What? The technology is not pretty much there. It would be utterly awesome if we could grow meat. I hardly eat meat, and was vegetarian for quite a while. I think that killing animals to eat them is very unethical... This is separate though from whether organic is good, which it isn't.
Organic farmed food has no more nutritional value, it is worse for the environment, it uses massive amounts of toxic pesticides (all organic approved), and it's more expensive.
Another thing, the maths shows a lot of local produce to be worse for the environment again for the energy/produce ratio.
Then perhaps you'd care to debunk their debunking. I took the time last night to read the other two and felt that they had been well researched and thought out.
Conspiracy theory websites? They're skeptic websites, where they've actually done their research. I suppose that James Randi is now the king of conspiracy theorists? You'll notice with the first one that the website looks skeptically at things like alternative medicines, such as homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, organic, etc... The second one is by this guy http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/ whom is also not a conspiracy theorist, if you actually read what he had said on that page you'd see that he was the one laughing at the conspiracy theorists.
No, you just used emotionally loaded words instead. I know that a lot of food gets dumped though, but whether we're over-producing or simply more food than can be eaten in a certain area is being concentrated in that area rather than sensibly distributed, I'm not sure. If we can feed every country with less food than we produce and using less land, then that would be great. Our priority though I think is getting everyone properly feed first, though being sensible with the environment is pretty much of the same importance, as if we don't look after the environment we're quite likely to find ourselves unable to produce enough food... That would be a massive disaster and very horrible to have to live (or die) through.
The public seems completely lost then, everyone I know that is in to organic food is in to it because they think it's healthier. My friend's family have swallowed it completely. One good thing they've done though is to start their own vegie garden in their back yard, which I think is a great idea for anyone living in an environment where it rains often (I'd imagine if everyone started doing this in areas with little rain, and therefore started using water from the hose, this would create another problem). Unfortunately they've swallowed the bullshit assumption that natural = healthy, to the point that they've attached a water purifier to the tap that feeds their hose which they use when there hasn't been enough rain.
They've even started buying such bullshit as 'Himalayan Salt', the wikipedia article on that is great.
To me though, this is an evasion tactic by organic proponents, much as we see with religious people when they redefine god. Here we're seeing people saying that organic food was never about the health benefits, it was always about the environment.
I agree that eating less meat would be a great start. I just unfortunately have no idea how we could really get people to eat less meat without making them angry.
Any solution has to be workable in the real world, which can really screw up many of the best plans. Whatever the solution may be though, we're going to need to use our brains. Sitting back and being a bunch of hippies and saying nature will care for everything if we just let it, is not going to fix things.
Check the data, organic farming is not better for the environment unfortunately. It's an idealistic dream, and one that I think is built upon the superstitious assumption that nature is benevolent and that we evil humans are screwing it up. Unfortunately the facts seem to indicate that a switch to organic would be terrible for the environment.
What? Says what? Their research was only looking at the nutritional differences.
As for environmental impact of organic farming, from what I know, in order to get the same amounts of produce we'd need to expand existing farms much more because organic farms give lower yields. If people ate less, that might help the situation and others, but that's unfortunately unrealistic. Instead given our track record, if we all switched to organic, we'd just destroy some forests. The other alternative is shrinking the human population quite a lot, but I do not like that idea at all.
I think that many people who champion organic have some crazy superstitious assumption beneath many of their claims, and that this assumption is that nature is benevolent, some kind of caring mother, probably called Gaia. Unfortunately nature is not benevolent, and our lives are so much better now because we've managed to subdue much of nature. During all the time we've been evolving we've had to adapt to fit in with nature. We've finally, in the last hundred years or so, been able to change things and make nature fit in with us instead. Though there are still many natural events that we can't control.
I myself have just become a member of the Folio Society, which produces high quality books. There are quite a few good ones in there, including some good science books, such as those by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. They certainly cost more than the cheap paperback versions you can easily find, but one day I would like to have a bookshelf full of high quality (both in content and construction) books that I've read. http://www.foliosociety.com/
To paraphrase Abbie Hoffman.
