One thing which gets left out is... I hate to say this but... consciousness. We know matter exists, and we know consciousness exists, but we really don't know the first thing about how consciousness works. I don't mean information processing, because eventually any robot will be able to do everything a human does, as it is just about having a machine that's processing inputs and converting those to behaviours.
No, the real mystery is why such a robot would even need to be sentient. There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines. We could go about performing human functions and communications all running our complex brains just as we are, just not sentient, not experiencing any of it. One human could say to another, "I love you" as simply a code for certain information which gets processed into various probabilities of scenarios for future survival, and so on. Even poetry can come down to that, given we're now starting to develop machines which can work with intuitive patterns.
So that leaves consciousness as a) totally irrelevant and b) the most core part of our existence as sentient experiencing humans, humans watching the movie of their lives.
A lot of people tend to dismiss consciousness as just a byproduct, but that's maybe just because it is so hard to study that any self respecting person stays well clear of it. But it is also known as the "hard problem" and it is so "hard" that some say we'll need to start thinking about consciousness as another law of the universe, along with the other fundamental laws. And that would eventually start to modify these "anthropic" principles in some way.
As for "gods" well, humans have always had very powerful imaginations, and we make stories, but that's a separate thing altogether, and those stories about identity and belonging are perhaps seen as survival strategies between groups, where rather than physically fight another group, you just reprogram them to act as if they are part of your group already, "owning" as it were, without destroying.
And even if one puts aside survival questions, and one assumes there may be an afterlife, it really is up for grabs what form that could take, as the possibilities are endless and in my mind, either you die and disappear in which case you don't know you're dead, or something else, which could be anything. Nobody knows. But I digress.
Back to the point, ideas like the anthropic principle tend to go a bit too far with their conclusions given that they take no account of consciousness and what part that plays in existence and the cosmos.
And inventing trillions of trillions of other universes as a way to explain why this one happened to be tuned just right for us, is hand-waving and as made up as any myth which was made up as an ad-hoc explanation. An explanation isn't more rigorous just because it avoids mentioning gods or turtles.
We don't know why matter was tuned just right, and we don't know what consciousness is, and we don't know if there is life out there. Although there's no reason to think that Earth is special. I mean, it is more like the naughty corner if anything, you get sent here and ignored until you learn to calm down and behave. (See, stories.)
Yes, we nerds are empowered by facts - not alternate facts.
As a side note, I continue to be amazed by how often the "cover the lie by sticking an adjective in front of it" method is used.
Alternative facts. Heart-healthy margarine. Catastrophic global warming. Peaceful religion. Natural... whatever. Organic... whatever.
Which isn't to say those things are all lies as such, rather, just how often marketing people use adjectives, rather than explain facts and how those facts were established, and how they were verified repeatedly, without excluding any counter-facts, and free of bias, and objective, and uh... oh ok.
At least this now highlights that anyone traveling to the US should use "dumb" phones instead, preferably some old device with obscure hardware interface.
I'm planning a visit to USA just as soon as I finish converting my data to binary smoke signals gathered into a jar.
Besides, as far as I can tell, USA became a great nation largely due to a lot of enterprising migrants coming to take advantage of vast natural resources, from places like tired old Europe. And that's great. And I'm sure China is still kicking itself for those emperors who decide that China was "the world" and the rest of the planet was just wastelands of barbarians, not fit to even explore. North America could have been colonised by China. Like, wow.
And I get it that it was largely the excesses of extreme PostModern culture which have made much of the core of USA say, f**k it, let's vote in someone who manifestly is NOT infected with PoMo, and oh look this guy keeps spouting racist stuff, great he's definitely not PC, let's vote for him! Thank you France and Germany for extreme PoMo which so successfully infected USA's academia. Thank you alt-left liberals and extreme reverse-colonialism and extreme catastrophic global warming predictions and extreme anti-prosperity consciousness and all that. Yep, the opportunity was created, and the first opportunist con-man took advantage.
Be that all as it may, one would really hope that border security would be a boring, mundane, technocratic, "do what works and what's efficient" undertaking, free of all that cultural wars stuff. It should be as interesting as plumbing or basket weaving. But instead, y'all seem to have turned it into this politicised pork contracts and hyperbole about stopping terrorists, and brown people, and it is like WTF, you'd expect that from--with all due respect to a small undeveloped African nation who setup the president's nephew as Supreme Director of National Borders to run the system, with consequent hilarity of obnoxious and silly rules, like the time my mom was told she had to change from her trousers into a skirt because women are not supposed to wear trousers (name of small African nation redacted)--but here we have king of silly rules as none other than the greatest nation on earth. Wow.
I'm all for new tech, be it batteries or fusion, or heck, even storing energy as... gas (something about mixing hydrogen into it). But until that day...
To be a little glib, the future of energy economics is just two things: gas and pork.
Gas for getting stuff working, and pork for all the people who are making money off of useless "renewables".
At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant. If the future is really without oil and coal and nuclear, as greens want, then everything will be gas.
(This post intentionally simple and glib to make a point.)
