In general most conservative anti-welfare rhetoric is bullshit and they keep proving it themselves. A good examples is mandatory drug-testing for welfare as now implemented in several states. The results are enlightening. In Indiana just over 300 people have been tested so far... not a single one tested positive. Florida has had their program in place for a bit longer, they've test just under 3000 people so... far 11 positive tests.
Turns out that 'people waste welfare money on drugs' is pretty much a myth, and it's being debunked by the very same programs conservatives created to try and rule it out. The only thing they've actually achieved is an invasive violation of the 4th amendment to further demoralise and indignify the most vulnerable people in their states for absolutely no good reason.
Not to mention that the cost of all these tests is much, much larger than the effective zero dollars saved by removing welfare from addicts.
And even that is without considering that, if it had been true, drug addicts are probably the MOST deserving of our help - not the least !
Except that in all of history there has never been a time when the number from willing donors was bigger than or equal to the need of the needy.
There probably never can be because too many people are fucking assholes who do NOT in fact believe in helping the needy. You simply CANNOT trust anybody who says they do. People say what they think they ought to say, not what they really think.
Without some other mandate - they simply do not do it. Why do you think the Christian church makes giving money to the poor MANDATORY - to the point of actually collecting it during the service, and tells you that if you don't give enough you'll go to hell (nope not exagerating, Jesus himself said exactly that in so many words). Failure to give sufficiently to the needy (and counting ONLY what you give via the church) will get you barred from communion or even kicked out of the church in most protestant denominations. If anything the government is LESS coercive as it doesn't force you to do all your giving through them and in fact actively encourages private charity as well - that's why charity is a tax write-off.
Not even religion could get people to truly give voluntarily, it had to get coercive in tone and execution to fullfill what it sees at it's charitable obligations - yet you think society at large will somehow act differently than the 95% of society that are religious ?
Whereas if I choose to give money to somebody begging I couldn't care less what they spend it on. That's how "giving" works. The second it leaves my hand it is NO LONGER MY MONEY. It's NOT My property anymore and it's NOT my business.
He didn't actually say 'for humans' - there are even better examples if you expand beyond one species. The plough-pulling ox is pretty much extinct, the cart-pulling horse now exists as a single novelty at a rate of less than one per major city. Even dogs. 200 years ago every dog had a job. There was even a breed who spent their lives running on a treadmill to turn the spit at restaurants and roast the meat evenly.
The only dogs with jobs today are pretty much police dogs and seeing-eye dogs.
But there's the catch - as it happens to humans that OUR jobs become universally replaced by machines, do we want to end up like oxen or like dogs ? Dogs proliferated in the post-job worl. My German shepherd may have never seen a sheep - but he gets to live a life of luxury since I enjoy his company. We can keep each other alive on the proceeds of robotic labour, or we can become as rare as horses and oxen. Somehow, I don't think human-glue factories should be our first choice...
You'll end right back with the same problem that led to 'socialised' roads in the first place since this tech will do nothing to fix that. Roads in the US were all privately built until the 1920s - it changed because it was a disaster. Big business owner wants to be next to busy road, does not want to relocate - bribes roads builder to run road past his business. There were roads between nearby towns that took so many detours they were 6 to 8 times longer than the socialised roads that replaced them because it was just too lucrative to accept money from existing locations for running a detour past them. Competition also didn't fix them since roads are a classic example of a natural monoply industry. Whoever builds the first road is impossible to ever profitably compete with no matter how badly they did it.
Without getting into this weird-ass dictat on how much beaurocracy a person should reasonably be subjected to and why the party that claims to hate burocracy seems the most eager to demand it of those least able to bear it's burdens... I do wonder if an ideal solution to America's problems today is not to bring back the civil war system - guaranteed citizenship if you volunteer for the military. The US would actually have enough soldiers to finish their losing wars in the middle east, undocumented immigrants have a path to citizenship that even the republicans can't claim is a hand-out (and it boosts their beloved military) and fighting to defend the USA is pretty strong evidence that you're probably not a terrorist bent on destroying it.
There is precedent for such a system (Lincoln did exactly that to get soldiers for the civil war - gave full citizenship to every new arrival who was willing to volunteer). Of course, to be sane, you have to extend it to immediate family but if a husband or a son is willing to serve, why not let the wives, mothers and children get their papers ?
Libertarians across the USA are scrambling to explain that giving people cash before they go homeless will only turn them into dependent slaves and no matter what the science says it is guaranteed to doom them to poverty even faster while simultaneously requiring the stealing of money from people who worked harder than they did because libertarians can't quite figure out that there is such a thing as luck and sometimes somebody can have great luck and sometimes you can have terrible luck and a huge chunk of the luck you have in life is already present in who your parents are and what color their skins is.
Because libertarians would rather trip over sidewalks full of starved corpses than spend an extra dollar in taxes.