Telling obese people to just stop eating and exercise is like telling manic-depressives to just cheer up.
Obesity is a predictable problem of placing humans in an environment with surplus food. We have evolved in an environment where food was not plentiful, and one of the best behavioural traits to have if you wanted to survive was to eat as much as you could when you could. That behavioural trait is now causing problems for many people.
Obesity is disgusting, but telling people that isn't going to solve the problem. Personally I wouldn't care one bit if taxes were increased (which would result in increased prices) for junk-food outlets like McDonalds and Burger King, it would hopefully limit the amount of shit that people eat, and would also be able to provide some funding for the massive costs that are going to be coming along very soon as obese and overweight people start requiring medical help.
According to an article on the BBC about a week ago, 44% of children in Mississippi are obese or overweight, that is disgusting and something needs to be done to fix this problem.
Apparently more than 25% of adults in my country, New Zealand, are obese. It is a serious problem, anything higher than 5% obesity in a population should be taken as a serious problem.
Perhaps I should read this again. On the first reading it was incredibly hard to make much sense of the story. It does though drip with atmosphere, but some parts of the story are just so damn bizarre.
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
A businessman meets a rival at a train station and asks him where he's going. The second businessman says he's going to Minsk. The first one replies, "You're telling me you're going to Minsk because you want me to think you're going to Pinsk. But I happen to know that you are going to Minsk. So why are you lying to me?"
It is not free software. Free software has a very specific meaning. When it is spoken on, especially in a community such as slashdot it refers to software that you have freedom with. So software under the GPL, BSD, MIT, etc licenses. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I know that you can upload it to youtube and it'll convert it... But to watch it you need flash, or to use a script to download the video files or something other things... I want to avoid using a site that requires you to use non-free software for it to work properly.
This is great. I was looking for somewhere that I could make videos in Ogg Theora format and upload them. I had tried a combination of archive.org and theorasea.org but it was quite terrible really.
Hopefully this will help to increase support for Ogg Theora. I'd like to see wikipedia start using Ogg Theora too, they used to have some videos on articles like the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk which was a neat little addition, but they seem to have disappeared.
When I used to use Bulletin Board systems to download software most of it was in the public domain. Now evil software licenses like GPL have ruined the public domain. It's quite sad to impose so many restrictions on free software.
There was an article the other day talking about copyfraud. Lazy people that want to take old work, charging for it while stopping anyone else from also distributing it.
The GPL stops this kind of harmful behaviour. It still allows anyone to profit from the software, there is no restriction there. But it stops you from taking from the community and distributing without giving back.
I can speculate as to what kind of person would like to see all that great GPL software fall into the public domain... But I'll keep such speculations to myself.
What about the possibility of some community based approach to this?
The tricky part would be making sure there were no mistakes, but it may help in reducing the costs and time.
Yup indeed. If it stops them from harming others then that should be seen as a good thing. Even though most of society would find their tastes repulsive we should not act on emotion, but rather be rational and think about things first.
Anybody getting of on that shit needs to have their dick cut off.
That's perhaps a bit harsh. I know a couple of guys that get off over anime drawings of young looking girls. The stuff revolts me, I find it incredibly repulsive... But we talked about why it is that they like younger looking females, and we all agreed that the most plausible explanation (we could think of) was that attraction to younger females was at one point in our evolution quite favourable due to much shorter life spans. If you were going to breed, you did it when you were young. This of course selected for those that were attracted to young females.
I still find it repulsive, but the fact that it's cartoon drawings they get off on (I don't know if they go further, they claim they don't), and that I can understand why some people may be attracted to younger females due to the above... Well I just wouldn't go as far as saying they need their dicks cut off, or need to be punished just because they're considered sexual deviants. As long as they don't harm another human I'm willing to live and let live.
Slashdot Mirror
What? The technology is not pretty much there. It would be utterly awesome if we could grow meat. I hardly eat meat, and was vegetarian for quite a while. I think that killing animals to eat them is very unethical... This is separate though from whether organic is good, which it isn't.
Organic farmed food has no more nutritional value, it is worse for the environment, it uses massive amounts of toxic pesticides (all organic approved), and it's more expensive.