You're entitled to that opinion. And, if so many people can suffer denialism, how do you or I know that we aren't also suffering from some sort of political bias? I mean it is funny isn't it, that it is always the other people who are the stupid deluded ones. I am, for example, reading a book at the moment that goes into the massive scientific cockup that was nutritional science over the last fifty years. The book got a review in the BMJ to the effect that, admitting indeed that, we all thought science was this clear headed thing and actually, there can be screw ups that ruin an entire field for decades and decades. If you want a fact, people are fallible and whole fields of enquiry can fail spectacularly whilst lots of intelligent smart and skilled people in the field confidently cock it up. That is just a fact of life, that it sometimes happens. So rather than just blast other views as denialists, why not be a little less certain? For me, once a field starts calling others "denialists" then it has become closed minded and loses the self-correcting nature that is supposed to be the reason why we trust science in the first place. It *might* have got the answer right, but once you start blasting others as denialists, we can no longer know whether it can be trusted, because the self-correciton has been replaced with dogma. As I say, we KNOW, empirically, from experience, that whole fields can and do screw up. I will still go to the doctor when I get ill, but I won't blindly trust anything he or she says about nutrition.
Actually, exercise can and will change the body's metabolic setpoints such as your resting metabolic rate. But nothing in your calculator can inform you about metabolic setpoints and so you remain misled by your incomplete understanding.
It appears a similar gap in your understanding blinds you to the truth about human triggered climate change.
Well, it is a similar thing. The metabolic set points can be changed, true, but that effect is small and practically useless compared to the real reasons why we gain weight. Just like climate change, we are sadly pursuing the wrong part of the system, the parts which are small and not the real problem. High level sports people are finding that they were not able to lose weight regardless of how well they set their system using athletic levels of exercise. Because that's not the key part of the system. And likewise you can want to see action on climate change all you like, it ain't going to work.
In nutrition there's this funny thing where, if you actually add up the calories burned in exercise, it becomes factually silly to think exercise has anything to do with weight loss, and yet, word + dog + medical establishment + science, all keep advising people to exercise more to lose weight. Yet it factually is quite silly to anyone with a calculator who actually thinks to add it up.
Once can easily expend 300 calories per day with relatively light exercise (eg an hour of light jogging), which depending on your body mass will usually be about 15% to 20% of the daily intake of the average untrained adult, assuming moderate physical activity lifestyle and not being grossly under-/overweight. Furthermore, exercise is known to increase the body metabolism and strengthen muscles, both of which contribute to the increased resting energy consumption of the body.
To say that this would substantially contribute to the body's energy balance is not silly at all, it's a reasonable conclusion based on very fundamental physical properties of the universe. Now of course, if one were to compensate for the expended energy they would remain their weight, and I would agree with that, but if you are going to say this is the exception and not the rule then I will ask of you the same I ask of anyone who challenges mainstream science: citation needed bitch.
Well, an hour of jogging is not "easy", and 300 calories is what, to adjust for eating slightly too many potato chips?
Look, I'm getting this from the paleo/primal movement where sports scientist Tim Noakes used to run and run and run and still put on weight. And one day he realised, fuck me this isn't working!
As for fundamental physical properties of the universe, bitch, exercise also works up an appetite and that drives people to eat excess calories. Oh what a great jog for the last hour, oops I now ate a bit extra pasta and a couple extra bytes of cake and slightly more cereal at breakfast the next day and downed a larger glass of orange juice. Poof all your savings are gone and then some. So the equation is not a simple one way thing. I find this myself. If I just sit around most of the day, I eat less.
And as for energy balance, there is a simple but overlooked calculation, and this one is a real head-scratcher. See, the difference in energy balance between becoming obese in a few decades or starving to death in a few decades, the cumulative energy balance, is just one bite of food extra or under per day. So how is that possible? How do we regulate our energy intake with that degree of precision? Animals don't do that, and neither do humans. Gaining weight can't be a simple energy balance. Yes, no laws of physics are violated. Just like a hybrid car which has a controller which decides when to direct energy to the batteries and when to direct it to the wheels, is not violating laws of physics. The body has its own controls.
It is more plausible to say that the body self regulates in many ways. And people are now finding that they can lose a lot of weight by eating foods which don't mess around with the body's hormones, the ones which promote weight gain. Exercise is good for other reasons, but weight loss is not one of them. That's just a dogma that's been spread for a few decades now, but which experience is proving wrong.
Yeah there are those aspects, true. Actually the reason I cite/simplify it down to exercise being pointless is because the real reason for gaining weight is generally that, it is the carbs which cause insulin to be released and which tells the body to store it all as fat, until eventually the person one day becoming insulin resistant and then everything else gets buggered up too. And this affects athletes too, people who can't seem to keep the pounds off, despite athletic levels of exercise. Once that main giant mountain of an effect is dealt with, then the hacks such as, exercising to stimulate the metabolism, or exercising with high intensity for short periods, and so on, can really come into their own. (That's as well as I understand it for now, and the low carb thing works for me). I got away with eating high carb for a long time, and people would say I must have a high metabolism, and then I started gaining weight at 40.
In nutrition there's this funny thing where, if you actually add up the calories burned in exercise, it becomes factually silly to think exercise has anything to do with weight loss, and yet, word + dog + medical establishment + science, all keep advising people to exercise more to lose weight. Yet it factually is quite silly to anyone with a calculator who actually thinks to add it up.
I mean, that's just one of those things, where people don't talk facts, they talk on account of what message they think they are sending out. Like, we can't encourage laziness, so we can't mention the calories numbers and the actual implications (that you cannot outrun a bad diet).
