Yes it is called architecture and design. It says, these products are clean, modern, convenient. And the main point about the layout is that each table invites you to go over and look at stuff and play with stuff. That's why there's so much space. That's why Regent Street has a wide open space when you enter -- it is a breath of air from the busy street.
Honestly, it is like geeks find design and aesthetics to be an affront to their sensibilities or something. And yet, do people sneer at beautifully designed sports cars? Beautiful women?
The key is this: yes you can make the store temple like, advertise humanistic values, a clean aesthetic. That's to get you to come in. But if what's on the tables is shit and non functional, people WILL leave. Great packaging can't make up for crappy functionality. People leave in a heartbeat.
"Cool" as a word doesn't explain much. If coolness was something trivial then most other manufacturers could just add cool to their product.
I could call Dyson vacuums "cool" and claim they only sell because of being marketed as "cool" with the "cool" funky coloured plastic designs.
If you can't explain why any other manufacturer can't just add coolness, or why they don't understand that coolness sells, then maybe neither you or them understand what this stuff actually is that you're simply labelling as "cool."
Sorta like if I pointed to a Boeing 747 and said, "nothing special about that, it is just the spirits that favour it and the spirits lift it and make it fly."
Yes, largely agree, I think you've got that pretty much right.
Take Hans Rosling's Gapminder demonstration; all nations (except the war torn ones) are gradually rising and the the whole trend is upwards. Then consider Howard Bloom's Genius of the Beast, which charts out significant new technologies that made once luxury items, like cotton clothes, now affordable even to the world's poorest people. I'm not smart about this stuff, but it does seem like it just comes down to technology. If someone invented a cheap pill to cure cancer, that would remove a huge material burden from our system, and free us even more.
We seem to argue a lot over how to redistribute stuff fairly, and not so much time imagining how we could create the next technical revolutions. We seem to be having a bit of a crisis of confidence as oil appears to run out and population grows, and people are sorta advocating "use less." Well we may be forced to do that. Or we may use these 7 billion brains, which are gradually all gaining better access to education, to invent a new wave of stuff that solves a lot of problems.
When my parents grew up in Scotland, you could't afford the dentist, so the smart thing to do was to get all your teeth removed and have false ones put in as soon as possible -- it was cheaper that way! To me this sounds horrific, but just a generation ago that was normal.
I just wish there was more objectivity and open-mindedness around new technology, instead of the ideologically driven marketing of wind turbines that don't produce much, and short term tech buzzes of some new variation on messaging. We really need to be applying our brains to survival-enhancement, stuff that will save your life, stuff that will make life easier, the kind of thinking great people like Buckmister Fuller were doing.
PS. Many argue that material things are not the answer (it just means raping Nature more) but better tech is also lighter tech. It is getting light at night from burning gas, rather than chopping down trees. Gas is better in most ways. Of course, then more people can use more... but you have to invent the next wave of stuff to again lighten the footprint. But for the people who advocate spirituality in general, and this includes most of the green movement, which they do because they advocate social change, by changing people's values (a subject traditionally the domain of religion -- how you should live, what is good and what is bad) people need to realise that we have always had a spiritual aspect to life (people sit on a rock and wonder what it is all about) and they've been asking for 20,000 years and they're not about to stop asking now. So let's just separate the moralising from the technology. Please, I wish the environmentalists would just feel free to lecture people on ethics as a subject in its own right, and leave technology to the domain of people who know technology. It is not evil if someone questions wind power output. It doesn't mean they are Gaia-rapers. Technology doesn't have morality, that's the point, it is merely about technique. If you want to change people's morality, teach them to think about ethical principles. Don't tie it to science and technology. I say this because I fear that the mixing of the two is doing neither any good.
How did aliens travel across countless light years of space to reach our planet in a craft that was just 50' in diameter? Presumably a couple generations of the crew would have grown old and died on the voyage. That's a pretty small space to raise a family in.
Is it so hard to imagine their Nimitz is in space and the disks are just the F-16s ?
I see Nature like a big photocopier. It doesn't just create one animal, it creates a multitude of them. Likewise for mountains, rivers, planets, stars. We used to think the sun was it. Then we realised all the other points were stars. Then we thought planets are rare. But as soon as we were able to just about detect them, we see lots of them. Then we thought maybe they aren't distributed in size and distance like in our system. But as our instruments got better we were able to detect similar distributions. So what's next? Detecting similar atmospheres -- nearly there. Then what? The core question is whether Earth is special. If Earth is just average, not too early, not too late, not too smart, not too dumb, then intelligent bipeds are out there, probably very similar. We are probably tracing their evolutionary footsteps, as a culture. Maybe they even gave us some religion, in a dumbed form that could be useful 5000 years ago to stop continual tribal slaughters. Who know what their rules are for interference. I'd guess it is: don't interfere; observe if you like; let them slug it out on their own. Perhaps though they have other rules. Maybe we have more potential but are still a bit too dumb and are trashing our planet (not global warming, that's dumb, I mean mercury in the oceans, and other pernicious chemical pollutants that sadly everyone has forgotten about in the AGW hype and big 'alternative' energy business.) So maybe they'll turn up and give us some extra time to sort out our shit. Yes space is unimaginably big -- maybe they are long lived (like 500 years), or maybe they send self assembling packages, or maybe they bend space. Maybe they reincarnate or download into their own descended bodies. Who knows that's possible. It would be dumb to believe they can't do stuff we can't imagine. Most people alive today on the planet can't imagine how electricity works. We've been around for maybe 200,000 years as tribes, and 10,000 as agriculturalists, and 5000 as empires, and 200 years as scientists, and what if they are just another 10,000 years ahead of us? That's 10,000 years as scientists versus our 200, and see what we've already done in just those 200 years. Of course, blind bad luck may have it that we've popped up in a deserted part of the galaxy. So that's why one can't just bet on it. But people do see stuff, and it only takes one in a thousand to be a real report, be it foo fighters, or some lady who stood with a group of people on a sunny day back in the 30s watching a metallic craft hovering and moving silently to and fro. If they arrived in our lifetime that would be very cool. Try not to run around in a panic, eh?
