I had to get fingerprinted to get a drivers license in Texas and that was 10 years ago.
I got my first drivers license in Texas in 1991 and didn't have to give fingerprints. I had to get a license in Texas again (from scratch) two years ago and didn't have to give fingerprints.
Now I'm not arguing for humans should die off but rather they should focus on accepting birth control as a societal norm until the individual is ready to actually have a child.
We do that already. I can't think of any first world country where birth control isn't completely normal and accepted by most as a matter purely of convenience and economics. There's no reason to expect that not to be the case with every other country as they catch up, since every country so far has behaved the exact same (economically inevitable) way. Nobody is expecting infinite population growth, but the idea that a permanent global population collapse is only a decade or two away is equally silly.
While technology has certainly raised the standard of living for those who benefit initially, is there any technology breakthrough that has not eventually (perhaps several generations later) presented even greater problems than the problem that was solved?
Yeah, pretty much every MAJOR fundamental technology. The wheel, electric lights, refrigeration, the integrated circuit, printing press, internal combustion engine, etc. Sure, every one of those has negative consequences as well, but you'd be pretty hard-pressed to say that any of them have negative consequences that outweigh the positive. The only controversial one on that list would be the internal combustion engine, and there the issue has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the use of convenient (but limited and polluting) fuels.
Cheap and easy desalination would be right up there with irrigation and crop rotation in terms of basic technologies that would enable population growth with minimal negative impact.
I can't even tell if I'm an optimist or a pessimist by this standard, since it seems clear that both cases are true. I don't know why it is pessimistic to believe population will grow to 9 billion, I'd think that was the "good news" scenario, where mortality declines and resources are used more effectively, the way both trends have gone for the past several hundred years.
Sure, when a society gets to a certain economic and technological stage, your birth rate declines (and in some first world countries is already below the replacement rate). So as the rest of the world catches up to our standard of living, we'll eventually reach some sort of rough global population plateau, but I seriously doubt we're going to hit that limit in a matter of decades. Africa could easily hold another one or two billion people with no new technology, just economic maturity.
Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.
Would it not be easy to have an unheated compartment insulated from the ISS, with 5 sides exposed to open space and in a shadow? I'm sure it would get cold enough (by heat radiation), and it would probably be useful to have a freezer to keep food/experiments fresh.
Things don't need to be heated in space, they need to be cooled. Radiation is generally not a very efficient way to get rid of waste heat, so it's usually quite warm in any enclosed space. So no, you can't really keep stuff cool without active refrigeration, which generates heat of its own that has to be radiated, so you don't want to do any more than necessary.
Indeed, I've been pulled over a half-dozen times in my life (never gotten a ticket, so I'm not terribly reckless) and I'd say that half the cops were absolute paragons of professionalism who I raved about afterwards. I would have happily posted great "reviews" of them the same way I've posted about good doctors I've encountered -- in part precisely so that if they read it afterwards they'd know their skill and attitude was genuinely appreciated by joe public and it wasn't just some guy kissing ass to get out of a ticket.
Maybe you missed the part where nearly every iPhone update has tried to block the jailbreak?
So you think Apple shouldn't patch security vulnerabilities, just because some people have used those vulnerabilities for good things?
You're certainly not *required* to update your iPhone, it will continue to work the same as it did the day you bought it.
Apple's attitude has clearly been of complete indifference to the hacking that goes on. They're not spending any energy trying to stop it, they're not spending any energy trying to help it. Some updates broke the hacked phones (by fixing the vulnerabilities they relied on), other updates didn't. The last update actually restored some previously "bricked" hacked iPhones to working order.
Any time the subject of hacking iPhones comes up in public statements from Apple execs, you can practically hear their shoulders shrugging.
The 24% approval rating of the Democratically-led Congress may have something to do with it. By the way, the President's is 32-34%.
Congress as a whole always has low approval ratings, "everyone else's congressmen" are always hated. People rate their own congressmen in the 80s-90s, which is all that matters come November (unless Congress does specific, party-driven ideological things that turn off voters as a whole, which hasn't happened, the only affect this Congress' unimpressive record might have is to suppress voting by Democrats who feel let down).