It's not a map at all (there were earlier stories about this couple prior to the lawsuit). It's a single table in a database which almost all geolocation services are based on. That table contains the center of the country for any IP which could not be tracked closer than country level, for the US - it's that farm. The data is poisoned and was poisoned by the company themselves when they used flawed logic in the algorithms they used to generate that data. The mapmaker is absolutely at fault because it does not, in fact, return to apps a location with an uncertainty circle, it does not return to them just a country - it returns a latitude and longitude, and when it doesn't have a closer answer than country - it very stupidly returns the numbers for the approximate center of that country because the database was built by an algorithm that stored that for every IP it could not trace closer.
Sometime in 2040. Off the west coast of Africa lies a graveyard of fallen drones and automatic-pilot ships. Rusty engines and hulls scatter the seafloor and a few not-yet-sunken ones bob along the surface of the water. The location: Longitude 0, Latitude 0.
Fossil fuel is hardly the only resource. And in fact, renewables would have played a large part in that one considering just how heavily Germany invested in it. The rest can be attributed to efficiency improvements (but those have an upper limit as well).
But you can't get a measure if you aren't measuring the US - the single largest per person resource consumer on earth.
You call a flagrant propaganda site like that 'actual science' ?!?!?!
Funny how you did not link a peer reviewed article in a journal... oh right, because to make such a claim they would need to experiment with all sorts of plants in all sorts of ecosystems, not just cherrypick a few which will give the result they want to advocate.
Or that complete and utter bullshit claim they make on another page that the rate of CO2 in the atmosphere has remained constant or even declined...
At least get something that isn't debunked with links to numerous peer reviewed studies on the 'common claims' page skepticalscience.com.
You know how you can tell an actual science education site from a bullshit propaganda site ? They link to REAL science published in REAL journals after being reviewed by other REAL scientists to back up their claims. They don't go do bullshit backyard experiments and claim groundbreaking results that somehow failed to get published in any journals and somehow miraculously did NOT get them the Nobel prize nomination which is absolutely guaranteed for anybody who could prove something THAT outrageous to contemporary science.
Just one little example of the kind of things you are flat-out ignoring. Oceanic algae tend to proliferate in a high CO2 environment... and that is NOT a good thing, because they overgrow so much that it destroys the entire ecosystem (including blocking out sunlight to lower-living plants like kelp) and can cause massive die-outs and even extinction level events. Funny how your article made no mention - or even included any aquatic plants in their testing. Funny how it didn't factor in what happens when CO2 hits the ocean at all. It's hardly rocket science. When CO2 is disolved in water it produces carbolic acid. Which is why the ocean's acidity has been going up so much. That's a very bad thing for all sorts of creatures (inclduing most ocean plants). Oh and ocean plants are big deal, since they produce more than 80% of the world's oxygen supply.
>As you said, it doesn't necessarily has to be this way, but it does seem to be the case.
How do you figure ? Right now - it would require two earths worth of resources for everybody to live like an average American does. Everybody living like the average Dane isn't far behind either.
>Resource consumption will increase in poor countries as they catch up to the west in living standards Arguably true - but you first have to accept the assumption that they can and will do so.
>Meantiime advanced economies will see a reduction in population and resource consumption of unprecedented proportions Based on what ? There seems to be no grounds for this claim. So far advanced economies have seen resource consumption per person increase much faster than the rate of population growth (and indeed continue even when the latter began to decline or even became negative). Efficiency increases can't do that - there are upper limits to efficiency and even then not all resources can be renewed so for many that can only postpone the inevitable. It's not even reasonable to assume that all of them have viable alternatives. Even where viable alternatives exist developed countries have proven to be extremely reticent about adopting them - even for cases where it means replacing a finite resource with an infinitely renewable one (just look at the energy sector) and even when there is a huge demand for changing from other major downsides to the current resource of choice.
>Some economists argue this is the basis of Japan's never ending recession: depressed internal demand. Some economists also argue that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is not complete and utter bullshit. The majority of economists believe that Japan's recession is the result of a welfare system that worked way too well and made everybody live a high standard life up to a ripe old age - which has led to an aging population where an ever smaller working-age sector has to work ever harder to supply a much larger unproductive sector. A problem which in Japan (as in Europe) is exacerbated by significant resistance to the only cure for this situation - the same cure the US used until the early 20th century: mass immigration. When your own population is aging, your only rapid source of lots of productive young people is to get them from places where there are currently lots of them who are not able to be productive as their own economies have too many of them.
>If you look at previous cases against copyright infringement the proof has pretty much been "because we say so" and it goes through because the courts doesn't know jack shit and the company representative is dressed in a suit and the "copyright infringer" have slacks and an attitude.
That pattern seems to be changing though - the recent happy birthday case saw the copyright revoked because WB couldn't prove they ever actually owned it.
>What do you think trees and other plants breath? Plants are evolved in a given CO2 level and their response to rapid changes is highly unpredictable - it isn't all good for plants.
>What do you think the earth did before humans existed when a volcano erupted spewing many times more so-called "greenhouse" gasses into the atmosphere?