There are a number of "greens" who think that human progress just has to slow down. Cheap energy would only mean more people and more consumption, in their view. I know because I've met them and talked to them. It is the view that the Earth is just overpopulated by about 6 billion. "Sustainability" means a massive reduction in our numbers, so that what little can be generated from wind and solar is all we need. It isn't an entirely evil or crazy idea, but it does ignore entirely any question of what drives human development. If we reduce our numbers but reduce our technology as well, then our culture will revert back to earlier epoch's where we were simply more aggressive and more brutal as humans. Avatar tried to make it all look very romantic, but note that even there, the tribes were very small, they lived very far apart from each other, and they were all warriors. What happens when two tribes start competing for the same land? Carnage. So, our vast numbers are forcing us to learn to live together in closer proximity, it is forcing us to learn to cooperate more. So it isn't as easy as just doing a back of the envelope calculation about how many mouths we think the Earth can feed, or how many TVs people will buy. Of course not all greens think this way, there is a spectrum of views. But the zero population growth resource limits stuff is pretty influential.
So you've never met a sceptic who contends, "nobody understands the climate to make these sorts of predictions or scenarios or whatever you want to call them" ??
As one scientist put it, "the people may not know the science but they know when they are being lied to."
We all have to rely on experts at some point or other in life. Going to the doctor, calling the plumber, asking the mechanic. We start by assuming they are honest and competent. But we lookout for telltale signs. We always try to lookout for telltale signs. You can generally spot when someone is lying. Their stories become inconsistent, which is interestingly the same thing you notice about sceptics. But the thing is, you have left out the sceptics who say, "the answer to climate is not known". If you claim to have spent time listening to sceptics, why not mention these? So, have I have caught you lying?
Well actually, it would seem the overall message and the science will have changed rather significantly if this study proves close to the mark.
Sadly it should be no surprise that the science may have advanced as new discoveries were made. The surprise was always that the earlier publicity claimed it was all "settled", "irrefutable", "incontrovertible". The surprise was that the Chairman of the IPCC was publicly likening scientists who disagreed to "flat earthers". THAT was the surprise. And it is all documented in videos and quotes. Plus, rather than investigate the 2035 Himalayan glaciers error, he simply denounced the Indian scientists as "vodoo". Again, very surprising for a rational scientific body.
The question is, on what is the usual refutation of your point based?
You know, the one that goes like this: something other than CO2 started the temperature rise, but then, after 800-1000 years, the temperature rise caused a rise in CO2, and from that point on, for the next 4000 years or so, the CO2 caused all the further warming, until, again, something which we don't know, caused it all to drop. Therefore, it is all consistent with CO2 as driver, for as you can see, in those 4000 years (whilst temperatures were rising after CO2 had also started rising), the CO2 caused a great deal of warming.
IIRC that's the basic refutation. See how that makes sense to you.
The trouble is, many many things have changed. There's more to life than carbon. Just the food we eat is one huge change -- how many modern diseases are a direct result of massive gain based food production? What is all that grain production doing to the ecosystem? Life as it is today bears little resemblance to it was 200 years ago, and then again to 1000 years ago, and that to 20,000 years ago. And that's just food. What about everything else? No, the point isn't that something changed. The point is, can anybody demonstrate that that change means a lot compared to everything else? Life is inherently risky and our job is to identify the biggest urgent risks. You can only afford "prudence" if you don't get silly and squander all your prudence attention on something that doesn't turn out to be a problem. If more people will die in cold conditions than warm conditions, then what are you achieving? There is only so much we can do, so we have to be careful what we choose to tackle.
Bias is inherent in everyone, this engine included. Who decides what fits a category? It is up to individuals to interpret the bias. Who decides whether something should appear in/terrorist or/freedomfighter ?
In life one has to choose what to believe in, what to value most, what is it that is the true guide?
At some point, some people choose Science. The way our minds work, we don't have much room for more than one Absolute at a time... otherwise it isn't an Absolute if there's more then a few... Science... Art... Morals... Religion... Sex... whatever. Something gets placed at the top.
The funny thing is that people will spend about 10 or 20 years putting one thing as the absolute top and then later, through life experience, change their minds, and put something else at the top. Then they put being Relative at the top... for a while... then another 20 years and it changes again.
What I'm saying is, yes, I agree with you... people are imagining that Science is the best most rational objective guide to truth... and they are partially correct. But they forget the "partially" and so they have to denounce anyone who might suggest that in practice, science is practiced by people with human motivations just like the rest of us, and that just because there are institutions and methods doesn't mean that those institutions and methods can't become corrupted to varying degrees from time to time, or just make mistakes which take a long time to correct, if they're even noticed.
