I have an idea, why not require 8 digits (fingers not numbers) to be pressed in an unique sequence. Then it'll only be marginally (hugely) more annoying than typing a numeric code. Gah.
I guess this is the TimeMachine of passwords — only an improvement for those who never otherwise bother with it.
If I may add my 2 cents, one of the trickier parts of Buddha's message seems to be how to live with care, lightness, and compassion, whilst knowing it is all just dust blowing in the wind.
But don't gloss over some of those questions. Some of them have scientific answers which we all ignore. Some don't have answers at all yet. Is there scientific evidence that you have free will? If not, why do all our laws and social systems revolve around the assumption of free will? Does "matter self-organises" really answer the question of the meaning of life, which for ordinary people tends to be, what meaning shall I give my life? How should I approach suffering? Should we allow euthanasia for the ill?
I think it is safer to say many of these questions, whilst not "answered" by myth, are open to debate. We don't even know the relationship between consciousness and the body -- the brain may be the CPU, or the brain may be a receiver like a radio, we don't know, and Occam's razor doesn't help because there is just no easy answer to this one. Science can make huge contributions to our understanding of ourselves, but let's not gloss over how much is yet unknown.
I think by claiming too soon science has this stuff answered, we just give more ammo to the religious people who want to impose their brand of answers. The truth is, much of it is just not known.
Myths don't answer it. Science maybe one day will.:)
And we are supposed to forget about the talk that the arctic would be ice free, that children will not know what show is anymore, that shifting rain belts will ruin millions of farmers, that disappearing glaciers will threaten millions of people's water supply etc etc etc and all the vast number of connected effects which mean it is highly unjust of you to emit CO2 because it is killing or flooding or spreading more disease and famine to many poor people around the world... all these things have been suggested, and made topic for law making at the international level, and many have complained that we have failed to act on the precautionary principle, a failure which shows we are far too selfish and shortsighted and some even suggest we need a Chinese style control because democracy has become unsustainable and unjust, and in the end, all we can say is that well gee, the temperature has gone up. Fine, the temperature has gone up.
Look, the human body is a massively complex thing, but we can still say that calorines in > calories spent it = weight gain.
Funny, after 50 years people are starting to question that very equation, the calorie balance equation. Basically, it is technically true, no thermodynamic laws were harmed, but it ignores the real driver of weight gain: your hormones and how they react to certain types of food, and how they program your appetite and exercise and metabolism levels.
Consider, a child overeats to gain the extra energy needed, because he is growing. But he is not growing because he overeats. He grows because his body and control system, the hormones, are actively in grow mode and part of that is to raise his appetite for food. Simply eating more without that hormone control system will not make him grow.
Using the bad science around diet to support the bad science around global warming / climate change / climate disruption is a good mirror -- both are mistaken about the real processes which are the big driver in the system.
Thanks for the links. Yes working with business and with the world, is rational. It is good to know some people are doing this.:)
And for others who might disagree, yes there are some business practices which are downright evil. That's the pathology of big organisations. And the environmental movements, the NGOs, etc. also have some pretty bad practices (they are big organisations too). At some point you have to ask, is teaching the Third World to shun cheap electricity any better than the Church teaching people to not use contraception? Is modelling the world as like a petri dish with swarming bacteria, about to consume all resources, any more sophisticated a view than teaching people to believe they'll get 72 virgins/raisins after dying for their cause?
Or that the term "holism" was coined by Jan Smuts.
See, if everything has a natural holarchical order (wholes made of parts) then it became obvious that the European Colonials had to take their natural place at the top of the stack, in South Africa, and Apartheid became justified.
As an environmentalist (she worked as an environmentalist involved in carbon trading) explained to me, it doesn't matter if CO2 doesn't turn out to be a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production, and a reduction in consumption. Then she added with emphasis, "it's about reducing greed."
You just have to look at the "solutions" people are proposing to see their worldview and political outlook. If the science didn't support their worldview, they'd look for some other way to justify it. A worldview (and we all have one) is self-justifying, self-validating, it-looks-like-a-duck-because-i'm-obsessed-with-ducks.