Ooh, ooh I know this one... it killed 90% of everything alive and started over with the leftovers. Seems smart to do that to ourselves. Oh but such events were extremely rare, they are called volcanic superplumes and current research suggests they only ever happen when massive meteor impacts happened first (strongly suggesting that meteors caused them). The last time that happened the dinosaurs, mosasoars, icthyosaurs and a few hundred other kingdoms all went extinct. Oh you thought ordinary volcanoes could do more than we do ? Nope. The USGS has published the data - the combined total CO2 output of the world's active volcanoes in a year is less than 0.25% of what we put out from coal power alone (which is, itself, a tiny fraction of our fossil fuel CO2 production). Oh and volcanoes have very limited heating effects because although they spew a bit of CO2 they spew a LOT of ash which blocks the sun - volcanoes in fact tend to freeze the planet rather than warm it up.
Your mistake is the assumption that resource consumption growth is directly (and exclusively) correlated with population growth. There's no grounds for this assumption. Even some of the countries with negative population growth rates are seeing accelerating rates of resource usage. The biggest resource consuming nations are NOT the largest ones in population by any stretch and certainly haven't been for at least 200 years (if ever).
In fact the pattern seems to be that groups with limited resources are MORE likely to have expanding populations because among the resources they have limited access to are those that would reduce population growth - like education and contraception.
So it's perfectly possible for global population growth to be even negative and STILL see an acceleration in resource consumption. That doesn't mean that overpopulation can't be a problem - but it does mean it's a lot more complicated than you imagine. More people do require more resources, but the biggest problem with resource consumption is people USING far more resources than they require - which is much more likely when there are fewer people.
I think you misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying it's bad that you are old enough to have done things in 1965, I was just questioning the idea that relays were only relevant in 1965 and pointing out that I did the same thing 30 years later and I would consider them a useful teaching tool even today - another 16 years since my adventures.
1965 ? I built a simple 8-bit calculator (I wouldn't call it a 'computer' out of relays in 1995. Granted I was just a highschool kid and the whole thing was merely an experiment to test out what I'd learned about logic gated and binary arithmetic and basic circuitry - but it worked, it's still an excellent way to learn because a relay does the same job a transistor does but huge and visibly.
Well yeah, but please note that I wasn't using 'lying' in a negative connotation, I was explaining that it's a required part of learning to learn simpler, but untrue, versions of reality first.
I still don't think the difference between Turing-Machines, Turing Complete Machines and modern day CPU's are appropriate material for a CHILDREN'S museum. Hell most adults don't know it.
I dissagree - fundamentally what makes a computer a computer is the ability to change the programming. Christopher COULDN'T be reprogrammed, it's instructions were part of the physical layout - not changeable. This was fine since it only had one task. But there was no way to reuse it for any other task.
The GPS can be reprogrammed, and they actually are with regular firmware updates. It's not about how instructions are stored, it's about whether they exist distinctly from the circuitry that operates on them. That may be in *other* circuitry, but only if it's possible to replace said other circuitry and (at least in theory) have the device perform a new set of instructions.
They aren't computers at all. They are mechanical calculators - we've had those for the better part of 5000 years. They steadily progressed and no doubt they deserve to be shown in such a museum - but they rather peaked with the Hollerith Tabulator.
Going from counting aids to reprogrammable computers was a quantum leap, and it took a complete rethink of the fundamental principles of mathematics. Three people did that rethink: Alonzo Church, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - but Alan Turing was the only one envision a device that utilized their ideas about effective methods. He was the one who saw beyond rethinking the abstractions of mathematics and saw an opportunity for an entirely new way of performing mathematical functions - and the birth of the reprogrammable computer. Also - Pascal never saved the world from an evil dictator bent on global rule.
I prefer to think of it in a different way. Human bodies are equipped with powerful radiation sensors, though they are only sensitive to a small section of the EM-Band they can, within this band, detect radiation with pin-point accuracy (including using triangulation to determine origin distance), and sort them by frequency and intensity. The brain takes all this data to construct the 3D picture we see of the world. We don't see objects, we detect some of their radiation (most of which is reflected solar radiation). It's essentially a biological radar-mapping system.
Much like the computer attached to a radar dish makes it useful by drawing a map from the radio pings - so our brain draws a map of the world from the measurements of our radiation detectors. Among other things it combines frequency with intensity to assign the labels to various sources that we call 'colour' which can mix as a single-source contains more than one frequency - and which our brains then label with secondary or tertiary colours.
So the visual spectrum is a highly simplified view of the world and of course not all animals have the same ones. The capacity to filter frequencies 'colour vision' seems to be limited almost exclusively to birds and primates and were probably a co-evolved trait with plants altering the reflective frequency of fruits when they are mature and ready to be eaten for seed distribution to get the birds/monkeys not to eat the ones that weren't ready (upping the sugar-content at the same time so as to boost the tastyness of the ready fruit was a neat trick too). On the other hand - quite a lot of creatures can detect infrared and/or ultraviolet but our detectors stop short of either.