I mean, we used to believe the police were the force for good and eventually we came to see things like "institutionalised racism" as real. But wait... how can there be bad cops? Surely the majority of good cops would catch them right away? Well... not if there's too many of them and they are covering each other's backs. Or if denouncing the few bad ones would bring the force into disrepute and lead to social problems because people lose faith in the police. So... "better" to hide the bad ones. That's why it is "institutionalised racism".
Many fields and activities have great value, even I daresay, politicians who have to expend great intelligence in trying to hold the nation together whilst trying to get something done, when competing groups would happily kill each other. I have to entertain the idea that some politicians are actually great people. Some scientists are great people. Some doctors are great people. Some soldiers are great. Some philosophers are great. Some religious people are great. The list goes on. And any of them could be wrong on any number of subjects.
Whether one believes in AGW or not, there is nothing wrong with your statement.
I'd add that efforts to polarise opinions between two extremes are really not helping open information exchange.
As you say, what is the quality of the evidence? Thousands of papers inferring from weak evidence are not in the same league as a few really solid physical measurements.
People have to publish. If the things being studied are hard, poorly understood, difficult to measure (because we weren't around measuring 100, 1000, 1 million years ago), and very complex, then people will still publish (and what data doesn't exist directly, they can infer from "reasonable assumptions"). If people can promote the importance of the field, then they get to keep publishing. Sooner or later the field may need correcting, but that can take decades.
Exactly. Plus, "nice" doesn't just mean pretty. Those who don't get this, consider a girlfriend. She can be pretty, but a total bitch. She can treat you like a doormat and make you feel terrible. She could be neurotic and make your life hell. But still, she could be "pretty".
In classical architecture, they talk about "commodity, firmness, and delight". You kinda need all three for any of them to be worth it. That's why Apple can seemingly make compromises but end up with a more popular product.
I know people (educated, expert, professional people) to whom you point out and name all the different ports on the side of their laptop, and they are confused. I think the confusion is actually, "I'm a respected professional in my field, and I earn loads of money, I'm qualified, I'm published, I'm intelligent -- so why am I wasting my time with all these different computer ports?"
Using the girlfriend analogy, she cooks you a nice dinner and she makes the effort to have a nice conversation with you over dinner. She is "nice". She can be good looking too. But she doesn't throw your dinner in the bin the moment you happen to make a remark that she misconstrues as being a subtle insult. That would be neurotic.
Neurotic can be exciting and wild, and have all sorts of interesting surprises, but in a long term relationship (which is what you enter into with a computer gadget that you are trusting all your information and media to) you want nice, mature, attractive, balanced, good hearted stuff.
Re:Babylon 5 / Firefly / Star Blazers
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
"Still, I too enjoyed the show in my youth..."
Yes, I saw an episode the other day, and realised how much it was for kids.
"Whoa... we're going off course.. it is like there's some huge gravitational force nearby!!!"
"Yes, that's Jupiter..."
Er, great guys, you're piloting a space ship out of the solar system and you didn't know Jupiter was there.... um...
Re:Babylon 5 / Firefly / Star Blazers
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
"The Star Force got the Cosmo DNA and got back to Earth, The Alliance accidentally created the Reavers by trying to make paradise, and Sheridan kicked some Shadow ass (and paid the ultimate price, twice!)."
Thank you!!! I caught some Star Blazers (in Italian!) when I was a kid but never got to see the ending! I loved that show! I still sing the theme in the shower! Thank you again!!
And yes, B5 knew where it was going, and could keep aiming for that even when they thought it was being cut down to 4 seasons (which was a pity because it made season 5 a bit awkward when it was OK'd).
Likewise Firefly -- there is a secret, we are hooked on the secret, secret is revealed, and it is a real tear jerker / food for thought / both!
It kills brain cells to watch stuff that makes no rational sense as a story -- I mean they can invent magic if they like, or have gods and angels, but it has to still hold as a rational narrative that makes sense. I eventually gave up on X files, then soon gave up on Lost, and almost immediately quit Flash Forward. The more they do this shit, the quicker I learn my lesson and leave.
If I watch a detective drama, I want some chance at figuring out the ending. And if I don't then the clues should all have been there in retrospect. I don't want, wow! Aliens smoking crack killed the wife and made it look like the butler did it using their alien technology -- wow I never saw that coming -- yeah, I never saw it coming because it makes no fucking sense!
Would it be better to find new and amazing ways to create energy from resources now, or would it be better for humanity to first learn to live within our means as oil runs out?
Humans have shown over and over that in large groups we use all the resources available, don't slow or restrain ourselves in time to save ourselves, and unless there are consistent, strict rules and provisioning in place, we exhaust available resources.
I think it would be better for the long term survival of the species if we ran out of cheap, easy energy sources for several generations, and we designed new culture based on long term sustainability instead of constant growth. If discover or invent an even cheaper, easier way to get energy out of water now, we'll have another "industrial revolution" type of growth, and come to an even worse dead-end when that runs out too.
I also think it would be better if children skipped ages 1 to 12 and started life as 13 year olds. No even better, as 21 years olds.
Whilst it would be nice to imagine a new culture which transcends material growth, our development thus far has come along side material growth. The material side is related to the cultural side. It is no accident that the most underdeveloped cultures (female genital mutilation, widespread corruption as a daily fact of life, religious intolerance, deep racism and sexism) are all places that are materially poor. Like, green grass is a luxury. Clean water is a luxury.