And you see a lot of this, unfortunately, in climate change. People insist it is all about science and facts, yet so often, the message is about what ethos people are trying to promote. Because if you are really trying to solve AGW, well, there is nothing to solve, because we are not going to stop catastrophic warming. I mean, years ago they were saying we have just just 3 years to save the planet, and such like, and yet a decade later we are still trying to get the world to agree to some such. Add up the calories, it doesn't matter if you "must do something" or "must make a start" or "head in the right direction"... we will not get there, the warming is locked in, and the amount we can reduce it by is negligible at this point. But people won't say that. Because...
Because... and the reason is telling... because climate change is what is known as a "superordinate goal", in that, the goals transcend the actual issue, and the goals can be fitted to many other issues. You can take climate change and use it to justify many different issues, like global ethics, transnationalism, one world government, as well as, energy schemes, new taxes, various kinds of subsidies, investment in research and education, and so on, and don't get me wrong, a lot of these things are good things, in the right context, and applied in places where they work, and I for one look forward to the day when a child can be born anywhere on the planet and have equal opportunities for health and education, but that day won't be for a long time, unfortunately, and yet, such issues are often gathered up in some catch-all term like "climate justice" and it leaves people wondering if it is some new kind of marxism or some new kind of spiritual awakening for humanity where we all suddenly grow a huge empathetic field of awareness and give up our material greed for the sake of helping the poor.
I remember the environmentalist who told me that it didn't matter if other forms of pollution might be worse than CO2, because, "by reducing CO2 you force a reduction on production and a reduction in consumption" and then she added, "it's about reducing greed." Well, for her it was about reducing greed. But reducing greed isn't going to stop climate change. That's the superordinate issue, the grand narrative to trump all other narratives. The "fertile fantasy" as Soros would put it.
At least people like Gates seem to be using it to drive an agenda for more investment in new technologies which might actually produce large quantities of energy, and not just the piddling wind farms which look nice but don't run much, compared what we actually use, and what the world will need in future.
Various thinkers have said that when you are faced with the problem of how to convince the masses to follow some action which they are not remotely interested in, you use bait-and-switch. I'm kinda hoping the nuclear people will be able to surf this to get more nuclear energy out there, if the new technologies fail to deliver, but I worry that the goals will be swayed too much by the guilt and greed brigade who see humanity as a cancer.
Indeed, and I vaguely gather there's the notion that "science" actually starts with "thinking about thinking" ie. asking not just, how do we know? but asking, how do we know whether, how we know, really allows us to know? or to be less wordy, why do we trust this method?
Well, fair enough. On the point about ports, I'm sitting here with docks to provide me with mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 2, some USB3 stuff, and a pair of eSATA ports, plus an adapter for FireWire2.
So OK, me talking about VGA+DVI isn't a good example, but it is the same point. As for HDMI being ubiquitous, it isn't here. Today I'll be pulling out an ancient projector because the main one is booked out. It has VGA (barely). Is that an edge case? Well, everyone has their edge cases. Our "newer" projector is also HDMI-less.
I'm not a fan of the move to USB-C/TB3, and making them the only ports on the new MBPs, but it is what it is. But consider this, also, that it is a Pro laptop, or meant to be, and so there's going to be a load of stuff hanging off it (my own gripe is that I wanted 32GB RAM) but as a Pro, how many cables do you want to have to plug/unplug every time? And if like me the laptop is being carried around all the time, and I don't have a car, then the weight does matter too.
What I do find a little horrific is that the MacBook only has one port. And that adapters are so expensive. But I'm perfectly agreeable that many people will need and prefer say, a Lenovo P50.
But Apple does, for good or bad, remove stuff, like how we just lost MagSafe and other stuff before that. These are compromises. I sat down this morning and pugged in one TB3 cable (to one of two docks), and my desk stuff is all connected. That's nice in some ways.
And dongles don't constantly lose themselves -- people lose dongles, if not careful. And needing a whole "pile of dongles" just shows that there's always some connection or other which can't be included. I mean, do I really want a laptop which has VGA + HDMI + DVI + DP ports? Well, who wants to carry any dongles, right?!
So I'm looking at a MacBook Pro and how it needs a dock sitting on the desk. But I also see this one tiny USB-C/TB3 cable and it is doing a multitude of things. And then I recall the SCSI cables we used to have to use, just for drives and scanners.
And how this one machine, when plugged into a USB-C cable, becomes a desktop, and when I unplug it, it becomes a laptop. And all my stuff is on it. Simple. Thing I like most about the MBP is that it has *four* TB3 ports. It has more connectivity than the Mac Pro tower it replaced.
There's a notion that a reason it is so hard to get rid of ISIS, and survivalists, and well, any kind of "nutter", is that nature keeps her options open. If for some reason life was set back to say, the 14th century, then you'd need the mindset of warlordism, in order to reestablish some kind of organised life, in those earlier harsher conditions.
Which is also why it is a bit sad to see the last of the hunter gatherers disappear -- but then, there's always a few people fascinated with the skills for running down a large animal over marathon distances. People today keep running marathons for, well, no reason;-)
It is sort of an evolutionary paradigm: nobody knows the way forward, or what might happen, so nature keeps as many different experiments running at the same time. As humans, we just don't know whether something is a good idea until a long time after it has been put into practice. And I think one can say this about everything from communism to agriculture.