Note the environmentalists who hold up signs saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed science" (UK's anti-airport groups) but they don't hold up those signs when they protest against GM. Their worldview comes first. Gee there's no evidence that GM is bad? Well we'll protest against it anyway because we know better.
Unfortunately they seem to have a worldview which operates at a lower level of complexity (huuumans baaaad) and so the money-wheelers-and-dealers and corporate types who actually have to work and excel and network and create results (even if only made up results) run rings around the environmentalists, not by defeating their aims, but by exploiting them. Oh carbon trading, what a great made-up-money paper thing, fantastic. Oh windfarms, great let's soak up all that subsidy for our big landowners, etc. "Every wind farm is a gas plant" they say at their corporate conferences. Many activist environmentalists are too stupid and lacking in skills to find good answers to environmental problems (and to be fair they are very hard problems), and instead have this "new-age" culture of oh how lovely if we all went back to pre-industrial levels where we can all live in a small village and sing songs around the fire. Which kinda ignores that in pre-industrial times, you needed many to be in slavery just to provide the "cheap energy" -- today, oil and gas is our "slave power", which is why we can live daily, as if with the energy of hundreds of slaves at our disposal.
So excuse the wild rant, but that's just to illustrate (not prove) a point, that you can put the science aside and say, ok, what if we're facing AGW, what's the solution? And then the "solution" will be a function of people's worldview. Many answers are from pre-modern world views, maybe new-romantic, maybe Marxist, and especially from people who can't count. Oh if we all made a small change... yeah it would all add up to a SMALL change. Try living without electricity, see if you can handle that change.
The rest are power and money drives. Real solutions are basically coming just from the gradual improvements in technology and systems, improvements which have been going on for hundreds of years anyway.
I honestly think they should go live in Third World countries for at least 10 years, and see what the majority of the world is like, and what problems they are facing. Live like the locals do, not just drive around in your SUV lecturing people on how they should live. Heck even my grandmother never had a fridge. I mean the arrogance is astounding, if not, you know, also kinda cute for its naivety.
Anyway this is just a rant, nothing real to see here, move on. Have a nice day.
Speaking as someone who studied architecture (bricks, not computers) I see similarities. The first rule of design was that you only learn the real problem by trying to solve it. Then when you realise why your first attempts are so horribly broken, you can use that understanding of the problem to actually start a design that works. But it is as much top down as it is bottom up, so you need both a clear simple overall architecture, but without it compromising the space to work out the details properly. So it is very iterative, some important details and constraints may break your elegant framework. The iteration usually stops not when it is finished but when you run out of time.
The notion of "site" is also very important, as every site is different and so every building is effectively a prototype, a design of one. This affects all sorts of subtleties in the project, so abstraction is nice for trying to think more quickly and simply, abstraction doesn't in itself solve anything, because the devil is always in the details. The details can't be hidden by abstraction, but they can be organised by abstraction.
Oh don't start me on the trains. I used to moan in disgust at the cost of train fares, only to add shock to insult when I heard the price would be double without subsidy. Private my arse.
Savings can be made (I haven't flown anywhere in ten years, live in a small house, never owned a car, have no kids, wear thick jumpers and fleeces around the house in winter, shower about once a fortnight, etc.)
You know what? These savings add up to a tiny amount (except the lack of kids). The fact is I live in an industrialised country with a huge infrastructure, and I use every day the equivalent of tens or hundreds of slaves' worth of energy.
Efficiency is great and good, but it is a technology problem, as that's where the big gains can be made. Even something as simple as cotton used to be a luxury material only the very rich could afford. That didn't come about by poor people conserving their use of wool shirts.
A simpler question, if the brain is 100% responsible for all our actions, perceiving and responding to the environment, then why are we sentient? The brain can process the information that it is being chased by a bear, and process that moving the limbs to run and climb a tree is a strategy for survival. What advantage does experiencing any of this situation give? What's the point of sentience? Sentience is 100% redundant. Yet we are sentient. I have no idea why that is.