So when you champion "living within our means", you're talking about your current cushy oil based lifestyle. If you took that away, how do you know that the next generation won't develop a harder culture? In history, men and women segregated because life was dangerous and the men were sent to do the most dangerous jobs. In South Africa, Apartheid started because the white poor miners were on the verge of losing their jobs to even poorer native Africans. In Zambia, my own mum couldn't get a driving license because the "driving test" was dinner with the examiner. In Pakistan, life is still essentially feudal today, with forced arranged marriages and family members being disowned for not following the strict traditional rules. I mean, there's places where it is not so bad, and some are more progressive, but my point is, it is easy to forget how tenuous is our hold on rational liberal secular humanistic culture.
it is not that those other cultures are "bad", they are just the best that ordinary humans can manage when the living conditions are harder.
The way to sustainability is better technology that can do more. Anything else is stagnation and eventual devolution to death.
If we fail to invent that new technology, we will fail to progress culturally beyond nation states and dogma.
There is a line in Pygmalion where the well-to-do gentleman asks the thief, "have you no morals man??"
And the thief replies, unashamed, "can't afford them."
I am by no means convinced yet that the iPad is the better choice for my particular line of work, but it sure hit the ground running.
Yes it very much depends on what work people do. If "real work" is architectural CAD and 3D then a netbook is not going to cut it. If real work requires running 4 OSs in emulators then a netbook can't. If real work requires being on the company's private secure LAN then again, no handy coffee shop netbook for you. If real work is still mostly the stack of confidential papers and files at your desk and in the office stores, then again, you can't do real work out in the field.
But for many people, access to web and email are pretty basic things now, and they ask themselves whether an iPad would do those things better and in a more touchy feely usable way than a netbook.
For me, sacrificing a mechanical keyboard for more screen space in a slim form factor is a good compromise. Other do disagree. So I'll be a customer and they won't.
Indeed. Apple seems to be aiming at non-computer people. People who aren't interested in computers for their own sake -- "gee I can install flash blockers" -- nope, not those people.
Apple were quite careful to say the iPhone is not a computer.
Maybe similar, they are being careful to say that the iPad is not a netbook.
Ordinary people don't build their own houses, but they might redecorate, or they might pay someone to redecorate. That's maybe sorta the level of control that ordinary people want over their gadgets -- they might cook, but not have to live on a farm -- there's a balance of convenience -- people depend on gadgets now and they are very useful, but please make them as hassle free as possible.
It is quite a hard problem, and Apple haven't necessarily got the best answers. But they recognise the problem and are willing to make it their business.
What I experience subjectively as a mind, has an objective correlate in the physical brain. It is "correlated" somewhat loosely for now -- depression and certain chemicals appear together -- but sometimes you can cure depression by doing something mental, like changing beliefs, and sometimes by doing something physical, like changing diet, or maybe sometimes it is a bit of both.
It can be tempting to say that everything is physical, but that leaves a problem. If everything is just matter, just physical, then where is the subjectively experienced "picture" of the world that I'm experiencing? Where is the "inner movie" or the "man in the movie theatre"? If you cut open a living brain, you don't see the picture the person sees. So where is that located? Someone experiences a picture. Even in purely digital SLRs, there is nobody in the camera experiencing the image. The camera doesn't experience anything, it isn't a conscious being.
Yet, being a conscious being, as abstract and etherial as that sounds, being a pure consciousness, can't exist as far as we know without a physical body to be its "correlate".
It seems that both mind and matter arise as two aspects of the same thing, like two sides of a coin.
With that model, the key is that NDEs are "near" death, not actual death. So they never were heaven after incineration of physical body. Actually, as mind and matter are two sides of the coin, then for there to be anything after biological death, then there must continue to exist some form of physical energy afterwards. We don't have the instruments that can measure those "subtle" energies. Imagine if one day we discovered we could measure them, and that "something" was floating or being radiated away after death. Imagine you could detect "something" being beamed to another birth happening somewhere else. I'm not saying that's going to happen, I'm saying that is what it would take to "demonstrate" that one life was somehow linked energetically to another life by reincarnation, if such a thing really exists.
If there really is some kind of higher mind, then there would need to be some kind of energy to be the physical basis for it. Maybe in 1000 years we could detect that kind of stuff. Or maybe it just doesn't exist.
Re:Don't Support Closed Systems...
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Apple iPad Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It is a fair point but it also applies to closed software where you don't get the source. It applies to any product that was created for a market where the purchaser simply wanted a ready made thing that just does certain things. Most people don't design their own house, design their own plumbing, grow their own food, prescribe their own medicines, build their own cars, and so on. Most people don't even bake their own bread. We have people and companies that specialise in these things, and because we delegate the work to them, they have more control over it than we do. We get to choose to some extent whether to buy it, but on the whole, if you want open computer systems, you'll need to explain to people why it is more advantageous and worth their time, to learn to use them. The app store basically removes most of the sys admin tasks that a person might have to otherwise do. People drive down the motorway, discover they're almost out of petrol, and in two minutes, tap tap they've found and installed and run an iPhone app that'll tell them where to find petrol. It is closed, but it fucking works.
Most of the greenhouse gasses are water vapour, and you know, those giant oceans, and cloud systems. If there was some way that water vapour was actually a self-regulating mechanism for the planet, and some real true to life in the field scientists do wonder about this, then rising CO2 would not be a problem. It is still up to the AGW people to show there is a problem. Just like with everything else in life.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is called architecture and design. It says, these products are clean, modern, convenient. And the main point about the layout is that each table invites you to go over and look at stuff and play with stuff. That's why there's so much space. That's why Regent Street has a wide open space when you enter -- it is a breath of air from the busy street.
