist Monitoring Program's scope; just whose side are you on?
I'm reminded of this article, whose first paragraph is really all you need to read:
The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
This test, he charged, was inhumane.
So, if we start feeling empathy for our new robotic soldiers, I wonder how long it will be before the robots themselves -- with the new ethical algorithms we're giving them -- start to as well, and rise up.
How to Survive a Robot Uprising should be required reading.
Actually, the nice point that the article makes is that this action DID significantly (and by significantly, I merely mean nonzero, not world-altering) hurt Sony/BMG: sales of albums known to contain the rootkit plummeted, the company lost millions in a recall and destruction action, and the entire industry shifted away from the distribution method they were trying to implement, to the point of Apple and EMI advocating ditching DRM altogether.
What's interesting here is that the lawyers follow a process that Barbara Tuchman documented really nicely in The March of Folly: the process of an organization to act - and continue acting - directly contrary to its own interests, in spite of prevailing evidence that such action was harmful. Sony/BMG got pretty well hammered for this, but they could have avoided the whole mess if they hadn't stonewalled at the beginning, made it worse midway, or - best of all - never gone through with a policy without doing due diligence that was clearly necessary.
Miss Manners (!!) before she was Miss Manners, had a really cute article about alien civilizations that basically came to the same conclusion: why would they even care? It's kinda like that weird dude told Richard Gere in The Mothman Prohecies: Richard: But they're more advanced than us; couldn't they just explain themselves? Weird Dude:You're more advanced than a cockroach. You ever try explaining yourself to one of them?
Somehow, I have a feeling ET is more on the level of the freaky telephone-creatures that kept calling Gere up, rather than the cockroach (which would be us). In that case, the idea of them coming to reveal warp technology to the cockroach that's waving its antennae at them seems kind of absurd.
I thought the earth went through ice age cycles about every 25k years or so (though I could be wrong). If you're interested for more explanations for why Antartica was so warm, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_shift_theory. It's controversial, but it claims that the earth's crust - due to the momentum built up by uneven ice distribution at the poles - shifts en masse every twenty-fifty thousand years or so. Takes about a thousand years, and it's a godawful mess (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.), but once everything settles down, formerly temperate areas suddenly find themselves circumpolar. It's also the only explanation I've found for why the north pole (magnetic) used to be in St. John's Bay, and how all those mastadons in Siberia froze solid with fresh grass in their stomachs.
But it's also one step shy of the whole aliens-under-the-ice-ruling-everything-via-freemasonry theory, so use a couple grains of salt.
Slashdot Mirror
The term which applies was coined by the excellent David Wong (whose talents are wasted writing dick jokes for cracked.com), and is FArtS (ha ha! "farts!" get it): it stands for "Forced ARTificial Scarcity."
To be honest, there is a perfectly logical chain of events, enabled by technology which already exists, and is in wide use, which effectively eliminates printers, publishers, bookstores, all the shipping of books, and so on. If it costs nothing to make a digital copy and deliver it to my reader, why should I pay for one? The entire publishing industry hasn't figured out the answer to that question, but they're going to have to, fast. One way or another, the print media economy is going to come crashing down in the next few years, wiping out anything that hasn't adapted to the new model (whatever that is).
Publishers know this, and they're terrified. So, they are trying to impose (force) limits (scarcity) on the distribution and use of digital media where no scarcity exists (the artificial part). That's what this "friction" is: an effort by an industry whose days are numbered to prolong - even if for just a little while, and at great inconvenience to the rest of us - the economic model upon which they depend.
FVWM is my favorite, too. ButtonBar allows me to run any of the applications I use with a single mouseclick (with one icon launching any of several apps depending on which button I pressed), jumping between virtual screens is super fast, and gkrellm serves as all the system management I need. It's highly configurable, very lightweight, and stable. I don't think I've changed the config files in ... ten years? except to update wallpapers.
Have a look at it. If you care, the devs are also all cat enthusiasts, so the homepage is full of pics of their cats.
This is an analogous situation to war crimes regarding POWs, you know. The reason there are treaties against torture isn't so much because we want to prove our moral superiority (to be pussies, to use your language regarding vegans), but because we want the moral authority to denounce our opponents in a conflict should they torture *our* soldiers. By your logic, an alien race - most assuredly technologically/socially/whatever superior to human beings, should they arrive tomorrow - would be perfectly justified morally to use and abuse humans as they see fit. The root of moral eithics is a sense of empathy. If you deny that, then you assent to your own enslavement/torture/death at the hands of whoever the bigger fish is. As for medically necessary, a lot of the US's biological weapons program, and a lot of its medical knowledge, comes from the atrocities of the Nazis in Europe, and - much more thoroughly - from the Japanese in China. You would be astonished at the amount of horror that can be explained away as "necessary for the greater good."
Yeah, I read TFA. It's rubbish.
Really? Wiki-freaking-pedia was handmaiden to the whole financial meltdown, by whitewashing articles about naked shorting?