Hearing is the same... you don't actually hear people speak, or car engines driving by. A pair of (excellent in mammals - better than almost any other family) detectors measure air flow patterns looking for telltale vibrations within their sensitive frequency scope. And this goes through a filtering process not very different from the one done with light radiation to produce our brains' map of 'sound'.
When you consider how far removed our experience of these 'senses' are from how they actually work it's 1) no wonder illusion artists are so good at fooling them 2) a bloody miracle that we could further abstract these already massively abstracted concepts enough to create art... let alone communication
About 99.99% of 'seeing' happens with zero influence from the conscious mind. The point where we actually get to think about it, is only after the abstracted map is drawn. No wonder we can't see the massive blindspot we all have in center of each eye.
You show a piece of gibberish text. You talk of how ENIGMA created a code that was considered unbreakable. Then you show this machine with the lots of cool spinning wheels and you show how you can type the gibberish in one on end and it spins around... and spits out a message that makes sense.
And then you talk of how doing that saved millions of lives because it meant the generals knew where the enemy's submarines were, they knew where the enemy was moving it's tanks - and they did it all without the enemy ever knowing they knew.
Tell them a story of espionage and counter-espionage and of how this early computer defeated the most recognizable face of evil in the 20th century. and how it's descendents are saving lives in Afganistan and Iraq today.
As an interesting and unrelated example of my point. Why do rainbows look like rainbows? You probably learned in school that water droplets act like prisms and breaks up white light into it's constituent colours - producing the rainbow. You probably did an experiment where you held a prison to the sun and saw a rainbow.
That's a prime example of lies to children. Because that thing you drew on the paper wasn't a bow. The lie explains the colours but it ignores how millions of raindrops can work together like one giant prism, it ignores the reason why the rainbow is bow-shaped. It explains the colours and pretends it has explained the rainbow.
The actual geometry of calculating how rainbows form is actually beautifully elegant... and really quite complex - you simply cannot possibly teach that in a middle school science class, hell you can't teach it at high-school level. But if you learn the lie, you are able to learn a lot more slightly less untrue lies - like wave interference patterns and how binoculars work with prisms rather than lenses... all of which never mentions that light can behave like a particle (you may encounter a very simplified version of that in your final highschool years, I did, so simplified it never used the word 'photon').
Pretty much the only way you'll actually ever learn and calculate the full set of formulae that make up our contemporary understanding of the rainbow... is if you study an advanced degree in optics and it happens to be used as an example in the textbooks you use. Though anybody with at least highschool maths can look it up online and probably understand the answers.
We teach lies to children - because you start simple to get to complex things. My 2-year old knows the sky is blue, but she's a while away yet from understanding what 'blue' means, let alone WHY the sky is blue and it's almost certainly true that my first explanations of that will be far simpler than reality. That's just how teaching works.
Lying to children is, in fact, one of the most noble things we can do for them. Provided the lies are steps on the path to truth, not steps to nowhere. The difference between science and religion at school level isn't that one tells you truths - they both lie, but science tells lies to help you on a path towards truth while religion tells lies to prepare you for bigger lies.
We're talking about a children's museum. The relatively subtle difference between a Turing Machine and a RAM based CPU is not actually at a level where I think they are suitable for a children's museum. Christopher was not a Turing machine and nobody claimed it was - but then, it wasn't a computer either. It wasn't programmable, let alone reprogrammable. It was essentially a mathematical pattern matching machine that was used to brute force the code-breaking. There are elements of it's architecture which later computers replicated but the key design was very different and it was a single-purpose machine. Even Turing wouldn't have called it a version of his idealized mathematical concept known as the Turing Machine. A CPU with memory and instructions however, are about as close as we could get to building something which is meant to contain an infinite length piece of paper.
Random Access Memory was, to my mind, really just a major optimization over his sequential access model.
Education is a skill known as a lies-to-children. You start with simple, but flagrantly untrue, explanations - which makes more complicated lies understandable and you don't get to anything resembling 'true' explanations until grad school. For children - a Turing machine is the concept that was realized in CPUs. That allows you to then go on and explain Turing-completeness and finally RAM designs with people who now understand the basic principles of computing.
Von Neumann's architecture differs from Turing machines in being about something fundamentally different. Turing was developing the early stages of computing theory (though he had set out to do something very different - attempt to create a new language for expressing mathematical proofs in) while Von Neumann's was an engineering design - the seperation of data and instruction while both are in the same basic format (and possibly even on the same medium) was a way to practically put Turing's pencil-holder into the machine itself, but it was an engineering concept. Both are still fundamental to how computers work to this day - and for children's level education that's all you can or OUGHT TO try and teach. You can't possibly teach the next level to somebody who hasn't first heard this lie. That's not how education works or ever can work because it isn't how human brains learn things.
Slashdot Mirror
In general most conservative anti-welfare rhetoric is bullshit and they keep proving it themselves.
A good examples is mandatory drug-testing for welfare as now implemented in several states. The results are enlightening.
In Indiana just over 300 people have been tested so far... not a single one tested positive.