You know, if the Precautionary Principle had seriously been used (and if it had any real worth), we'd never have invented agriculture. I mean, if you'd been back there 12,000 years ago, you'd really wonder who are these nutters who want to stay in one place all the time and ruin their teeth trying to eat ground grains, not to mention the all the hard work which only might pay off several months later. Totally nuts if you think about it.
If you paid for an undergrad degree at a research institution, and didn't understand that you should have been working in some famous professor's lab to actually get your education, you're going to be pretty upset when you get out.
And didn't understand... because someone should have taught you that when you were 14, so this basically blames the schools for not properly educating kids about the ways of the world. Fair enough.
I'd suggest it goes a little further though. The left has a bias or belief that problems are the fault of society, whereas the right tends to bias to the belief that problems are the fault of the individual. Now, the problem is that, the left tends to be more associated with education (because if society and its institutions are the problem, then those are the institutions which need to be improved, and education needs to be improved). So the left is more idealistic about the role of education. See it is implicit. But what you're saying is, from more of a right wing point of view, hey nobody should be an idiot, or ignorant, to the fact that the world is competitive and selfish place, and that individuals have to learn to handle this, mostly via self control and character building and smarts (so don't come crying when you become a victim).
And that, I think, is fair enough, as there is no real difference between the "individual" and "society", as ideological categories, because we are always both, we are all individuals and we all live in society and are part of social institutions. Individuals have agency. Groups have communion. And we always act and function in both. So the problems are often found in both places. (A way forward for politics is to become both left and right wing).
So I would just add that, I agree in the sense that, our society needs to spend more time acclimatising kids to "how the world works", as by nature, humans are both competitive and cooperative. And we need to be educated to understand when and where each one is the dominant driver. So I do agree, it is right to tell people that they need to wise up about American universities. But I wouldn't blame kids for not knowing that already, if they haven't been taught.
That reminds me of cases in the Good Wife, except they wisely limited their law humour scripts to half retard, whereas what you describe goes full retard.
the dream is over, and the company is on the verge of decline, like it was in the end of the 80s.
Computers are becoming ever more ubiquitous, and Apple has laptops, desktops, tablets, watches, and a music service, cloud services, some presence in the living room, a bit of AI, and a long history of OS development, plus has a track record of approaching new form factors with a humanist perspective on design, and a presence in many shopping malls, with stores often very busy, and lots of money, for now.
Yes, everyone else can do a part or parts of that better, like, maybe I'd rather have a Lenovo P50, if I was an architect, or you must have a phablet, because your company is based on Google Docs, but for a lot of people, buying into a system is more like a marriage, you get what you can and stick with it, knowing it won't be the best at everything, because change is a pain and perfection a mirage.
Apple would have to screw up a lot of things at this point, to enter real decline. Doesn't mean you have to go anywhere near them with a bargepole, but saying they or their dream is over, is a bit silly. There isn't a heck of a lot new you can do with a laptop, and someone has to decide the balance of features, and they won't suit everyone.
Maybe in 10 years, when AI has gotten somewhere, we can ask if Apple is over.
Columbo plots so often centred on him learning about a new gadget and that it was in an odd state at the time. I think Columbo would do just fine today:)
Do you actually believe that more than 90% of climatologists have somehow been bribed to lie?
Just to take this in a different direction, it may not be lies. It may simply be that other sciences can get in a lab and test a thing to death, whereas you can't do that with "the planet". So there is an over-reliance on models, which are sort of predictions/scenarios but not really real (again, not tested to death), and like other areas of science where it is hard to get concrete data without lots of confounding factors, like nutrition, a wrong bunch of findings can hang on for a very long time. Like how they've said for decades that fat is very bad for you and gives you heart attacks and now they are starting to say, oh, wait, that's completely wrong.
And that's before we get to the politics. For once an issue becomes political, most reason goes out the window and it is all about winning power and obliterating the competition and doing deals and so on. Big oil has its counterparts in big wind, big solar, big gas, and big nuclear. We use so much energy that all of it is big business, whether it comes from renewables or not. 100m tall turbines aren't assembled by little old ladies in the village. It is all big bucks.
So if it is wrong, there's lots of reasons why very smart people could in consensus have been wrong for so long, and there's lots of political and money reasons why climate change policies would be backed just as much as the old oil industry would back the opposite. And I think everyone knows this, which is why climate change advocacy so often goes on about "the ever increasing weight of overwhelming evidence" and "ever growing consensus" and all that, which is mostly spin. Of course consensus can be wrong. If history teaches anything it is that expert consensus can often be entirely wrong, because reality and truth are hard.
Heh. I'll always remember Jerry Pournelle writing in Byte: "I'm not sure I want to share cycles even with myself" back when preemptive multi tasking was a strange new fangled thing in PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing which gets left out is ... I hate to say this but ... consciousness. We know matter exists, and we know consciousness exists, but we really don't know the first thing about how consciousness works. I don't mean information processing, because eventually any robot will be able to do everything a human does, as it is just about having a machine that's processing inputs and converting those to behaviours.
No, the real mystery is why such a robot would even need to be sentient. There is no reason why humans, as we are, need to be sentient. We are just biological machines. We could go about performing human functions and communications all running our complex brains just as we are, just not sentient, not experiencing any of it. One human could say to another, "I love you" as simply a code for certain information which gets processed into various probabilities of scenarios for future survival, and so on. Even poetry can come down to that, given we're now starting to develop machines which can work with intuitive patterns.