Another thing, the maths shows a lot of local produce to be worse for the environment again for the energy/produce ratio.
Then perhaps you'd care to debunk their debunking. I took the time last night to read the other two and felt that they had been well researched and thought out.
Conspiracy theory websites? They're skeptic websites, where they've actually done their research. I suppose that James Randi is now the king of conspiracy theorists? You'll notice with the first one that the website looks skeptically at things like alternative medicines, such as homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, organic, etc... The second one is by this guy http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/ whom is also not a conspiracy theorist, if you actually read what he had said on that page you'd see that he was the one laughing at the conspiracy theorists.
No, you just used emotionally loaded words instead. I know that a lot of food gets dumped though, but whether we're over-producing or simply more food than can be eaten in a certain area is being concentrated in that area rather than sensibly distributed, I'm not sure. If we can feed every country with less food than we produce and using less land, then that would be great. Our priority though I think is getting everyone properly feed first, though being sensible with the environment is pretty much of the same importance, as if we don't look after the environment we're quite likely to find ourselves unable to produce enough food... That would be a massive disaster and very horrible to have to live (or die) through.
Oh no! Please don't tell me you're still carrying that old myth around.
http://quackfiles.blogspot.com/2005/11/risks-and-benefits-of-ddt-from-lancet.html
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/11/ddt-spencer.php
http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html
I've not read the first two articles here, but I imagine they'll have referenced much of the information I've seen in the past.
http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4019
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.1190/news_detail.asp
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4162
The public seems completely lost then, everyone I know that is in to organic food is in to it because they think it's healthier. My friend's family have swallowed it completely. One good thing they've done though is to start their own vegie garden in their back yard, which I think is a great idea for anyone living in an environment where it rains often (I'd imagine if everyone started doing this in areas with little rain, and therefore started using water from the hose, this would create another problem). Unfortunately they've swallowed the bullshit assumption that natural = healthy, to the point that they've attached a water purifier to the tap that feeds their hose which they use when there hasn't been enough rain.
They've even started buying such bullshit as 'Himalayan Salt', the wikipedia article on that is great.
To me though, this is an evasion tactic by organic proponents, much as we see with religious people when they redefine god. Here we're seeing people saying that organic food was never about the health benefits, it was always about the environment.
I agree that eating less meat would be a great start. I just unfortunately have no idea how we could really get people to eat less meat without making them angry.
Any solution has to be workable in the real world, which can really screw up many of the best plans. Whatever the solution may be though, we're going to need to use our brains. Sitting back and being a bunch of hippies and saying nature will care for everything if we just let it, is not going to fix things.
Check the data, organic farming is not better for the environment unfortunately. It's an idealistic dream, and one that I think is built upon the superstitious assumption that nature is benevolent and that we evil humans are screwing it up. Unfortunately the facts seem to indicate that a switch to organic would be terrible for the environment.
What? Says what? Their research was only looking at the nutritional differences.
As for environmental impact of organic farming, from what I know, in order to get the same amounts of produce we'd need to expand existing farms much more because organic farms give lower yields. If people ate less, that might help the situation and others, but that's unfortunately unrealistic. Instead given our track record, if we all switched to organic, we'd just destroy some forests. The other alternative is shrinking the human population quite a lot, but I do not like that idea at all.
I think that many people who champion organic have some crazy superstitious assumption beneath many of their claims, and that this assumption is that nature is benevolent, some kind of caring mother, probably called Gaia. Unfortunately nature is not benevolent, and our lives are so much better now because we've managed to subdue much of nature. During all the time we've been evolving we've had to adapt to fit in with nature. We've finally, in the last hundred years or so, been able to change things and make nature fit in with us instead. Though there are still many natural events that we can't control.
I myself have just become a member of the Folio Society, which produces high quality books. There are quite a few good ones in there, including some good science books, such as those by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. They certainly cost more than the cheap paperback versions you can easily find, but one day I would like to have a bookshelf full of high quality (both in content and construction) books that I've read. http://www.foliosociety.com/
Perhaps you could make a good lepidopterist.