Honestly, it is like geeks find design and aesthetics to be an affront to their sensibilities or something. And yet, do people sneer at beautifully designed sports cars? Beautiful women?
The key is this: yes you can make the store temple like, advertise humanistic values, a clean aesthetic. That's to get you to come in. But if what's on the tables is shit and non functional, people WILL leave. Great packaging can't make up for crappy functionality. People leave in a heartbeat.
"Cool" as a word doesn't explain much. If coolness was something trivial then most other manufacturers could just add cool to their product.
I could call Dyson vacuums "cool" and claim they only sell because of being marketed as "cool" with the "cool" funky coloured plastic designs.
If you can't explain why any other manufacturer can't just add coolness, or why they don't understand that coolness sells, then maybe neither you or them understand what this stuff actually is that you're simply labelling as "cool."
Sorta like if I pointed to a Boeing 747 and said, "nothing special about that, it is just the spirits that favour it and the spirits lift it and make it fly."
Yes, largely agree, I think you've got that pretty much right.
Take Hans Rosling's Gapminder demonstration; all nations (except the war torn ones) are gradually rising and the the whole trend is upwards. Then consider Howard Bloom's Genius of the Beast, which charts out significant new technologies that made once luxury items, like cotton clothes, now affordable even to the world's poorest people. I'm not smart about this stuff, but it does seem like it just comes down to technology. If someone invented a cheap pill to cure cancer, that would remove a huge material burden from our system, and free us even more.
We seem to argue a lot over how to redistribute stuff fairly, and not so much time imagining how we could create the next technical revolutions. We seem to be having a bit of a crisis of confidence as oil appears to run out and population grows, and people are sorta advocating "use less." Well we may be forced to do that. Or we may use these 7 billion brains, which are gradually all gaining better access to education, to invent a new wave of stuff that solves a lot of problems.
When my parents grew up in Scotland, you could't afford the dentist, so the smart thing to do was to get all your teeth removed and have false ones put in as soon as possible -- it was cheaper that way! To me this sounds horrific, but just a generation ago that was normal.
I just wish there was more objectivity and open-mindedness around new technology, instead of the ideologically driven marketing of wind turbines that don't produce much, and short term tech buzzes of some new variation on messaging. We really need to be applying our brains to survival-enhancement, stuff that will save your life, stuff that will make life easier, the kind of thinking great people like Buckmister Fuller were doing.
PS. Many argue that material things are not the answer (it just means raping Nature more) but better tech is also lighter tech. It is getting light at night from burning gas, rather than chopping down trees. Gas is better in most ways. Of course, then more people can use more... but you have to invent the next wave of stuff to again lighten the footprint. But for the people who advocate spirituality in general, and this includes most of the green movement, which they do because they advocate social change, by changing people's values (a subject traditionally the domain of religion -- how you should live, what is good and what is bad) people need to realise that we have always had a spiritual aspect to life (people sit on a rock and wonder what it is all about) and they've been asking for 20,000 years and they're not about to stop asking now. So let's just separate the moralising from the technology. Please, I wish the environmentalists would just feel free to lecture people on ethics as a subject in its own right, and leave technology to the domain of people who know technology. It is not evil if someone questions wind power output. It doesn't mean they are Gaia-rapers. Technology doesn't have morality, that's the point, it is merely about technique. If you want to change people's morality, teach them to think about ethical principles. Don't tie it to science and technology. I say this because I fear that the mixing of the two is doing neither any good.
How did aliens travel across countless light years of space to reach our planet in a craft that was just 50' in diameter? Presumably a couple generations of the crew would have grown old and died on the voyage. That's a pretty small space to raise a family in.
Is it so hard to imagine their Nimitz is in space and the disks are just the F-16s ?
I see Nature like a big photocopier. It doesn't just create one animal, it creates a multitude of them. Likewise for mountains, rivers, planets, stars. We used to think the sun was it. Then we realised all the other points were stars. Then we thought planets are rare. But as soon as we were able to just about detect them, we see lots of them. Then we thought maybe they aren't distributed in size and distance like in our system. But as our instruments got better we were able to detect similar distributions. So what's next? Detecting similar atmospheres -- nearly there. Then what? The core question is whether Earth is special. If Earth is just average, not too early, not too late, not too smart, not too dumb, then intelligent bipeds are out there, probably very similar. We are probably tracing their evolutionary footsteps, as a culture. Maybe they even gave us some religion, in a dumbed form that could be useful 5000 years ago to stop continual tribal slaughters. Who know what their rules are for interference. I'd guess it is: don't interfere; observe if you like; let them slug it out on their own. Perhaps though they have other rules. Maybe we have more potential but are still a bit too dumb and are trashing our planet (not global warming, that's dumb, I mean mercury in the oceans, and other pernicious chemical pollutants that sadly everyone has forgotten about in the AGW hype and big 'alternative' energy business.) So maybe they'll turn up and give us some extra time to sort out our shit. Yes space is unimaginably big -- maybe they are long lived (like 500 years), or maybe they send self assembling packages, or maybe they bend space. Maybe they reincarnate or download into their own descended bodies. Who knows that's possible. It would be dumb to believe they can't do stuff we can't imagine. Most people alive today on the planet can't imagine how electricity works. We've been around for maybe 200,000 years as tribes, and 10,000 as agriculturalists, and 5000 as empires, and 200 years as scientists, and what if they are just another 10,000 years ahead of us? That's 10,000 years as scientists versus our 200, and see what we've already done in just those 200 years. Of course, blind bad luck may have it that we've popped up in a deserted part of the galaxy. So that's why one can't just bet on it. But people do see stuff, and it only takes one in a thousand to be a real report, be it foo fighters, or some lady who stood with a group of people on a sunny day back in the 30s watching a metallic craft hovering and moving silently to and fro. If they arrived in our lifetime that would be very cool. Try not to run around in a panic, eh?