So that leaves consciousness as a) totally irrelevant and b) the most core part of our existence as sentient experiencing humans, humans watching the movie of their lives.
A lot of people tend to dismiss consciousness as just a byproduct, but that's maybe just because it is so hard to study that any self respecting person stays well clear of it. But it is also known as the "hard problem" and it is so "hard" that some say we'll need to start thinking about consciousness as another law of the universe, along with the other fundamental laws. And that would eventually start to modify these "anthropic" principles in some way.
As for "gods" well, humans have always had very powerful imaginations, and we make stories, but that's a separate thing altogether, and those stories about identity and belonging are perhaps seen as survival strategies between groups, where rather than physically fight another group, you just reprogram them to act as if they are part of your group already, "owning" as it were, without destroying.
And even if one puts aside survival questions, and one assumes there may be an afterlife, it really is up for grabs what form that could take, as the possibilities are endless and in my mind, either you die and disappear in which case you don't know you're dead, or something else, which could be anything. Nobody knows. But I digress.
Back to the point, ideas like the anthropic principle tend to go a bit too far with their conclusions given that they take no account of consciousness and what part that plays in existence and the cosmos.
And inventing trillions of trillions of other universes as a way to explain why this one happened to be tuned just right for us, is hand-waving and as made up as any myth which was made up as an ad-hoc explanation. An explanation isn't more rigorous just because it avoids mentioning gods or turtles.
We don't know why matter was tuned just right, and we don't know what consciousness is, and we don't know if there is life out there. Although there's no reason to think that Earth is special. I mean, it is more like the naughty corner if anything, you get sent here and ignored until you learn to calm down and behave. (See, stories.)
Yes, we nerds are empowered by facts - not alternate facts.
As a side note, I continue to be amazed by how often the "cover the lie by sticking an adjective in front of it" method is used.
Alternative facts. ... whatever. ... whatever.
Heart-healthy margarine.
Catastrophic global warming.
Peaceful religion.
Natural
Organic
Which isn't to say those things are all lies as such, rather, just how often marketing people use adjectives, rather than explain facts and how those facts were established, and how they were verified repeatedly, without excluding any counter-facts, and free of bias, and objective, and uh... oh ok.
Hey, Wise and Popular Trump everyone!
At least this now highlights that anyone traveling to the US should use "dumb" phones instead, preferably some old device with obscure hardware interface.
I'm planning a visit to USA just as soon as I finish converting my data to binary smoke signals gathered into a jar.
Besides, as far as I can tell, USA became a great nation largely due to a lot of enterprising migrants coming to take advantage of vast natural resources, from places like tired old Europe. And that's great. And I'm sure China is still kicking itself for those emperors who decide that China was "the world" and the rest of the planet was just wastelands of barbarians, not fit to even explore. North America could have been colonised by China. Like, wow.
And I get it that it was largely the excesses of extreme PostModern culture which have made much of the core of USA say, f**k it, let's vote in someone who manifestly is NOT infected with PoMo, and oh look this guy keeps spouting racist stuff, great he's definitely not PC, let's vote for him! Thank you France and Germany for extreme PoMo which so successfully infected USA's academia. Thank you alt-left liberals and extreme reverse-colonialism and extreme catastrophic global warming predictions and extreme anti-prosperity consciousness and all that. Yep, the opportunity was created, and the first opportunist con-man took advantage.
Be that all as it may, one would really hope that border security would be a boring, mundane, technocratic, "do what works and what's efficient" undertaking, free of all that cultural wars stuff. It should be as interesting as plumbing or basket weaving. But instead, y'all seem to have turned it into this politicised pork contracts and hyperbole about stopping terrorists, and brown people, and it is like WTF, you'd expect that from--with all due respect to a small undeveloped African nation who setup the president's nephew as Supreme Director of National Borders to run the system, with consequent hilarity of obnoxious and silly rules, like the time my mom was told she had to change from her trousers into a skirt because women are not supposed to wear trousers (name of small African nation redacted)--but here we have king of silly rules as none other than the greatest nation on earth. Wow.
I'm all for new tech, be it batteries or fusion, or heck, even storing energy as... gas (something about mixing hydrogen into it).
But until that day...
To be a little glib, the future of energy economics is just two things: gas and pork.
Gas for getting stuff working, and pork for all the people who are making money off of useless "renewables".
At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant. If the future is really without oil and coal and nuclear, as greens want, then everything will be gas.
(This post intentionally simple and glib to make a point.)
You're entitled to that opinion. And, if so many people can suffer denialism, how do you or I know that we aren't also suffering from some sort of political bias? I mean it is funny isn't it, that it is always the other people who are the stupid deluded ones. I am, for example, reading a book at the moment that goes into the massive scientific cockup that was nutritional science over the last fifty years. The book got a review in the BMJ to the effect that, admitting indeed that, we all thought science was this clear headed thing and actually, there can be screw ups that ruin an entire field for decades and decades. If you want a fact, people are fallible and whole fields of enquiry can fail spectacularly whilst lots of intelligent smart and skilled people in the field confidently cock it up. That is just a fact of life, that it sometimes happens. So rather than just blast other views as denialists, why not be a little less certain? For me, once a field starts calling others "denialists" then it has become closed minded and loses the self-correcting nature that is supposed to be the reason why we trust science in the first place. It *might* have got the answer right, but once you start blasting others as denialists, we can no longer know whether it can be trusted, because the self-correciton has been replaced with dogma. As I say, we KNOW, empirically, from experience, that whole fields can and do screw up. I will still go to the doctor when I get ill, but I won't blindly trust anything he or she says about nutrition.