Florida has had their program in place for a bit longer, they've test just under 3000 people so... far 11 positive tests.
Turns out that 'people waste welfare money on drugs' is pretty much a myth, and it's being debunked by the very same programs conservatives created to try and rule it out.
The only thing they've actually achieved is an invasive violation of the 4th amendment to further demoralise and indignify the most vulnerable people in their states for absolutely no good reason.
Not to mention that the cost of all these tests is much, much larger than the effective zero dollars saved by removing welfare from addicts.
And even that is without considering that, if it had been true, drug addicts are probably the MOST deserving of our help - not the least !
Except that in all of history there has never been a time when the number from willing donors was bigger than or equal to the need of the needy.
There probably never can be because too many people are fucking assholes who do NOT in fact believe in helping the needy. You simply CANNOT trust anybody who says they do. People say what they think they ought to say, not what they really think.
Without some other mandate - they simply do not do it. Why do you think the Christian church makes giving money to the poor MANDATORY - to the point of actually collecting it during the service, and tells you that if you don't give enough you'll go to hell (nope not exagerating, Jesus himself said exactly that in so many words). Failure to give sufficiently to the needy (and counting ONLY what you give via the church) will get you barred from communion or even kicked out of the church in most protestant denominations.
If anything the government is LESS coercive as it doesn't force you to do all your giving through them and in fact actively encourages private charity as well - that's why charity is a tax write-off.
Not even religion could get people to truly give voluntarily, it had to get coercive in tone and execution to fullfill what it sees at it's charitable obligations - yet you think society at large will somehow act differently than the 95% of society that are religious ?
Whereas if I choose to give money to somebody begging I couldn't care less what they spend it on.
That's how "giving" works. The second it leaves my hand it is NO LONGER MY MONEY. It's NOT My property anymore and it's NOT my business.
But then, I'm not a sanctimonious asshole.
He didn't actually say 'for humans' - there are even better examples if you expand beyond one species.
The plough-pulling ox is pretty much extinct, the cart-pulling horse now exists as a single novelty at a rate of less than one per major city. Even dogs. 200 years ago every dog had a job. There was even a breed who spent their lives running on a treadmill to turn the spit at restaurants and roast the meat evenly.
The only dogs with jobs today are pretty much police dogs and seeing-eye dogs.
But there's the catch - as it happens to humans that OUR jobs become universally replaced by machines, do we want to end up like oxen or like dogs ? Dogs proliferated in the post-job worl. My German shepherd may have never seen a sheep - but he gets to live a life of luxury since I enjoy his company. We can keep each other alive on the proceeds of robotic labour, or we can become as rare as horses and oxen. Somehow, I don't think human-glue factories should be our first choice...
You'll end right back with the same problem that led to 'socialised' roads in the first place since this tech will do nothing to fix that. Roads in the US were all privately built until the 1920s - it changed because it was a disaster.
Big business owner wants to be next to busy road, does not want to relocate - bribes roads builder to run road past his business. There were roads between nearby towns that took so many detours they were 6 to 8 times longer than the socialised roads that replaced them because it was just too lucrative to accept money from existing locations for running a detour past them.
Competition also didn't fix them since roads are a classic example of a natural monoply industry. Whoever builds the first road is impossible to ever profitably compete with no matter how badly they did it.
Without getting into this weird-ass dictat on how much beaurocracy a person should reasonably be subjected to and why the party that claims to hate burocracy seems the most eager to demand it of those least able to bear it's burdens...
I do wonder if an ideal solution to America's problems today is not to bring back the civil war system - guaranteed citizenship if you volunteer for the military.
The US would actually have enough soldiers to finish their losing wars in the middle east, undocumented immigrants have a path to citizenship that even the republicans can't claim is a hand-out (and it boosts their beloved military) and fighting to defend the USA is pretty strong evidence that you're probably not a terrorist bent on destroying it.
There is precedent for such a system (Lincoln did exactly that to get soldiers for the civil war - gave full citizenship to every new arrival who was willing to volunteer). Of course, to be sane, you have to extend it to immediate family but if a husband or a son is willing to serve, why not let the wives, mothers and children get their papers ?
Libertarians across the USA are scrambling to explain that giving people cash before they go homeless will only turn them into dependent slaves and no matter what the science says it is guaranteed to doom them to poverty even faster while simultaneously requiring the stealing of money from people who worked harder than they did because libertarians can't quite figure out that there is such a thing as luck and sometimes somebody can have great luck and sometimes you can have terrible luck and a huge chunk of the luck you have in life is already present in who your parents are and what color their skins is.
Because libertarians would rather trip over sidewalks full of starved corpses than spend an extra dollar in taxes.
It's not a map at all (there were earlier stories about this couple prior to the lawsuit).
It's a single table in a database which almost all geolocation services are based on. That table contains the center of the country for any IP which could not be tracked closer than country level, for the US - it's that farm.