And they have some emails to prove that some guy didn't like some other guy, and edited some articles about him, and the admins tried to keep him anonymous, and the other guy's company went bankrupt because of it, the end!
Really, every article I read in The Register about the Great Wikispiracy just feeds stereotypes about British journalism, which is a real shame because those page three girls are really sweet.
I'm specifically talking about the story arcs of both, the generic outlines of the main characters, and so forth; visually, and in terms of pacing, they're totally different. But I prefer Tarkovsky to most other directors, and the Polish brothers are in that vein. If you've been dining on minimal film for a while, seeing something like PL feels like eating a four-course meal at Applebee's after subsisting on sushi. It's way too much, and feels unnecessary to tell basically the same story.
If I can go out on a limb here: I actually thought Pan's Labyrinth was mostly a very over-saturated (read: tarted up) retelling of Northfork. If you've seen that, Pan's Labyrinth is basically the same story. Except that it's full of eyecandy. There are points in Northfork that are stunning in their simple beauty, and it comes with a surprisingly sober Nick Nolte.
After that, Pan's Labyrinth seems kinda derivative.
This does not change my opinion on the awesomeness of Hellboy, though that's mostly because I'm a Ron Perlman fan, and Selma Blair is totally hot (no pun intended).
One of my favorite sections in America (The Book) was on the future of our nominal democracy. One of the questions in the activity section went something like this:
Make a list of five things about our society that seem like they couldn't possibly get any worse, which we'll look back on ten years from now with quaint nostalgia for those better times.
Pure genius that book.
Well, yes: that's exactly the point. Name any other field where all the developments since around 1900 are covered in two single-semester courses. I got my BM from Indiana, my MA from UCSD, and did my doctoral work at SUNY Buffalo. Those are each centers for twentieth-century music. But outside some of the courses in the composition department, it was almost all Common Practice. The few analysis courses on 20th century music were almost always on the music of Schönberg or Stravinsky, who were both very closely related to the 19th century. Go to one of the more traditional conservatories (Julliard, Eastman, never mind Peabody or Curtis) and it's much worse.
These schools aren't intended to train people to break new ground: they're intended to train them to sustain the current classical music concert system, which is still grounded in the 19th century.
See, now I feel bad for being snippy. Sorry. I happen to like occultism sometimes (Scriabin, a friend of Ouspensky's, is pretty interesting), but I don't think it's a good basis for interpreting music. That said, I don't think TFA is really good at it either. Too many times a mathematician or music theorist tries to generalize Western music of the Common Practice - specifically in the case where he is working off of a 12-note equal-tempered scale characterized by pitch-classes - and ends up making a bunch of pretty pictures and equations with little or no bearing on how humans interpret music, or even how music functions in general. Heck, all he seems to be doing is illuminating structural similarities between different chords, much the way Riemann did two centuries ago. But it falls apart completely if you don't assume pitch-class equivalence: That is, if the pitches aren't tuned the same in every context, and equidistant - and they were neither until around the 20s - you can't map them the same way, and the pretty pictures turn into mush.
I happen to write music characterized as "microtonal" (though I think that term bespeaks prejudice), and I don't think any of the harmonic structures I write would work in this analysis. If he managed to get this to work for the music of Harry Partch, even, that would be interesting. But to date, there's nothing in the literature that says anything about geometric expression of harmonic structures in music with any arbitrary number of arbitrarily-tuned pitches. Most of it, alas, is rehashing the music of the Common Practice - which died a century ago - and its popular derivatives. It reeks of the sort of incestuous academicism that far too often permeates music theory.
What the...? His teachings - as far as I can tell - are along the same lines as Ouspenky. That is, mostly occultist nonsense that has little if anything to do with music or science. Are you being serious?
I realize this is probably whiny of me, but it would have been nice if he hadn't built his entire freaking page as a Flash object. Since I run Firefox3 on 64bit Linux, the only way to see swf content is through an ugly hack that rarely works. This is one case where it does not: I just get a big white page. Is there another link to the article?
/rant
Like I said about the month you're born in, it' largely contextual. Second, you're still assuming causality, which I'm specifically arguing against. I'm arguing that it's a convenient shorthand for keeping track of anything that occurs in cycles. Arguing for causality makes the whole thing spiritualist, since there is obviously no way for planetary positions to influence human affairs. And I didn't say "because there was once an economic recession;" my argument is that if you observe a continuing and persistent correlation between recessions and some arbitrary planetary alignment, then that alignment make for a convenient timekeeper. Your argument - that there must be a causal relationship for there to exist a correlative one - is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I don't believe anything causes recessions other than the macroeconomic processes here on Earth, but I'd be a fool to think that those processes don't follow predictable cycles. If some people choose to keep track of them with one type of calendar versus another, it really makes no difference, and I don't think one timekeeper is inherently any more valid than the other.
If I can play (ahem) Devil's advocate for a minute...
