Even Malthus repudiated Malthusianism before he died.
There's been more than a bit of propaganda attached to the idea of overpopulation and resource depletion foisted upon us since the 60's, I fear. Not even food is scarce, though we know that the problems of distributing it sometimes are huge. Still, that seems like a political problem; not to be ignored, but solvable.
To keep this whole thread on-topic, I submit that the only true shortage to watch out for is the shortage of human brains. Especially good ones, in the high-tech professions, in the medical professions, in the teaching profession (and how about in the legal profession, anyone?). I will not be too surprised to see underpopulation be touted as the "problem of the 21st century" before I die.
The statistics about American productivity that you reference may be correct, but I'm not sure anymore that they are meaningful.
If productivity is measured anything like "How many widgets per hour...", the issue gets confused, especially in this profession, when 1) we're not making the right (or even the best) widget, and 2) we re-use someone else's perfectly good-and-trusted widget. And if we do our jobs well, then it's not clear to me how that would show up in the stats. the way they are defined.
This same issue comes up when we're pounded with stats. that seem to indicate no (or at best, marginal) gains in productivity over the past 15 or so years, despite the fact that we've got a whole lot more stuff connected to the net these days.
I'm not sure it's necessary to prioritize and (over?) control any aspect of technology the way it's proposed here. I'm not sure it's possible to do that, minor Greek gods (or Emerson, Lake and Palmer) notwithstanding.
Humans tend to do what they can do, whether it's right or wrong. As the tools get better as a species we tend to do more.
PCs may still be solutions without problems, but that's mostly because we still don't know how to use these tools very well. The Ludite in me just wants to slow down just enough do that. But no more.
The latest breaking news on the Mars Orbiter can be found at Astronomy Now.
It's got to be Elvis. Not only did the Mars Observer "disappear" in early 1993, but the Soviets/Russians had two spacecraft fail (and disappear) just the year before.
Notice the paths that students wear down on college campuses? This review made me think of them. The paths are often on the lawns and often do violence to any sense of design that the architects and landscapers had in mind, but they are always the most efficient route. They have to be.
The web is going to grow in this way, no matter what we (or g'ments) do. We don't have much choice but to let it grow sort of organically, despite the best intentions of the Tim Berners-Lees of the world. The most we can do is regulate so that we don't choke on ads.
The resolution of Chandra is about 0.5 arc-seconds (one arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, which is 1/60 of a degree). The resolution of Hubble sort of depends on the instrument being used, and in the case of the WFPC, on which one you're talking about (WFPC I was replaced by WFPC II in Dec. of '93), but is generally considered to be in the "few hundredths of an arc-second" range in visual light, about 5 times better, give or take. Milli-arc-second astrometry has been done with Hubble data using the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs).
Chandra is such a great advance because it's so much better (in resolution) than it's predecessors in the X-Ray region of the spectrum.
I'm a former NASAite, so I've sort of seen it from the inside. My take is that NASA isn't necessarily the best vehicle for Space Exploration anymore, and perhaps, never was.
Don't get me wrong. What NASA did in the 60s with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo was magnificant. And the shuttle ain't a bad feat either, considering the effects of politics on the whole thing.
But that's the whole problem. NASA has always been a political creature, and did it's cold-war job of brute-forcing our way to the Moon very well. It's the wrong organization for today, I think.
I suspect that the very presence of NASA hampered other groups from trying alternatives to get into space reliably and cheaply. At least, that seems to be happening now. The need to get to space exists (more than ever!) and the means exists. The systems, organizations and "institutional knowledge" does not, because NASA has pretty much kept it locked up.
The g'ment did a great job bootstrapping space exploration. It's time for private enterprise to carry this burden farther, and although NASA may have some appropriate role in advancing to our goals, our tax money may be better spent elsewhere.
I believe that NASA has not focused it's efforts correctly in these matters. I believe NASA has focused on "Star Wars" type programs (both in a Cold War, Ronald Regan sense, and in a George Lucus glamorous space travel sense), when in fact they should focus more on conservation concerns such as meteor impacts.