The data is poisoned and was poisoned by the company themselves when they used flawed logic in the algorithms they used to generate that data. The mapmaker is absolutely at fault because it does not, in fact, return to apps a location with an uncertainty circle, it does not return to them just a country - it returns a latitude and longitude, and when it doesn't have a closer answer than country - it very stupidly returns the numbers for the approximate center of that country because the database was built by an algorithm that stored that for every IP it could not trace closer.
Sometime in 2040.
Off the west coast of Africa lies a graveyard of fallen drones and automatic-pilot ships. Rusty engines and hulls scatter the seafloor and a few not-yet-sunken ones bob along the surface of the water. The location: Longitude 0, Latitude 0.
Fossil fuel is hardly the only resource. And in fact, renewables would have played a large part in that one considering just how heavily Germany invested in it. The rest can be attributed to efficiency improvements (but those have an upper limit as well).
But you can't get a measure if you aren't measuring the US - the single largest per person resource consumer on earth.
You call a flagrant propaganda site like that 'actual science' ?!?!?!
Funny how you did not link a peer reviewed article in a journal... oh right, because to make such a claim they would need to experiment with all sorts of plants in all sorts of ecosystems, not just cherrypick a few which will give the result they want to advocate.
Or that complete and utter bullshit claim they make on another page that the rate of CO2 in the atmosphere has remained constant or even declined...
At least get something that isn't debunked with links to numerous peer reviewed studies on the 'common claims' page skepticalscience.com.
You know how you can tell an actual science education site from a bullshit propaganda site ? They link to REAL science published in REAL journals after being reviewed by other REAL scientists to back up their claims. They don't go do bullshit backyard experiments and claim groundbreaking results that somehow failed to get published in any journals and somehow miraculously did NOT get them the Nobel prize nomination which is absolutely guaranteed for anybody who could prove something THAT outrageous to contemporary science.
Just one little example of the kind of things you are flat-out ignoring. Oceanic algae tend to proliferate in a high CO2 environment... and that is NOT a good thing, because they overgrow so much that it destroys the entire ecosystem (including blocking out sunlight to lower-living plants like kelp) and can cause massive die-outs and even extinction level events. Funny how your article made no mention - or even included any aquatic plants in their testing. Funny how it didn't factor in what happens when CO2 hits the ocean at all. It's hardly rocket science. When CO2 is disolved in water it produces carbolic acid. Which is why the ocean's acidity has been going up so much. That's a very bad thing for all sorts of creatures (inclduing most ocean plants).
Oh and ocean plants are big deal, since they produce more than 80% of the world's oxygen supply.
>As you said, it doesn't necessarily has to be this way, but it does seem to be the case.
How do you figure ? Right now - it would require two earths worth of resources for everybody to live like an average American does. Everybody living like the average Dane isn't far behind either.
>Resource consumption will increase in poor countries as they catch up to the west in living standards
Arguably true - but you first have to accept the assumption that they can and will do so.
>Meantiime advanced economies will see a reduction in population and resource consumption of unprecedented proportions
Based on what ? There seems to be no grounds for this claim. So far advanced economies have seen resource consumption per person increase much faster than the rate of population growth (and indeed continue even when the latter began to decline or even became negative).
Efficiency increases can't do that - there are upper limits to efficiency and even then not all resources can be renewed so for many that can only postpone the inevitable. It's not even reasonable to assume that all of them have viable alternatives. Even where viable alternatives exist developed countries have proven to be extremely reticent about adopting them - even for cases where it means replacing a finite resource with an infinitely renewable one (just look at the energy sector) and even when there is a huge demand for changing from other major downsides to the current resource of choice.
>Some economists argue this is the basis of Japan's never ending recession: depressed internal demand.
Some economists also argue that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is not complete and utter bullshit. The majority of economists believe that Japan's recession is the result of a welfare system that worked way too well and made everybody live a high standard life up to a ripe old age - which has led to an aging population where an ever smaller working-age sector has to work ever harder to supply a much larger unproductive sector. A problem which in Japan (as in Europe) is exacerbated by significant resistance to the only cure for this situation - the same cure the US used until the early 20th century: mass immigration. When your own population is aging, your only rapid source of lots of productive young people is to get them from places where there are currently lots of them who are not able to be productive as their own economies have too many of them.
>If you look at previous cases against copyright infringement the proof has pretty much been "because we say so" and it goes through because the courts doesn't know jack shit and the company representative is dressed in a suit and the "copyright infringer" have slacks and an attitude.
That pattern seems to be changing though - the recent happy birthday case saw the copyright revoked because WB couldn't prove they ever actually owned it.
Europe got a ton of money from the USA for what was, comparatively, a tiny rebuilding effort.
And mind you, world war 2 killed a shitload of people - we generally try to AVOID things that kill shitloads of people.
So who do you think will provide the ton of money to every country on earth for your supposed post-climate-change renewal idea ?
>What do you think trees and other plants breath?
Plants are evolved in a given CO2 level and their response to rapid changes is highly unpredictable - it isn't all good for plants.
>What do you think the earth did before humans existed when a volcano erupted spewing many times more so-called "greenhouse" gasses into the atmosphere?