Thanks. Have you heard of the blog Mark's Daily Apple?
Actually, exercise can and will change the body's metabolic setpoints such as your resting metabolic rate. But nothing in your calculator can inform you about metabolic setpoints and so you remain misled by your incomplete understanding.
It appears a similar gap in your understanding blinds you to the truth about human triggered climate change.
Well, it is a similar thing. The metabolic set points can be changed, true, but that effect is small and practically useless compared to the real reasons why we gain weight. Just like climate change, we are sadly pursuing the wrong part of the system, the parts which are small and not the real problem. High level sports people are finding that they were not able to lose weight regardless of how well they set their system using athletic levels of exercise. Because that's not the key part of the system. And likewise you can want to see action on climate change all you like, it ain't going to work.
In nutrition there's this funny thing where, if you actually add up the calories burned in exercise, it becomes factually silly to think exercise has anything to do with weight loss, and yet, word + dog + medical establishment + science, all keep advising people to exercise more to lose weight. Yet it factually is quite silly to anyone with a calculator who actually thinks to add it up.
Once can easily expend 300 calories per day with relatively light exercise (eg an hour of light jogging), which depending on your body mass will usually be about 15% to 20% of the daily intake of the average untrained adult, assuming moderate physical activity lifestyle and not being grossly under-/overweight. Furthermore, exercise is known to increase the body metabolism and strengthen muscles, both of which contribute to the increased resting energy consumption of the body.
To say that this would substantially contribute to the body's energy balance is not silly at all, it's a reasonable conclusion based on very fundamental physical properties of the universe. Now of course, if one were to compensate for the expended energy they would remain their weight, and I would agree with that, but if you are going to say this is the exception and not the rule then I will ask of you the same I ask of anyone who challenges mainstream science: citation needed bitch.
Well, an hour of jogging is not "easy", and 300 calories is what, to adjust for eating slightly too many potato chips?
Look, I'm getting this from the paleo/primal movement where sports scientist Tim Noakes used to run and run and run and still put on weight. And one day he realised, fuck me this isn't working!
As for fundamental physical properties of the universe, bitch, exercise also works up an appetite and that drives people to eat excess calories. Oh what a great jog for the last hour, oops I now ate a bit extra pasta and a couple extra bytes of cake and slightly more cereal at breakfast the next day and downed a larger glass of orange juice. Poof all your savings are gone and then some. So the equation is not a simple one way thing.
I find this myself. If I just sit around most of the day, I eat less.
And as for energy balance, there is a simple but overlooked calculation, and this one is a real head-scratcher. See, the difference in energy balance between becoming obese in a few decades or starving to death in a few decades, the cumulative energy balance, is just one bite of food extra or under per day. So how is that possible? How do we regulate our energy intake with that degree of precision? Animals don't do that, and neither do humans. Gaining weight can't be a simple energy balance. Yes, no laws of physics are violated. Just like a hybrid car which has a controller which decides when to direct energy to the batteries and when to direct it to the wheels, is not violating laws of physics. The body has its own controls.
It is more plausible to say that the body self regulates in many ways. And people are now finding that they can lose a lot of weight by eating foods which don't mess around with the body's hormones, the ones which promote weight gain. Exercise is good for other reasons, but weight loss is not one of them. That's just a dogma that's been spread for a few decades now, but which experience is proving wrong.
Science + Medical Establishment do not suggest exercise to lose weight, but to remain healthy.
From AMA, July 2016, five steps to lose weight, including "Balance what you eat with physical activity."
That was just the first hit on google.
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/WeightManagement/LosingWeight/5-Steps-to-Lose-Weight_UCM_307260_Article.jsp
Yeah there are those aspects, true. Actually the reason I cite/simplify it down to exercise being pointless is because the real reason for gaining weight is generally that, it is the carbs which cause insulin to be released and which tells the body to store it all as fat, until eventually the person one day becoming insulin resistant and then everything else gets buggered up too. And this affects athletes too, people who can't seem to keep the pounds off, despite athletic levels of exercise.
Once that main giant mountain of an effect is dealt with, then the hacks such as, exercising to stimulate the metabolism, or exercising with high intensity for short periods, and so on, can really come into their own. (That's as well as I understand it for now, and the low carb thing works for me). I got away with eating high carb for a long time, and people would say I must have a high metabolism, and then I started gaining weight at 40.
In nutrition there's this funny thing where, if you actually add up the calories burned in exercise, it becomes factually silly to think exercise has anything to do with weight loss, and yet, word + dog + medical establishment + science, all keep advising people to exercise more to lose weight. Yet it factually is quite silly to anyone with a calculator who actually thinks to add it up.
I mean, that's just one of those things, where people don't talk facts, they talk on account of what message they think they are sending out. Like, we can't encourage laziness, so we can't mention the calories numbers and the actual implications (that you cannot outrun a bad diet).