I respectfully disagree. Although it's true that much of NASAs funding in the late 70s and 80s came from military budgets, that situation was essentially forced by a congress unwilling to fund NASA science missions to the level we would have expected. Congress, in general, always used NASA as a political tool. Their "micro-managing" of space missions brought us the space-station and the Space-Shuttle as emasculated examples of what could have been possible.
But "conservation concerns", or chaining NASA to an Earth-facing, ecological agenda would do exactly the same thing. God knows Al Gore is still hypnotized by the image of a tiny, fragile earth, shining blue in the distance as seen from Apollo. It's a pity, because NASA should be looking outwards, in exactly the other direction. That's what it's for. That's what it does best.
Well, not exactly. There's a lot of physics unstated here, but a signal would decrease as an inverse square only if it was carried in a single frequency and propagating out into space uniformly. If you either let it spread out in bandwidth or restrict the signal dispersion in space ("beam it!") then you change the loss to something other than inverse-square of the distance.
My statement came from Sagan and Sholvsky's book from about 1975, and it was about the Arecibo 1000' radio dish. It's simplistic, granted. But it's basically true. We could "hear" Arecibo's twin at a distance about the size of the galaxy.
No one's commented yet on SITI. So what if they succeed? So what if they don't?
It's sort of cool to realize that if von Neumann machines are possible at all, the galaxy would/should be filled with them in about 1x10**5 yrs. If we don't find them soon, it may be a strong hint that self-replicating machines aren't feasible, and e-m signals are a much better bet for finding life "out there".
We're already capable of detecting the equivalent of our own radio transmissions across the galaxy (more or less), and since radio is cheap and easy, it starts to look like we can detect anything in the galaxy that wants to be detected, and probably will within our lifetimes, if they're out there.
Now it gets into the realm of psychology. Why would intellegent creatures want to be detected after all? It gets real speculative, to say the least. It's also possible (or at least, not impossible) that we're either alone, or we're the first. After all, the assumption that there is nothing particularly special about our situation, an assumption that's served science very well for the past 400 years, is just an assumption.
The implications of both success and failure of SETI to detect extraterrestrial life are equally important.
For nearly two weeks now the search for meaning and the search for culprits in this terrible event has led to - Well, where it's led has depended on who you read. And I find that "interesting" to say the least. Read Salon, it's the gays who are being blamed. Read the W. Post and it's the Goths, the Marylyn Manson fans and the Hitler Youth who get the blame. And let's not forget gun owners. Read SlashDot, and it's the Geeks who are blamed, except that they are blaming the jocks. Yeah, right. Who's kidding whom? You hurt someone, you're part of the problem. You pull the trigger, you're a big part of the problem. You point fingers, you're part of the problem too. And that includes the Geeks here, who don't seem to notice that they're doing-unto-others exactly what they say is being done to them.
Yes, this is one big mess and the e-mails Jon Katz has shown all week us are compelling. But I can't help but think that those of us who ever saw ourselves as outcasts have done it to ourselves.
Oh wow. I had to read this twice to get the jist of it. Usually as soon as I see the word "deconstruct", it's over. Deconstruction is a discredited form of critical analysis (lit-crit) and seemed badly out of place here. But when I re-read...a world in which people are not always what they seem. I had to stop and think. And that was Thieme's intent. Wasn't it? Contrats. It worked. Keep him. But I warn you. As soon as I see the work "SubAltern" in one of his tomes, I'm outta here. Joe
Judith Lewis says that she uses Windows just to use Word. She uses a computer just (I assume predominantly) for word processing? Uh - I guess that, when I think about it, my job is about 5% programming these days and about 95% documenting. So I do too.
After 9 hrs a day at my terminal, I'm not in a mood to go home and play games - I'm getting too old for Doom and never bothered with Unreal and my time is spent enjoyably with my lover doing things that people do.
So just what was it for that I spent that $3k 8 years ago? Upgrade headaches?
Slashdot Mirror
Even Malthus repudiated Malthusianism before he died.