It is about numbers. You can read books by Muslim women talking about what they see as dominant trends in their culture, in places like Egypt, Gaza, and where Islamic culture spreads to Europe and America. It isn't as simple as "extremists are a tiny minority". I also see it personally with friends who come from Muslim families -- despite being born in the West, they cannot extricate themselves from the old culture without being completely ostracised from their family. Many would rather conform than leave. And to do it they'll live a double life. Anyway like I say, read what Moslem women like Nonie Darwish, Ghazal Omid, Qanta Ahmed.
A sample from Darwish: "We often hear that “moderate” Muslims are the majority and that terrorist supporters are a minority fringe group. However, when genuine Islamic moderate leaders stand firm against terrorism, we do not see majority Muslim support for their views. To the contrary, such “moderates” shout the speakers down, condemn, and threaten them."
Anyway this is a separate point to racial profiling by security services.
And also, most of our energy is used in the base metabolic rate. The body can adjust that a little here, a little there.
Another little point, children overeat because they are growing. But they don't grow because they overeat. It is the body's control systems which regulate what the body is doing and thus, how much to eat.
Sugar / carbs, being available in unnatural quantities, flummox this system. It puts the body into a mode where its aim becomes to store fat, and it'll get the energy to store fat even by destroying muscle if it has to. Lab rats which died of heart failure because they were being underfed, starved, and they burned up their muscle tissue, whilst keeping their fat tissue -- they died obese and starved. (see Taubes for the ref.)
But instead of recognising the conventional energy-balance model has failed, "common sense" blames it on "lack of will power". (Thermodynamics as a law hasn't failed, it is still true for bodies, but they reasoning that fat loss is just about calorie counting and exercise has failed.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have an idea, why not require 8 digits (fingers not numbers) to be pressed in an unique sequence. Then it'll only be marginally (hugely) more annoying than typing a numeric code. Gah.
I guess this is the TimeMachine of passwords — only an improvement for those who never otherwise bother with it.
Ah Grasshopper, you have perfected the subtle art of typing out an eight digit passcode, but only making contact on the screen with four.
We are gradually running out of professions which enjoy unquestioning blind respect from the public.
Always good to hear from people who were there.
"Good" as in, oh... my.... god....
If I may add my 2 cents, one of the trickier parts of Buddha's message seems to be how to live with care, lightness, and compassion, whilst knowing it is all just dust blowing in the wind.
Reason trumps faith and belief, yes, absolutely.
But don't gloss over some of those questions. Some of them have scientific answers which we all ignore. Some don't have answers at all yet. Is there scientific evidence that you have free will? If not, why do all our laws and social systems revolve around the assumption of free will? Does "matter self-organises" really answer the question of the meaning of life, which for ordinary people tends to be, what meaning shall I give my life? How should I approach suffering? Should we allow euthanasia for the ill?
I think it is safer to say many of these questions, whilst not "answered" by myth, are open to debate. We don't even know the relationship between consciousness and the body -- the brain may be the CPU, or the brain may be a receiver like a radio, we don't know, and Occam's razor doesn't help because there is just no easy answer to this one. Science can make huge contributions to our understanding of ourselves, but let's not gloss over how much is yet unknown.
I think by claiming too soon science has this stuff answered, we just give more ammo to the religious people who want to impose their brand of answers. The truth is, much of it is just not known.
Myths don't answer it. Science maybe one day will. :)
Isn't philosophical arguments what people do until they have a chance to test it by experiment?
I can think of all sorts of arguments for sentience after physical body death. One day I may find out.
And we are supposed to forget about the talk that the arctic would be ice free, that children will not know what show is anymore, that shifting rain belts will ruin millions of farmers, that disappearing glaciers will threaten millions of people's water supply etc etc etc and all the vast number of connected effects which mean it is highly unjust of you to emit CO2 because it is killing or flooding or spreading more disease and famine to many poor people around the world... all these things have been suggested, and made topic for law making at the international level, and many have complained that we have failed to act on the precautionary principle, a failure which shows we are far too selfish and shortsighted and some even suggest we need a Chinese style control because democracy has become unsustainable and unjust, and in the end, all we can say is that well gee, the temperature has gone up. Fine, the temperature has gone up.
Ah the missing heat lurking in the deep unmeasured ocean.
The was the little ice age. Of course when we'll go into another is anybody's guess.