No serious - that is, the sorts who take themselves seriously and don't work for movie stars or newspapers - astrologists believe that there is any kind of causal relationship between celestial bodies and us here. Rather, it's more like a correlative relationship: the various objects on a starchart are shorthand for archetypes (of the Jungian sort, I guess) that happen to occur in corresponding cycles. I can imagine a completely empirical approach: "I notice that the red dot in the sky is always near the horizon when we get invaded by the tribe in the next valley. That red dot must be a god of war, and he comes near to earth to bring war in predictable cycles."
There is nothing unscientific in saying that economic cycles, for example, follow a general rhythm: that's what any economist knows. If you find that, say, Pluto and Saturn fall into a certain orientation in a similar rhythm, it's a convenient shorthand to say, "watch out for Pluto-Saturn conjunctions: they correlate to recessions." It's anthropomorphizing, but can be far from spiritualist nonsense.
I also find nothing unscientific in asserting that the metabolic and hormonal changes our mothers experienced while carrying us - which also depend on where the various stages of pregnancy fall in the seasons - can have a predictable impact on our psyche (though largely contextual).I think the pop-psych astrology you find in newspapers is nonsense, but I also think that it's possible to see perfectly valid ways of describing the basic principle: that certain archetypes have corresponding rhythms, and that your birth month has nontrivial consequences. And I think the basic thrust of the article is offensive, sexist, and stupid. It is itself distastefully illogical.
1. Terrorism --> War
2. kiddie pr0n --> Iniquity
3. fraud --> Pestilence
That leaves Strife/Conquest. If I could channel how the post-9/11 technology-oriented security official might see things, I would guess, um, Microsoft.
But then, we've already extended this metaphor too far.
yes, but Hawking radiation is somewhat different, and requires no material in the vicinity. It works like this: there are always opposite particles (say, positron-electron pairs) that spontaneously appear at the subatomic level. But in the normal universe, they immediately re-collide, giving back to the local space whatever energy was used to create them. That's a bad explanation (because I'm not a physicist), but it gives a rough picture. At the edge of an event horizon, however, there is a small - though nonzero - chance that one or the other particle will get sucked down the gravity well before it can remerge with its opposite. Thus the one that survived ambles off into space, no doubt pondering its cosmic parthenogenesis. The energy of the particle is - for reasons unknown to me - taken from the black hole. Also, this process steadily accelerates as the black hole continues to lose mass through the process: it eventually pops out of existence in a burst of gamma radiation.
So, it's a little more complicated/interesting than you described; I'm sure it would be even better if someone here could describe it from an actual background in physics, instead of the armchair variety I can muster.
Actually, so far as I can tell, that's basically what they do in Germany. There are no jetways at some airports: they park all the planes out on the tarmac, and use buses. People board and exit from both front and back (at least, they did the couple times I saw), and in basically any weather. The stairs are covered, but once you hit the tarmac, you're in the open air. It was pleasantly old-school: I think I even saw a couple business-traveler types wearing fedoras.
Sorry, that information is classified for reasons of national security. You have an inappropriately strong interest in questioning the Terrorist Monitoring Program's scope; just whose side are you on?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising should be required reading.
Actually, the nice point that the article makes is that this action DID significantly (and by significantly, I merely mean nonzero, not world-altering) hurt Sony/BMG: sales of albums known to contain the rootkit plummeted, the company lost millions in a recall and destruction action, and the entire industry shifted away from the distribution method they were trying to implement, to the point of Apple and EMI advocating ditching DRM altogether.
What's interesting here is that the lawyers follow a process that Barbara Tuchman documented really nicely in The March of Folly: the process of an organization to act - and continue acting - directly contrary to its own interests, in spite of prevailing evidence that such action was harmful. Sony/BMG got pretty well hammered for this, but they could have avoided the whole mess if they hadn't stonewalled at the beginning, made it worse midway, or - best of all - never gone through with a policy without doing due diligence that was clearly necessary.
Miss Manners (!!) before she was Miss Manners, had a really cute article about alien civilizations that basically came to the same conclusion: why would they even care? It's kinda like that weird dude told Richard Gere in The Mothman Prohecies:
Richard: But they're more advanced than us; couldn't they just explain themselves?
Weird Dude:You're more advanced than a cockroach. You ever try explaining yourself to one of them?
Somehow, I have a feeling ET is more on the level of the freaky telephone-creatures that kept calling Gere up, rather than the cockroach (which would be us). In that case, the idea of them coming to reveal warp technology to the cockroach that's waving its antennae at them seems kind of absurd.
I thought the earth went through ice age cycles about every 25k years or so (though I could be wrong). If you're interested for more explanations for why Antartica was so warm, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_shift_theory. It's controversial, but it claims that the earth's crust - due to the momentum built up by uneven ice distribution at the poles - shifts en masse every twenty-fifty thousand years or so. Takes about a thousand years, and it's a godawful mess (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.), but once everything settles down, formerly temperate areas suddenly find themselves circumpolar. It's also the only explanation I've found for why the north pole (magnetic) used to be in St. John's Bay, and how all those mastadons in Siberia froze solid with fresh grass in their stomachs.
But it's also one step shy of the whole aliens-under-the-ice-ruling-everything-via-freemasonry theory, so use a couple grains of salt.