There's been more than a bit of propaganda attached to the idea of overpopulation and resource depletion foisted upon us since the 60's, I fear. Not even food is scarce, though we know that the problems of distributing it sometimes are huge. Still, that seems like a political problem; not to be ignored, but solvable.
To keep this whole thread on-topic, I submit that the only true shortage to watch out for is the shortage of human brains. Especially good ones, in the high-tech professions, in the medical professions, in the teaching profession (and how about in the legal profession, anyone?). I will not be too surprised to see underpopulation be touted as the "problem of the 21st century" before I die.
J.
The statistics about American productivity that you reference may be correct, but I'm not sure anymore that they are meaningful.
If productivity is measured anything like "How many widgets per hour...", the issue gets confused, especially in this profession, when 1) we're not making the right (or even the best) widget, and 2) we re-use someone else's perfectly good-and-trusted widget. And if we do our jobs well, then it's not clear to me how that would show up in the stats. the way they are defined.
This same issue comes up when we're pounded with stats. that seem to indicate no (or at best, marginal) gains in productivity over the past 15 or so years, despite the fact that we've got a whole lot more stuff connected to the net these days.
J.
I'm not sure it's necessary to prioritize and (over?) control any aspect of technology the way it's proposed here. I'm not sure it's possible to do that, minor Greek gods (or Emerson, Lake and Palmer) notwithstanding.
Humans tend to do what they can do, whether it's right or wrong. As the tools get better as a species we tend to do more.
PCs may still be solutions without problems, but that's mostly because we still don't know how to use these tools very well. The Ludite in me just wants to slow down just enough do that. But no more.
The latest breaking news on the Mars Orbiter can be found at Astronomy Now.
It's got to be Elvis. Not only did the Mars Observer "disappear" in early 1993, but the Soviets/Russians had two spacecraft fail (and disappear) just the year before.
Joe
Notice the paths that students wear down on college campuses? This review made me think of them. The paths are often on the lawns and often do violence to any sense of design that the architects and landscapers had in mind, but they are always the most efficient route. They have to be.
The web is going to grow in this way, no matter what we (or g'ments) do. We don't have much choice but to let it grow sort of organically, despite the best intentions of the Tim Berners-Lees of the world. The most we can do is regulate so that we don't choke on ads.
Joe
The resolution of Chandra is about 0.5 arc-seconds (one arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, which is 1/60 of a degree). The resolution of Hubble sort of depends on the instrument being used, and in the case of the WFPC, on which one you're talking about (WFPC I was replaced by WFPC II in Dec. of '93), but is generally considered to be in the "few hundredths of an arc-second" range in visual light, about 5 times better, give or take. Milli-arc-second astrometry has been done with Hubble data using the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs).
Chandra is such a great advance because it's so much better (in resolution) than it's predecessors in the X-Ray region of the spectrum.
Joe
I read the Salon article, and it wasn't exactly kind to you. Do you think it was fair or a hatchet job?
J
I'm a former NASAite, so I've sort of seen it from the inside. My take is that NASA isn't necessarily the best vehicle for Space Exploration anymore, and perhaps, never was.
Don't get me wrong. What NASA did in the 60s with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo was magnificant. And the shuttle ain't a bad feat either, considering the effects of politics on the whole thing.
But that's the whole problem. NASA has always been a political creature, and did it's cold-war job of brute-forcing our way to the Moon very well. It's the wrong organization for today, I think.
I suspect that the very presence of NASA hampered other groups from trying alternatives to get into space reliably and cheaply. At least, that seems to be happening now. The need to get to space exists (more than ever!) and the means exists. The systems, organizations and "institutional knowledge" does not, because NASA has pretty much kept it locked up.
The g'ment did a great job bootstrapping space exploration. It's time for private enterprise to carry this burden farther, and although NASA may have some appropriate role in advancing to our goals, our tax money may be better spent elsewhere.
J
IIRC, Rand was strongly anti-union, and very much pro-individualist/anti-collectivist.
J.
I believe that NASA has not focused it's efforts correctly in these matters. I believe NASA has focused on "Star Wars" type programs (both in a Cold War, Ronald Regan sense, and in a George Lucus glamorous space travel sense), when in fact they should focus more on conservation concerns such as meteor impacts.