Ocean acidification.
Look, the human body is a massively complex thing, but we can still say that calorines in > calories spent it = weight gain.
Funny, after 50 years people are starting to question that very equation, the calorie balance equation. Basically, it is technically true, no thermodynamic laws were harmed, but it ignores the real driver of weight gain: your hormones and how they react to certain types of food, and how they program your appetite and exercise and metabolism levels.
Consider, a child overeats to gain the extra energy needed, because he is growing. But he is not growing because he overeats. He grows because his body and control system, the hormones, are actively in grow mode and part of that is to raise his appetite for food. Simply eating more without that hormone control system will not make him grow.
Using the bad science around diet to support the bad science around global warming / climate change / climate disruption is a good mirror -- both are mistaken about the real processes which are the big driver in the system.
Thanks for the links. Yes working with business and with the world, is rational. It is good to know some people are doing this. :)
And for others who might disagree, yes there are some business practices which are downright evil. That's the pathology of big organisations. And the environmental movements, the NGOs, etc. also have some pretty bad practices (they are big organisations too). At some point you have to ask, is teaching the Third World to shun cheap electricity any better than the Church teaching people to not use contraception? Is modelling the world as like a petri dish with swarming bacteria, about to consume all resources, any more sophisticated a view than teaching people to believe they'll get 72 virgins/raisins after dying for their cause?
Or that the term "holism" was coined by Jan Smuts.
See, if everything has a natural holarchical order (wholes made of parts) then it became obvious that the European Colonials had to take their natural place at the top of the stack, in South Africa, and Apartheid became justified.
The failure of global warming proved climate change, and the failure of climate change proves climate disruption.
It is always worse than we thought.
As an environmentalist (she worked as an environmentalist involved in carbon trading) explained to me, it doesn't matter if CO2 doesn't turn out to be a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production, and a reduction in consumption. Then she added with emphasis, "it's about reducing greed."
You just have to look at the "solutions" people are proposing to see their worldview and political outlook. If the science didn't support their worldview, they'd look for some other way to justify it. A worldview (and we all have one) is self-justifying, self-validating, it-looks-like-a-duck-because-i'm-obsessed-with-ducks.
Note the environmentalists who hold up signs saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed science" (UK's anti-airport groups) but they don't hold up those signs when they protest against GM. Their worldview comes first. Gee there's no evidence that GM is bad? Well we'll protest against it anyway because we know better.
Unfortunately they seem to have a worldview which operates at a lower level of complexity (huuumans baaaad) and so the money-wheelers-and-dealers and corporate types who actually have to work and excel and network and create results (even if only made up results) run rings around the environmentalists, not by defeating their aims, but by exploiting them. Oh carbon trading, what a great made-up-money paper thing, fantastic. Oh windfarms, great let's soak up all that subsidy for our big landowners, etc. "Every wind farm is a gas plant" they say at their corporate conferences. Many activist environmentalists are too stupid and lacking in skills to find good answers to environmental problems (and to be fair they are very hard problems), and instead have this "new-age" culture of oh how lovely if we all went back to pre-industrial levels where we can all live in a small village and sing songs around the fire. Which kinda ignores that in pre-industrial times, you needed many to be in slavery just to provide the "cheap energy" -- today, oil and gas is our "slave power", which is why we can live daily, as if with the energy of hundreds of slaves at our disposal.
So excuse the wild rant, but that's just to illustrate (not prove) a point, that you can put the science aside and say, ok, what if we're facing AGW, what's the solution? And then the "solution" will be a function of people's worldview. Many answers are from pre-modern world views, maybe new-romantic, maybe Marxist, and especially from people who can't count. Oh if we all made a small change... yeah it would all add up to a SMALL change. Try living without electricity, see if you can handle that change.
The rest are power and money drives. Real solutions are basically coming just from the gradual improvements in technology and systems, improvements which have been going on for hundreds of years anyway.
I honestly think they should go live in Third World countries for at least 10 years, and see what the majority of the world is like, and what problems they are facing. Live like the locals do, not just drive around in your SUV lecturing people on how they should live. Heck even my grandmother never had a fridge. I mean the arrogance is astounding, if not, you know, also kinda cute for its naivety.