There are a number of "greens" who think that human progress just has to slow down. Cheap energy would only mean more people and more consumption, in their view. I know because I've met them and talked to them. It is the view that the Earth is just overpopulated by about 6 billion. "Sustainability" means a massive reduction in our numbers, so that what little can be generated from wind and solar is all we need. It isn't an entirely evil or crazy idea, but it does ignore entirely any question of what drives human development. If we reduce our numbers but reduce our technology as well, then our culture will revert back to earlier epoch's where we were simply more aggressive and more brutal as humans. Avatar tried to make it all look very romantic, but note that even there, the tribes were very small, they lived very far apart from each other, and they were all warriors. What happens when two tribes start competing for the same land? Carnage. So, our vast numbers are forcing us to learn to live together in closer proximity, it is forcing us to learn to cooperate more. So it isn't as easy as just doing a back of the envelope calculation about how many mouths we think the Earth can feed, or how many TVs people will buy. Of course not all greens think this way, there is a spectrum of views. But the zero population growth resource limits stuff is pretty influential.
So you've never met a sceptic who contends, "nobody understands the climate to make these sorts of predictions or scenarios or whatever you want to call them" ??
As one scientist put it, "the people may not know the science but they know when they are being lied to."
We all have to rely on experts at some point or other in life. Going to the doctor, calling the plumber, asking the mechanic. We start by assuming they are honest and competent. But we lookout for telltale signs. We always try to lookout for telltale signs. You can generally spot when someone is lying. Their stories become inconsistent, which is interestingly the same thing you notice about sceptics. But the thing is, you have left out the sceptics who say, "the answer to climate is not known". If you claim to have spent time listening to sceptics, why not mention these? So, have I have caught you lying?
Well actually, it would seem the overall message and the science will have changed rather significantly if this study proves close to the mark.
Sadly it should be no surprise that the science may have advanced as new discoveries were made. The surprise was always that the earlier publicity claimed it was all "settled", "irrefutable", "incontrovertible". The surprise was that the Chairman of the IPCC was publicly likening scientists who disagreed to "flat earthers". THAT was the surprise. And it is all documented in videos and quotes. Plus, rather than investigate the 2035 Himalayan glaciers error, he simply denounced the Indian scientists as "vodoo". Again, very surprising for a rational scientific body.
The question is, on what is the usual refutation of your point based?
You know, the one that goes like this: something other than CO2 started the temperature rise, but then, after 800-1000 years, the temperature rise caused a rise in CO2, and from that point on, for the next 4000 years or so, the CO2 caused all the further warming, until, again, something which we don't know, caused it all to drop. Therefore, it is all consistent with CO2 as driver, for as you can see, in those 4000 years (whilst temperatures were rising after CO2 had also started rising), the CO2 caused a great deal of warming.
IIRC that's the basic refutation. See how that makes sense to you.
The trouble is, many many things have changed. There's more to life than carbon. Just the food we eat is one huge change -- how many modern diseases are a direct result of massive gain based food production? What is all that grain production doing to the ecosystem? Life as it is today bears little resemblance to it was 200 years ago, and then again to 1000 years ago, and that to 20,000 years ago. And that's just food. What about everything else? No, the point isn't that something changed. The point is, can anybody demonstrate that that change means a lot compared to everything else? Life is inherently risky and our job is to identify the biggest urgent risks. You can only afford "prudence" if you don't get silly and squander all your prudence attention on something that doesn't turn out to be a problem. If more people will die in cold conditions than warm conditions, then what are you achieving? There is only so much we can do, so we have to be careful what we choose to tackle.
Bias is inherent in everyone, this engine included. Who decides what fits a category? It is up to individuals to interpret the bias. Who decides whether something should appear in /terrorist or /freedomfighter ?
In life one has to choose what to believe in, what to value most, what is it that is the true guide?
At some point, some people choose Science. The way our minds work, we don't have much room for more than one Absolute at a time... otherwise it isn't an Absolute if there's more then a few... Science... Art... Morals... Religion... Sex... whatever. Something gets placed at the top.
The funny thing is that people will spend about 10 or 20 years putting one thing as the absolute top and then later, through life experience, change their minds, and put something else at the top. Then they put being Relative at the top... for a while... then another 20 years and it changes again.
What I'm saying is, yes, I agree with you... people are imagining that Science is the best most rational objective guide to truth... and they are partially correct. But they forget the "partially" and so they have to denounce anyone who might suggest that in practice, science is practiced by people with human motivations just like the rest of us, and that just because there are institutions and methods doesn't mean that those institutions and methods can't become corrupted to varying degrees from time to time, or just make mistakes which take a long time to correct, if they're even noticed.