I respectfully disagree. Although it's true that much of NASAs funding in the late 70s and 80s came from military budgets, that situation was essentially forced by a congress unwilling to fund NASA science missions to the level we would have expected. Congress, in general, always used NASA as a political tool. Their "micro-managing" of space missions brought us the space-station and the Space-Shuttle as emasculated examples of what could have been possible.
But "conservation concerns", or chaining NASA to an Earth-facing, ecological agenda would do exactly the same thing. God knows Al Gore is still hypnotized by the image of a tiny, fragile earth, shining blue in the distance as seen from Apollo. It's a pity, because NASA should be looking outwards, in exactly the other direction. That's what it's for. That's what it does best.
J
Well, not exactly. There's a lot of physics unstated here, but a signal would decrease as an inverse square only if it was carried in a single frequency and propagating out into space uniformly.
If you either let it spread out in bandwidth or restrict the signal dispersion in space ("beam it!") then you change the loss to something other than inverse-square of the distance.
My statement came from Sagan and Sholvsky's book from about 1975, and it was about the Arecibo 1000' radio dish. It's simplistic, granted. But it's basically true. We could "hear" Arecibo's twin at a distance about the size of the galaxy.
Joe
No one's commented yet on SITI. So what if they succeed? So what if they don't?
It's sort of cool to realize that if von Neumann machines are possible at all, the galaxy would/should be filled with them in about 1x10**5 yrs. If we don't find them soon, it may be a strong hint that self-replicating machines aren't feasible, and e-m signals are a much better bet for finding life "out there".
We're already capable of detecting the equivalent of our own radio transmissions across the galaxy (more or less), and since radio is cheap and easy, it starts to look like we can detect anything in the galaxy that wants to be detected, and probably will within our lifetimes, if they're out there.
Now it gets into the realm of psychology. Why would intellegent creatures want to be detected after all? It gets real speculative, to say the least. It's also possible (or at least, not impossible) that we're either alone, or we're the first. After all, the assumption that there is nothing particularly special about our situation, an assumption that's served science very well for the past 400 years, is just an assumption.
The implications of both success and failure of SETI to detect extraterrestrial life are equally important.
Joe
For nearly two weeks now the search for meaning and the search for culprits in this terrible event has led to -
Well, where it's led has depended on who you read. And I find that "interesting" to say the least.
Read Salon, it's the gays who are being blamed. Read the W. Post and it's the Goths, the Marylyn Manson fans and the Hitler Youth who get the blame. And let's not forget gun owners.
Read SlashDot, and it's the Geeks who are blamed, except that they are blaming the jocks.
Yeah, right. Who's kidding whom? You hurt someone, you're part of the problem. You pull the trigger, you're a big part of the problem. You point fingers, you're part of the problem too. And that includes the Geeks here, who don't seem to notice that they're doing-unto-others exactly what they say is being done to them.
Yes, this is one big mess and the e-mails Jon Katz has shown all week us are compelling. But I can't help but think that those of us who ever saw ourselves as outcasts have done it to ourselves.
J.
Oh wow. I had to read this twice to get the jist of it. Usually as soon as I see the word "deconstruct", it's over. Deconstruction is a discredited form of critical analysis (lit-crit) and seemed badly out of place here. But when I re-read ...a world in which people are not always what they seem. I had to stop and think. And that was Thieme's intent. Wasn't it? Contrats. It worked. Keep him. But I warn you. As soon as I see the work "SubAltern" in one of his tomes, I'm outta here. Joe
To go boldly where no man has gone before... J
Judith Lewis says that she uses Windows just to use Word. She uses a computer just (I assume predominantly) for word processing? Uh - I guess that, when I think about it, my job is about 5% programming these days and about 95% documenting. So I do too.
After 9 hrs a day at my terminal, I'm not in a mood to go home and play games - I'm getting too old for Doom and never bothered with Unreal and my time is spent enjoyably with my lover doing things that people do.
So just what was it for that I spent that $3k 8 years ago? Upgrade headaches?
Joe