And you see a lot of this, unfortunately, in climate change. People insist it is all about science and facts, yet so often, the message is about what ethos people are trying to promote. Because if you are really trying to solve AGW, well, there is nothing to solve, because we are not going to stop catastrophic warming. I mean, years ago they were saying we have just just 3 years to save the planet, and such like, and yet a decade later we are still trying to get the world to agree to some such. Add up the calories, it doesn't matter if you "must do something" or "must make a start" or "head in the right direction"... we will not get there, the warming is locked in, and the amount we can reduce it by is negligible at this point. But people won't say that. Because...
Because... and the reason is telling... because climate change is what is known as a "superordinate goal", in that, the goals transcend the actual issue, and the goals can be fitted to many other issues. You can take climate change and use it to justify many different issues, like global ethics, transnationalism, one world government, as well as, energy schemes, new taxes, various kinds of subsidies, investment in research and education, and so on, and don't get me wrong, a lot of these things are good things, in the right context, and applied in places where they work, and I for one look forward to the day when a child can be born anywhere on the planet and have equal opportunities for health and education, but that day won't be for a long time, unfortunately, and yet, such issues are often gathered up in some catch-all term like "climate justice" and it leaves people wondering if it is some new kind of marxism or some new kind of spiritual awakening for humanity where we all suddenly grow a huge empathetic field of awareness and give up our material greed for the sake of helping the poor.
I remember the environmentalist who told me that it didn't matter if other forms of pollution might be worse than CO2, because, "by reducing CO2 you force a reduction on production and a reduction in consumption" and then she added, "it's about reducing greed." Well, for her it was about reducing greed. But reducing greed isn't going to stop climate change. That's the superordinate issue, the grand narrative to trump all other narratives. The "fertile fantasy" as Soros would put it.
At least people like Gates seem to be using it to drive an agenda for more investment in new technologies which might actually produce large quantities of energy, and not just the piddling wind farms which look nice but don't run much, compared what we actually use, and what the world will need in future.
Various thinkers have said that when you are faced with the problem of how to convince the masses to follow some action which they are not remotely interested in, you use bait-and-switch. I'm kinda hoping the nuclear people will be able to surf this to get more nuclear energy out there, if the new technologies fail to deliver, but I worry that the goals will be swayed too much by the guilt and greed brigade who see humanity as a cancer.
No you can't, Google Drive syncs links to Google Docs to your hard drive, not the actual documents.
Habits change (keep personal privacy, no wait, let's share it all on Facebook) but this about documents is the one thing I can't let go of.
I'm sure these data centres are the best in security and backups. I still want the piddly files copied to some media I own.
Indeed, and I vaguely gather there's the notion that "science" actually starts with "thinking about thinking"
ie.
asking not just, how do we know?
but asking, how do we know whether, how we know, really allows us to know?
or to be less wordy,
why do we trust this method?
Ah, thanks, bookmarked the dock for future. I've got a couple different ones.
I'm glad there is a market and several companies making them.
Well, fair enough. On the point about ports, I'm sitting here with docks to provide me with mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 2, some USB3 stuff, and a pair of eSATA ports, plus an adapter for FireWire2.
So OK, me talking about VGA+DVI isn't a good example, but it is the same point. As for HDMI being ubiquitous, it isn't here. Today I'll be pulling out an ancient projector because the main one is booked out. It has VGA (barely). Is that an edge case? Well, everyone has their edge cases. Our "newer" projector is also HDMI-less.
I'm not a fan of the move to USB-C/TB3, and making them the only ports on the new MBPs, but it is what it is. But consider this, also, that it is a Pro laptop, or meant to be, and so there's going to be a load of stuff hanging off it (my own gripe is that I wanted 32GB RAM) but as a Pro, how many cables do you want to have to plug/unplug every time? And if like me the laptop is being carried around all the time, and I don't have a car, then the weight does matter too.
What I do find a little horrific is that the MacBook only has one port. And that adapters are so expensive. But I'm perfectly agreeable that many people will need and prefer say, a Lenovo P50.
But Apple does, for good or bad, remove stuff, like how we just lost MagSafe and other stuff before that. These are compromises. I sat down this morning and pugged in one TB3 cable (to one of two docks), and my desk stuff is all connected. That's nice in some ways.
And dongles don't constantly lose themselves -- people lose dongles, if not careful. And needing a whole "pile of dongles" just shows that there's always some connection or other which can't be included. I mean, do I really want a laptop which has VGA + HDMI + DVI + DP ports? Well, who wants to carry any dongles, right?!
So I'm looking at a MacBook Pro and how it needs a dock sitting on the desk. But I also see this one tiny USB-C/TB3 cable and it is doing a multitude of things. And then I recall the SCSI cables we used to have to use, just for drives and scanners.
And how this one machine, when plugged into a USB-C cable, becomes a desktop, and when I unplug it, it becomes a laptop. And all my stuff is on it. Simple. Thing I like most about the MBP is that it has *four* TB3 ports. It has more connectivity than the Mac Pro tower it replaced.
There's a notion that a reason it is so hard to get rid of ISIS, and survivalists, and well, any kind of "nutter", is that nature keeps her options open. If for some reason life was set back to say, the 14th century, then you'd need the mindset of warlordism, in order to reestablish some kind of organised life, in those earlier harsher conditions.