I mean, we used to believe the police were the force for good and eventually we came to see things like "institutionalised racism" as real. But wait... how can there be bad cops? Surely the majority of good cops would catch them right away? Well... not if there's too many of them and they are covering each other's backs. Or if denouncing the few bad ones would bring the force into disrepute and lead to social problems because people lose faith in the police. So... "better" to hide the bad ones. That's why it is "institutionalised racism".
Many fields and activities have great value, even I daresay, politicians who have to expend great intelligence in trying to hold the nation together whilst trying to get something done, when competing groups would happily kill each other. I have to entertain the idea that some politicians are actually great people. Some scientists are great people. Some doctors are great people. Some soldiers are great. Some philosophers are great. Some religious people are great. The list goes on. And any of them could be wrong on any number of subjects.
But no... I'm forgetting... SCIENZ RULEZZZ!
Whether one believes in AGW or not, there is nothing wrong with your statement.
I'd add that efforts to polarise opinions between two extremes are really not helping open information exchange.
As you say, what is the quality of the evidence? Thousands of papers inferring from weak evidence are not in the same league as a few really solid physical measurements.
People have to publish. If the things being studied are hard, poorly understood, difficult to measure (because we weren't around measuring 100, 1000, 1 million years ago), and very complex, then people will still publish (and what data doesn't exist directly, they can infer from "reasonable assumptions"). If people can promote the importance of the field, then they get to keep publishing. Sooner or later the field may need correcting, but that can take decades.
After posting I thought, well, actually some kinds of girls will want to be seen online... which is what you said!
And this guy expects to ever get a date?
Exactly. Plus, "nice" doesn't just mean pretty. Those who don't get this, consider a girlfriend. She can be pretty, but a total bitch. She can treat you like a doormat and make you feel terrible. She could be neurotic and make your life hell. But still, she could be "pretty".
In classical architecture, they talk about "commodity, firmness, and delight". You kinda need all three for any of them to be worth it. That's why Apple can seemingly make compromises but end up with a more popular product.
I know people (educated, expert, professional people) to whom you point out and name all the different ports on the side of their laptop, and they are confused. I think the confusion is actually, "I'm a respected professional in my field, and I earn loads of money, I'm qualified, I'm published, I'm intelligent -- so why am I wasting my time with all these different computer ports?"
Using the girlfriend analogy, she cooks you a nice dinner and she makes the effort to have a nice conversation with you over dinner. She is "nice". She can be good looking too. But she doesn't throw your dinner in the bin the moment you happen to make a remark that she misconstrues as being a subtle insult. That would be neurotic.
Neurotic can be exciting and wild, and have all sorts of interesting surprises, but in a long term relationship (which is what you enter into with a computer gadget that you are trusting all your information and media to) you want nice, mature, attractive, balanced, good hearted stuff.
"Still, I too enjoyed the show in my youth..."
Yes, I saw an episode the other day, and realised how much it was for kids.
"Whoa... we're going off course.. it is like there's some huge gravitational force nearby!!!"
"Yes, that's Jupiter..."
Er, great guys, you're piloting a space ship out of the solar system and you didn't know Jupiter was there.... um...
"The Star Force got the Cosmo DNA and got back to Earth, The Alliance accidentally created the Reavers by trying to make paradise, and Sheridan kicked some Shadow ass (and paid the ultimate price, twice!)."
Thank you!!! I caught some Star Blazers (in Italian!) when I was a kid but never got to see the ending! I loved that show! I still sing the theme in the shower! Thank you again!!
And yes, B5 knew where it was going, and could keep aiming for that even when they thought it was being cut down to 4 seasons (which was a pity because it made season 5 a bit awkward when it was OK'd).
Likewise Firefly -- there is a secret, we are hooked on the secret, secret is revealed, and it is a real tear jerker / food for thought / both!
It kills brain cells to watch stuff that makes no rational sense as a story -- I mean they can invent magic if they like, or have gods and angels, but it has to still hold as a rational narrative that makes sense. I eventually gave up on X files, then soon gave up on Lost, and almost immediately quit Flash Forward. The more they do this shit, the quicker I learn my lesson and leave.
If I watch a detective drama, I want some chance at figuring out the ending. And if I don't then the clues should all have been there in retrospect. I don't want, wow! Aliens smoking crack killed the wife and made it look like the butler did it using their alien technology -- wow I never saw that coming -- yeah, I never saw it coming because it makes no fucking sense!
Would it be better to find new and amazing ways to create energy from resources now, or would it be better for humanity to first learn to live within our means as oil runs out?
Humans have shown over and over that in large groups we use all the resources available, don't slow or restrain ourselves in time to save ourselves, and unless there are consistent, strict rules and provisioning in place, we exhaust available resources.
I think it would be better for the long term survival of the species if we ran out of cheap, easy energy sources for several generations, and we designed new culture based on long term sustainability instead of constant growth. If discover or invent an even cheaper, easier way to get energy out of water now, we'll have another "industrial revolution" type of growth, and come to an even worse dead-end when that runs out too.
I also think it would be better if children skipped ages 1 to 12 and started life as 13 year olds. No even better, as 21 years olds.
Whilst it would be nice to imagine a new culture which transcends material growth, our development thus far has come along side material growth. The material side is related to the cultural side. It is no accident that the most underdeveloped cultures (female genital mutilation, widespread corruption as a daily fact of life, religious intolerance, deep racism and sexism) are all places that are materially poor. Like, green grass is a luxury. Clean water is a luxury.