Natural selection or artificial selection is what you should have titled that.
Intelligent design is a term used for a fairly specific type of religious sophistry.
To paraphrase Abbie Hoffman.
Telling obese people to just stop eating and exercise is like telling manic-depressives to just cheer up.
Obesity is a predictable problem of placing humans in an environment with surplus food. We have evolved in an environment where food was not plentiful, and one of the best behavioural traits to have if you wanted to survive was to eat as much as you could when you could. That behavioural trait is now causing problems for many people.
Obesity is disgusting, but telling people that isn't going to solve the problem. Personally I wouldn't care one bit if taxes were increased (which would result in increased prices) for junk-food outlets like McDonalds and Burger King, it would hopefully limit the amount of shit that people eat, and would also be able to provide some funding for the massive costs that are going to be coming along very soon as obese and overweight people start requiring medical help.
According to an article on the BBC about a week ago, 44% of children in Mississippi are obese or overweight, that is disgusting and something needs to be done to fix this problem.
Apparently more than 25% of adults in my country, New Zealand, are obese. It is a serious problem, anything higher than 5% obesity in a population should be taken as a serious problem.
Perhaps I should read this again. On the first reading it was incredibly hard to make much sense of the story. It does though drip with atmosphere, but some parts of the story are just so damn bizarre.
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
A businessman meets a rival at a train station and asks him where he's going. The second businessman says he's going to Minsk. The first one replies, "You're telling me you're going to Minsk because you want me to think you're going to Pinsk. But I happen to know that you are going to Minsk. So why are you lying to me?"
Uhh... The BBC link to this page. http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/
Over on the right hand side, under 'related internet links'.
It is not free software. Free software has a very specific meaning. When it is spoken on, especially in a community such as slashdot it refers to software that you have freedom with. So software under the GPL, BSD, MIT, etc licenses. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I know that you can upload it to youtube and it'll convert it... But to watch it you need flash, or to use a script to download the video files or something other things... I want to avoid using a site that requires you to use non-free software for it to work properly.
This is great. I was looking for somewhere that I could make videos in Ogg Theora format and upload them. I had tried a combination of archive.org and theorasea.org but it was quite terrible really.
Hopefully this will help to increase support for Ogg Theora. I'd like to see wikipedia start using Ogg Theora too, they used to have some videos on articles like the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk which was a neat little addition, but they seem to have disappeared.
When I used to use Bulletin Board systems to download software most of it was in the public domain. Now evil software licenses like GPL have ruined the public domain. It's quite sad to impose so many restrictions on free software.
There was an article the other day talking about copyfraud. Lazy people that want to take old work, charging for it while stopping anyone else from also distributing it.
The GPL stops this kind of harmful behaviour. It still allows anyone to profit from the software, there is no restriction there. But it stops you from taking from the community and distributing without giving back.
I can speculate as to what kind of person would like to see all that great GPL software fall into the public domain... But I'll keep such speculations to myself.
What about the possibility of some community based approach to this?
The tricky part would be making sure there were no mistakes, but it may help in reducing the costs and time.
Yup indeed. If it stops them from harming others then that should be seen as a good thing. Even though most of society would find their tastes repulsive we should not act on emotion, but rather be rational and think about things first.
Anybody getting of on that shit needs to have their dick cut off.
That's perhaps a bit harsh. I know a couple of guys that get off over anime drawings of young looking girls. The stuff revolts me, I find it incredibly repulsive... But we talked about why it is that they like younger looking females, and we all agreed that the most plausible explanation (we could think of) was that attraction to younger females was at one point in our evolution quite favourable due to much shorter life spans. If you were going to breed, you did it when you were young. This of course selected for those that were attracted to young females.
I still find it repulsive, but the fact that it's cartoon drawings they get off on (I don't know if they go further, they claim they don't), and that I can understand why some people may be attracted to younger females due to the above... Well I just wouldn't go as far as saying they need their dicks cut off, or need to be punished just because they're considered sexual deviants. As long as they don't harm another human I'm willing to live and let live.