You still have a maximum price that you're willing to pay for an item. Why would this change based on someone else's behavior?
Because, separate from the maximum you're willing to pay under any circumstances, is your desire to get it at the least possible amount. That means being aware of competitors and their activities -- if someone else lists the same item for less money, I'd prefer to buy the second one at half price than to pay the maximum amount for the first. In between the beginning and end of a single auction, other information comes into the possession of both the buyers and the sellers which can cause the perceived value of the items to change.
If 20 different people are selling an identical item in auctions that close during the next 6 hours, it would be stupid to put in your max allowable bid on the first item and then let the 10th one expire with no bids because everyone who needed one already "won" an earlier auction at their max allowable amount.
Actualy, it does. Evolution says that the human species appeared about 200,000 years ago and dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago. Were human remains and dinosaur remains unambiguously found together and were there no explanation found other than they lived together at the same time, pretty much all of evolutionary theory would collapse. That would include a of of what we think we know about palaeontology, geology and genetics. For that reason I would happily bet everything I own against a copy of Windows Vista Home edition that it will never happen.
I'd bet against it, too, but there's nothing in evolutionary theory itself that *requires* dinosaurs to go extinct before man. There is more than enough evidence to believe that was the historical case, but if we dug up evidence tomorrow that showed some dinosaurs managed to eke out an existence in some particular environmental niche for millions of years after we thought they were extinct (ala "Nessie"), it would not necessarily change our our understanding of human evolution.
Evolution has nothing to say about the reasons we are here Actually it does.
I believe the original poster was asking "why are we here" in the philosophical sense, which religion answers but science does not.
That's what Creationism says. Intelligent Design "says" that scientific evidence suggests a creator as opposed to evolutionary processes but does not make statements as to the nature of the creator.
Well yes, but it's immaterial to the point. Whether it is God or aliens or time travelers, saying "some intelligent designer did it" is of no scientific value, because all it does is add a layer of needless complexity to the question without offering any real answers.
With regards to science I think you are underestimating the role of interpretation...I actually question this because one of the requirements of science as you have said is that your methodology is predictive, because if you just adjust your theory in accordance with every time you are wrong but are not actually successful at leveraging that to predict things correctly, I don't really see how that's different from for example astrology.
Well, I didn't make any statements about interpretation so I don't know how I could have underestimated it. Indeed, most of the details of a field change quite a bit over time, as new evidence comes in. Most scientists don't view this as a flaw, this is the nature of learning -- the more you know, the more you know you don't know, and then as you learn new things you realize the things you *thought* you knew were only approximations of the truth because you weren't yet able to grasp the subtle details. The shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics was one of those learning stages, but you'd be hard-pressed to say the study of gravity was flawed or half-assed simply because Newton didn't get everything right.
Evolutionary theory has certainly required some pretty spectacularly unintuitive predictions that were tested and found to be true.
Richard Dawkins writes: "If a single, well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500-million year-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed" [The Blind Watchmaker, 3rd ed., p. 320]. J. B. S. Haldane also said that "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian" would constitute evidence that might contradict evolution.
As Jardine pointed out, there's a big difference between saying "dinosaurs and humans living at the same time would disprove evolution" and saying "humans existing before any primates or other mammals would disprove evolution".
Sure, dinosaurs living long after we thought they were extinct, or humans living long before we thought they came to be, would cause a lot of current biological timelines to be thrown off completely, and entire careers would be thrown out the window while the past few centuries of data were looked at all over again.
But there's nothing in evolutionary theory that says we can't be wrong about the exact timing of things, only that some things have to happen in a certain order. There's nothing in our understanding of the evolution of man that *requires* dinosaurs to be extinct before homo sapiens could be born. We only require that other primates existed before man, and certain other organisms before them, and certain others before them. What was happening in completely separate biological trees at the same time is certainly of great scientific importance, but not necessarily of evolutionary importance to the evolution of man.