So when you champion "living within our means", you're talking about your current cushy oil based lifestyle. If you took that away, how do you know that the next generation won't develop a harder culture? In history, men and women segregated because life was dangerous and the men were sent to do the most dangerous jobs. In South Africa, Apartheid started because the white poor miners were on the verge of losing their jobs to even poorer native Africans. In Zambia, my own mum couldn't get a driving license because the "driving test" was dinner with the examiner. In Pakistan, life is still essentially feudal today, with forced arranged marriages and family members being disowned for not following the strict traditional rules. I mean, there's places where it is not so bad, and some are more progressive, but my point is, it is easy to forget how tenuous is our hold on rational liberal secular humanistic culture.
it is not that those other cultures are "bad", they are just the best that ordinary humans can manage when the living conditions are harder.
The way to sustainability is better technology that can do more. Anything else is stagnation and eventual devolution to death.
If we fail to invent that new technology, we will fail to progress culturally beyond nation states and dogma.
There is a line in Pygmalion where the well-to-do gentleman asks the thief, "have you no morals man??"
And the thief replies, unashamed, "can't afford them."
I am by no means convinced yet that the iPad is the better choice for my particular line of work, but it sure hit the ground running.
Yes it very much depends on what work people do. If "real work" is architectural CAD and 3D then a netbook is not going to cut it. If real work requires running 4 OSs in emulators then a netbook can't. If real work requires being on the company's private secure LAN then again, no handy coffee shop netbook for you. If real work is still mostly the stack of confidential papers and files at your desk and in the office stores, then again, you can't do real work out in the field.
But for many people, access to web and email are pretty basic things now, and they ask themselves whether an iPad would do those things better and in a more touchy feely usable way than a netbook.
For me, sacrificing a mechanical keyboard for more screen space in a slim form factor is a good compromise. Other do disagree. So I'll be a customer and they won't.
Indeed. Apple seems to be aiming at non-computer people. People who aren't interested in computers for their own sake -- "gee I can install flash blockers" -- nope, not those people.
Apple were quite careful to say the iPhone is not a computer.
Maybe similar, they are being careful to say that the iPad is not a netbook.
Ordinary people don't build their own houses, but they might redecorate, or they might pay someone to redecorate. That's maybe sorta the level of control that ordinary people want over their gadgets -- they might cook, but not have to live on a farm -- there's a balance of convenience -- people depend on gadgets now and they are very useful, but please make them as hassle free as possible.
It is quite a hard problem, and Apple haven't necessarily got the best answers. But they recognise the problem and are willing to make it their business.
Yes that's very true -- I agree.
What I experience subjectively as a mind, has an objective correlate in the physical brain. It is "correlated" somewhat loosely for now -- depression and certain chemicals appear together -- but sometimes you can cure depression by doing something mental, like changing beliefs, and sometimes by doing something physical, like changing diet, or maybe sometimes it is a bit of both.
It can be tempting to say that everything is physical, but that leaves a problem. If everything is just matter, just physical, then where is the subjectively experienced "picture" of the world that I'm experiencing? Where is the "inner movie" or the "man in the movie theatre"? If you cut open a living brain, you don't see the picture the person sees. So where is that located? Someone experiences a picture. Even in purely digital SLRs, there is nobody in the camera experiencing the image. The camera doesn't experience anything, it isn't a conscious being.
Yet, being a conscious being, as abstract and etherial as that sounds, being a pure consciousness, can't exist as far as we know without a physical body to be its "correlate".
It seems that both mind and matter arise as two aspects of the same thing, like two sides of a coin.
With that model, the key is that NDEs are "near" death, not actual death. So they never were heaven after incineration of physical body. Actually, as mind and matter are two sides of the coin, then for there to be anything after biological death, then there must continue to exist some form of physical energy afterwards. We don't have the instruments that can measure those "subtle" energies. Imagine if one day we discovered we could measure them, and that "something" was floating or being radiated away after death. Imagine you could detect "something" being beamed to another birth happening somewhere else. I'm not saying that's going to happen, I'm saying that is what it would take to "demonstrate" that one life was somehow linked energetically to another life by reincarnation, if such a thing really exists.
If there really is some kind of higher mind, then there would need to be some kind of energy to be the physical basis for it. Maybe in 1000 years we could detect that kind of stuff. Or maybe it just doesn't exist.
It is a fair point but it also applies to closed software where you don't get the source. It applies to any product that was created for a market where the purchaser simply wanted a ready made thing that just does certain things. Most people don't design their own house, design their own plumbing, grow their own food, prescribe their own medicines, build their own cars, and so on. Most people don't even bake their own bread. We have people and companies that specialise in these things, and because we delegate the work to them, they have more control over it than we do. We get to choose to some extent whether to buy it, but on the whole, if you want open computer systems, you'll need to explain to people why it is more advantageous and worth their time, to learn to use them. The app store basically removes most of the sys admin tasks that a person might have to otherwise do. People drive down the motorway, discover they're almost out of petrol, and in two minutes, tap tap they've found and installed and run an iPhone app that'll tell them where to find petrol. It is closed, but it fucking works.
Mod parent up.
Most of the greenhouse gasses are water vapour, and you know, those giant oceans, and cloud systems. If there was some way that water vapour was actually a self-regulating mechanism for the planet, and some real true to life in the field scientists do wonder about this, then rising CO2 would not be a problem. It is still up to the AGW people to show there is a problem. Just like with everything else in life.