Which is also why it is a bit sad to see the last of the hunter gatherers disappear -- but then, there's always a few people fascinated with the skills for running down a large animal over marathon distances. People today keep running marathons for, well, no reason ;-)
It is sort of an evolutionary paradigm: nobody knows the way forward, or what might happen, so nature keeps as many different experiments running at the same time. As humans, we just don't know whether something is a good idea until a long time after it has been put into practice. And I think one can say this about everything from communism to agriculture.
You know, if the Precautionary Principle had seriously been used (and if it had any real worth), we'd never have invented agriculture. I mean, if you'd been back there 12,000 years ago, you'd really wonder who are these nutters who want to stay in one place all the time and ruin their teeth trying to eat ground grains, not to mention the all the hard work which only might pay off several months later. Totally nuts if you think about it.
If you paid for an undergrad degree at a research institution, and didn't understand that you should have been working in some famous professor's lab to actually get your education, you're going to be pretty upset when you get out.
And didn't understand... because someone should have taught you that when you were 14, so this basically blames the schools for not properly educating kids about the ways of the world. Fair enough.
I'd suggest it goes a little further though. The left has a bias or belief that problems are the fault of society, whereas the right tends to bias to the belief that problems are the fault of the individual. Now, the problem is that, the left tends to be more associated with education (because if society and its institutions are the problem, then those are the institutions which need to be improved, and education needs to be improved). So the left is more idealistic about the role of education. See it is implicit. But what you're saying is, from more of a right wing point of view, hey nobody should be an idiot, or ignorant, to the fact that the world is competitive and selfish place, and that individuals have to learn to handle this, mostly via self control and character building and smarts (so don't come crying when you become a victim).
And that, I think, is fair enough, as there is no real difference between the "individual" and "society", as ideological categories, because we are always both, we are all individuals and we all live in society and are part of social institutions. Individuals have agency. Groups have communion. And we always act and function in both. So the problems are often found in both places. (A way forward for politics is to become both left and right wing).
So I would just add that, I agree in the sense that, our society needs to spend more time acclimatising kids to "how the world works", as by nature, humans are both competitive and cooperative. And we need to be educated to understand when and where each one is the dominant driver. So I do agree, it is right to tell people that they need to wise up about American universities. But I wouldn't blame kids for not knowing that already, if they haven't been taught.
That reminds me of cases in the Good Wife, except they wisely limited their law humour scripts to half retard, whereas what you describe goes full retard.
the dream is over, and the company is on the verge of decline, like it was in the end of the 80s.
Computers are becoming ever more ubiquitous, and Apple has laptops, desktops, tablets, watches, and a music service, cloud services, some presence in the living room, a bit of AI, and a long history of OS development, plus has a track record of approaching new form factors with a humanist perspective on design, and a presence in many shopping malls, with stores often very busy, and lots of money, for now.
Yes, everyone else can do a part or parts of that better, like, maybe I'd rather have a Lenovo P50, if I was an architect, or you must have a phablet, because your company is based on Google Docs, but for a lot of people, buying into a system is more like a marriage, you get what you can and stick with it, knowing it won't be the best at everything, because change is a pain and perfection a mirage.
Apple would have to screw up a lot of things at this point, to enter real decline. Doesn't mean you have to go anywhere near them with a bargepole, but saying they or their dream is over, is a bit silly. There isn't a heck of a lot new you can do with a laptop, and someone has to decide the balance of features, and they won't suit everyone.
Maybe in 10 years, when AI has gotten somewhere, we can ask if Apple is over.
"Just one more thing....'
Columbo plots so often centred on him learning about a new gadget and that it was in an odd state at the time. I think Columbo would do just fine today :)
I'm starting to feel like a horse veterinarian, if the horse is sick shoot it and get another.
I'm feeling a little bit sad. We're upgrading some machines but I know this is the last time we'll be upgrading anything.
Do you actually believe that more than 90% of climatologists have somehow been bribed to lie?
Just to take this in a different direction, it may not be lies. It may simply be that other sciences can get in a lab and test a thing to death, whereas you can't do that with "the planet". So there is an over-reliance on models, which are sort of predictions/scenarios but not really real (again, not tested to death), and like other areas of science where it is hard to get concrete data without lots of confounding factors, like nutrition, a wrong bunch of findings can hang on for a very long time. Like how they've said for decades that fat is very bad for you and gives you heart attacks and now they are starting to say, oh, wait, that's completely wrong.
And that's before we get to the politics. For once an issue becomes political, most reason goes out the window and it is all about winning power and obliterating the competition and doing deals and so on. Big oil has its counterparts in big wind, big solar, big gas, and big nuclear. We use so much energy that all of it is big business, whether it comes from renewables or not. 100m tall turbines aren't assembled by little old ladies in the village. It is all big bucks.
So if it is wrong, there's lots of reasons why very smart people could in consensus have been wrong for so long, and there's lots of political and money reasons why climate change policies would be backed just as much as the old oil industry would back the opposite. And I think everyone knows this, which is why climate change advocacy so often goes on about "the ever increasing weight of overwhelming evidence" and "ever growing consensus" and all that, which is mostly spin. Of course consensus can be wrong. If history teaches anything it is that expert consensus can often be entirely wrong, because reality and truth are hard.
Heh. I'll always remember Jerry Pournelle writing in Byte: "I'm not sure I want to share cycles even with myself" back when preemptive multi tasking was a strange new fangled thing in PCs.