Anyway this is just a rant, nothing real to see here, move on. Have a nice day.
But... We love death more than you love ... sitting in a comfy chair munching popcorn playing with million dollar toys... oh wait.
Speaking as someone who studied architecture (bricks, not computers) I see similarities. The first rule of design was that you only learn the real problem by trying to solve it. Then when you realise why your first attempts are so horribly broken, you can use that understanding of the problem to actually start a design that works. But it is as much top down as it is bottom up, so you need both a clear simple overall architecture, but without it compromising the space to work out the details properly. So it is very iterative, some important details and constraints may break your elegant framework. The iteration usually stops not when it is finished but when you run out of time.
The notion of "site" is also very important, as every site is different and so every building is effectively a prototype, a design of one. This affects all sorts of subtleties in the project, so abstraction is nice for trying to think more quickly and simply, abstraction doesn't in itself solve anything, because the devil is always in the details. The details can't be hidden by abstraction, but they can be organised by abstraction.
I'm sure the Chinese and Prince Philip feel practically the same family.
Oh don't start me on the trains. I used to moan in disgust at the cost of train fares, only to add shock to insult when I heard the price would be double without subsidy. Private my arse.
I have fun watching http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk, especially how the gas dial jumps up and down trying to follow the wind.
Savings can be made (I haven't flown anywhere in ten years, live in a small house, never owned a car, have no kids, wear thick jumpers and fleeces around the house in winter, shower about once a fortnight, etc.)
You know what? These savings add up to a tiny amount (except the lack of kids). The fact is I live in an industrialised country with a huge infrastructure, and I use every day the equivalent of tens or hundreds of slaves' worth of energy.
Efficiency is great and good, but it is a technology problem, as that's where the big gains can be made. Even something as simple as cotton used to be a luxury material only the very rich could afford. That didn't come about by poor people conserving their use of wool shirts.
A simpler question, if the brain is 100% responsible for all our actions, perceiving and responding to the environment, then why are we sentient? The brain can process the information that it is being chased by a bear, and process that moving the limbs to run and climb a tree is a strategy for survival. What advantage does experiencing any of this situation give? What's the point of sentience? Sentience is 100% redundant. Yet we are sentient. I have no idea why that is.
It is about numbers. You can read books by Muslim women talking about what they see as dominant trends in their culture, in places like Egypt, Gaza, and where Islamic culture spreads to Europe and America. It isn't as simple as "extremists are a tiny minority". I also see it personally with friends who come from Muslim families -- despite being born in the West, they cannot extricate themselves from the old culture without being completely ostracised from their family. Many would rather conform than leave. And to do it they'll live a double life. Anyway like I say, read what Moslem women like Nonie Darwish, Ghazal Omid, Qanta Ahmed.
A sample from Darwish: "We often hear that “moderate” Muslims are the majority and that terrorist supporters are a minority fringe group. However, when genuine Islamic moderate leaders stand firm against terrorism, we do not see majority Muslim support for their views. To the contrary, such “moderates” shout the speakers down, condemn, and threaten them."
Anyway this is a separate point to racial profiling by security services.
Heh, I for one lost the bit of excess weight I had put on after 40. My weight reduced 12 per cent and I am back to the lean 20 year old I was.
And also, most of our energy is used in the base metabolic rate. The body can adjust that a little here, a little there.
Another little point, children overeat because they are growing. But they don't grow because they overeat. It is the body's control systems which regulate what the body is doing and thus, how much to eat.
Sugar / carbs, being available in unnatural quantities, flummox this system. It puts the body into a mode where its aim becomes to store fat, and it'll get the energy to store fat even by destroying muscle if it has to. Lab rats which died of heart failure because they were being underfed, starved, and they burned up their muscle tissue, whilst keeping their fat tissue -- they died obese and starved. (see Taubes for the ref.)
But instead of recognising the conventional energy-balance model has failed, "common sense" blames it on "lack of will power".
(Thermodynamics as a law hasn't failed, it is still true for bodies, but they reasoning that fat loss is just about calorie counting and exercise has failed.)