Ooh, ooh I know this one... it killed 90% of everything alive and started over with the leftovers. Seems smart to do that to ourselves.
Oh but such events were extremely rare, they are called volcanic superplumes and current research suggests they only ever happen when massive meteor impacts happened first (strongly suggesting that meteors caused them). The last time that happened the dinosaurs, mosasoars, icthyosaurs and a few hundred other kingdoms all went extinct.
Oh you thought ordinary volcanoes could do more than we do ? Nope. The USGS has published the data - the combined total CO2 output of the world's active volcanoes in a year is less than 0.25% of what we put out from coal power alone (which is, itself, a tiny fraction of our fossil fuel CO2 production).
Oh and volcanoes have very limited heating effects because although they spew a bit of CO2 they spew a LOT of ash which blocks the sun - volcanoes in fact tend to freeze the planet rather than warm it up.
So basically... you're an utterly ignorant idiot.
Your mistake is the assumption that resource consumption growth is directly (and exclusively) correlated with population growth. There's no grounds for this assumption. Even some of the countries with negative population growth rates are seeing accelerating rates of resource usage. The biggest resource consuming nations are NOT the largest ones in population by any stretch and certainly haven't been for at least 200 years (if ever).
In fact the pattern seems to be that groups with limited resources are MORE likely to have expanding populations because among the resources they have limited access to are those that would reduce population growth - like education and contraception.
So it's perfectly possible for global population growth to be even negative and STILL see an acceleration in resource consumption. That doesn't mean that overpopulation can't be a problem - but it does mean it's a lot more complicated than you imagine. More people do require more resources, but the biggest problem with resource consumption is people USING far more resources than they require - which is much more likely when there are fewer people.
I think you misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying it's bad that you are old enough to have done things in 1965, I was just questioning the idea that relays were only relevant in 1965 and pointing out that I did the same thing 30 years later and I would consider them a useful teaching tool even today - another 16 years since my adventures.
1965 ? I built a simple 8-bit calculator (I wouldn't call it a 'computer' out of relays in 1995. Granted I was just a highschool kid and the whole thing was merely an experiment to test out what I'd learned about logic gated and binary arithmetic and basic circuitry - but it worked, it's still an excellent way to learn because a relay does the same job a transistor does but huge and visibly.
Well yeah, but please note that I wasn't using 'lying' in a negative connotation, I was explaining that it's a required part of learning to learn simpler, but untrue, versions of reality first.
I still don't think the difference between Turing-Machines, Turing Complete Machines and modern day CPU's are appropriate material for a CHILDREN'S museum. Hell most adults don't know it.
I dissagree - fundamentally what makes a computer a computer is the ability to change the programming. Christopher COULDN'T be reprogrammed, it's instructions were part of the physical layout - not changeable. This was fine since it only had one task. But there was no way to reuse it for any other task.
The GPS can be reprogrammed, and they actually are with regular firmware updates. It's not about how instructions are stored, it's about whether they exist distinctly from the circuitry that operates on them. That may be in *other* circuitry, but only if it's possible to replace said other circuitry and (at least in theory) have the device perform a new set of instructions.
They aren't computers at all. They are mechanical calculators - we've had those for the better part of 5000 years. They steadily progressed and no doubt they deserve to be shown in such a museum - but they rather peaked with the Hollerith Tabulator.
Going from counting aids to reprogrammable computers was a quantum leap, and it took a complete rethink of the fundamental principles of mathematics. Three people did that rethink: Alonzo Church, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - but Alan Turing was the only one envision a device that utilized their ideas about effective methods. He was the one who saw beyond rethinking the abstractions of mathematics and saw an opportunity for an entirely new way of performing mathematical functions - and the birth of the reprogrammable computer.
Also - Pascal never saved the world from an evil dictator bent on global rule.
I prefer to think of it in a different way. Human bodies are equipped with powerful radiation sensors, though they are only sensitive to a small section of the EM-Band they can, within this band, detect radiation with pin-point accuracy (including using triangulation to determine origin distance), and sort them by frequency and intensity.
The brain takes all this data to construct the 3D picture we see of the world. We don't see objects, we detect some of their radiation (most of which is reflected solar radiation). It's essentially a biological radar-mapping system.
Much like the computer attached to a radar dish makes it useful by drawing a map from the radio pings - so our brain draws a map of the world from the measurements of our radiation detectors. Among other things it combines frequency with intensity to assign the labels to various sources that we call 'colour' which can mix as a single-source contains more than one frequency - and which our brains then label with secondary or tertiary colours.
So the visual spectrum is a highly simplified view of the world and of course not all animals have the same ones. The capacity to filter frequencies 'colour vision' seems to be limited almost exclusively to birds and primates and were probably a co-evolved trait with plants altering the reflective frequency of fruits when they are mature and ready to be eaten for seed distribution to get the birds/monkeys not to eat the ones that weren't ready (upping the sugar-content at the same time so as to boost the tastyness of the ready fruit was a neat trick too). On the other hand - quite a lot of creatures can detect infrared and/or ultraviolet but our detectors stop short of either.
Hearing is the same... you don't actually hear people speak, or car engines driving by. A pair of (excellent in mammals - better than almost any other family) detectors measure air flow patterns looking for telltale vibrations within their sensitive frequency scope. And this goes through a filtering process not very different from the one done with light radiation to produce our brains' map of 'sound'.
When you consider how far removed our experience of these 'senses' are from how they actually work it's
1) no wonder illusion artists are so good at fooling them
2) a bloody miracle that we could further abstract these already massively abstracted concepts enough to create art... let alone communication
About 99.99% of 'seeing' happens with zero influence from the conscious mind. The point where we actually get to think about it, is only after the abstracted map is drawn. No wonder we can't see the massive blindspot we all have in center of each eye.
Which is why you don't do it like that.
You show a piece of gibberish text. You talk of how ENIGMA created a code that was considered unbreakable.
Then you show this machine with the lots of cool spinning wheels and you show how you can type the gibberish in one on end and it spins around... and spits out a message that makes sense.
And then you talk of how doing that saved millions of lives because it meant the generals knew where the enemy's submarines were, they knew where the enemy was moving it's tanks - and they did it all without the enemy ever knowing they knew.
Tell them a story of espionage and counter-espionage and of how this early computer defeated the most recognizable face of evil in the 20th century. and how it's descendents are saving lives in Afganistan and Iraq today.
As an interesting and unrelated example of my point. Why do rainbows look like rainbows? You probably learned in school that water droplets act like prisms and breaks up white light into it's constituent colours - producing the rainbow.
You probably did an experiment where you held a prison to the sun and saw a rainbow.
That's a prime example of lies to children.
Because that thing you drew on the paper wasn't a bow. The lie explains the colours but it ignores how millions of raindrops can work together like one giant prism, it ignores the reason why the rainbow is bow-shaped. It explains the colours and pretends it has explained the rainbow.
The actual geometry of calculating how rainbows form is actually beautifully elegant... and really quite complex - you simply cannot possibly teach that in a middle school science class, hell you can't teach it at high-school level. But if you learn the lie, you are able to learn a lot more slightly less untrue lies - like wave interference patterns and how binoculars work with prisms rather than lenses... all of which never mentions that light can behave like a particle (you may encounter a very simplified version of that in your final highschool years, I did, so simplified it never used the word 'photon').
Pretty much the only way you'll actually ever learn and calculate the full set of formulae that make up our contemporary understanding of the rainbow... is if you study an advanced degree in optics and it happens to be used as an example in the textbooks you use. Though anybody with at least highschool maths can look it up online and probably understand the answers.
We teach lies to children - because you start simple to get to complex things. My 2-year old knows the sky is blue, but she's a while away yet from understanding what 'blue' means, let alone WHY the sky is blue and it's almost certainly true that my first explanations of that will be far simpler than reality. That's just how teaching works.
Lying to children is, in fact, one of the most noble things we can do for them. Provided the lies are steps on the path to truth, not steps to nowhere. The difference between science and religion at school level isn't that one tells you truths - they both lie, but science tells lies to help you on a path towards truth while religion tells lies to prepare you for bigger lies.
We're talking about a children's museum. The relatively subtle difference between a Turing Machine and a RAM based CPU is not actually at a level where I think they are suitable for a children's museum.
Christopher was not a Turing machine and nobody claimed it was - but then, it wasn't a computer either. It wasn't programmable, let alone reprogrammable. It was essentially a mathematical pattern matching machine that was used to brute force the code-breaking. There are elements of it's architecture which later computers replicated but the key design was very different and it was a single-purpose machine. Even Turing wouldn't have called it a version of his idealized mathematical concept known as the Turing Machine.
A CPU with memory and instructions however, are about as close as we could get to building something which is meant to contain an infinite length piece of paper.
Random Access Memory was, to my mind, really just a major optimization over his sequential access model.
http://www.groklaw.net/article... This article explains the point better than I can.
Education is a skill known as a lies-to-children. You start with simple, but flagrantly untrue, explanations - which makes more complicated lies understandable and you don't get to anything resembling 'true' explanations until grad school.
For children - a Turing machine is the concept that was realized in CPUs. That allows you to then go on and explain Turing-completeness and finally RAM designs with people who now understand the basic principles of computing.
Von Neumann's architecture differs from Turing machines in being about something fundamentally different. Turing was developing the early stages of computing theory (though he had set out to do something very different - attempt to create a new language for expressing mathematical proofs in) while Von Neumann's was an engineering design - the seperation of data and instruction while both are in the same basic format (and possibly even on the same medium) was a way to practically put Turing's pencil-holder into the machine itself, but it was an engineering concept.
Both are still fundamental to how computers work to this day - and for children's level education that's all you can or OUGHT TO try and teach. You can't possibly teach the next level to somebody who hasn't first heard this lie. That's not how education works or ever can work because it isn't how human brains learn things.