I agree that is how to test weather something is scientific or not. However in what way does that disprove Intelligent Design?
It doesn't -- ID isn't disprovable, precisely because it isn't scientific. ID says "God did it". That's not of much use in a science class, because there's nothing scientific you can learn from that statement.
If a human foot print is found next to a fossilized dinosaur bone, would that not prove that Evolution is wrong?
No, evolution says nothing about dinosaurs and humans being unable to live at the same time. We're from two completely different evolutionary trees -- reptiles and mammals. Geologists and paleontologists would be pretty shocked if such a thing were to be found, but evolution wouldn't be affected in any significant way.
There are, indeed, numerous things that COULD be found or occur that would disprove evolution, yet none of those things ever has. The fact that such things are able to be spelled out ahead of time, and then tested, is precisely what makes evolution science, and ID not science.
The thing is, you either BELIEVE that God created everything or you BELIEVE that evolution is the reason we are here or you BELIEVE something else. There is no way to truly scientifically prove how things began. Both intelligent design and evolution are religions.
Evolution has nothing to say about the reasons we are here or how things began. It is not a religion, and requires no faith. You can be a staunch creationist opposed to evolution and you will get the exact same experimental results with DNA manipulation, genome sequencing, carbon dating, and fruit fly reproduction, as a fervent believer in evolution. Predictable, repeatable results independent of the experimenter are the hallmark of real science -- evolution has many, and ID has none.
Keep in mind the majority of the world is of Muslim faith. Just because you're of the opinion that it's the most iconic image in the world doesn't make it fact. Your comment actually comes of as a sign of ignorance.
It is indeed ONE OF the most iconic images in the world. Regardless of one's religion.
And, for what its worth, Muslims are quite familiar with the popular western images of Jesus. In their faith, he is one of the messengers of God, they just don't believe he was the son of God.
In a universal health care system, everyone gets equally mediocre care
As opposed to our great system, where 2/3 of the people get equally mediocre care, 1/3 get horrible emergency-only care, and we pay twice as much for the privilege.
You decide what your reaction is to events, you can control how events effect your mental state.
So if I shoot you, you can choose not to feel pain?
You're right, of course, that how we react to things is in great part up to our own interpretation of them. But just because different people interpret things differently doesn't imply that they have control over all of those interpretations.
For example, most people would find being punched in the face to be painful and react badly. Some people regard it as highly erotic and do it for fun. You're never going to convince members of those two groups to just "think themselves" into belonging to the other group.
I think you missed the point, the drugs do nothing. Its the idea that they do something that is the fix.
No, that's not what the study says at all. "The point" is that many people are given antidepressants who don't need them (and that isn't groundbreaking news) and that for those people, they don't provide much more than a placebo effect (which, for a temporary condition like situational depression isn't necessarily a bad thing).
For people with actual long-term clinical depression, the study shows that drugs perform very well.
No one has witnessed Macro-Evolution (changes from one species to another).
you are aware this is completely wrong, right? Granted, only Creationists try to invent an invisible line between micr- and macro-evolution, but regardless, speciation has been observed and documented numerous times. I think your education about Evolution is about 50 years out of date.
Take your penis, now bend it towards your anus. If your penis is long enough, you'll be able to insert it. And there you go! You are now fucking yourself.
You could try asking people to put a specific random word in their message subject when they write you, that way you know they've at least read your profile. It seems a little offputting, but for any attractive woman I think most guys realize you're inundated with messages and can use a tool like that to help decide which ones to read first when looking at a list of 100 messages. Or you could just move to Austin where we loves us some nerdy girls and guys.
I can attest to the fact that I get more messages than I can go through in a reasonable amount, which makes singling out the people I'd like to talk to pretty difficult...It would also be great if there was a higher demand for girl nerds
I guess my mind is trying to wrap around this seeming contradiction. Or am I being overly optimistic in assuming the people writing you have bothered to read your nerdy profile?
But I agree with you 100% on the mail filtering, it would cut down on 90% of the useless messages my sister and friends get on OKCupid (as a guy of course I only get 3-4 messages on a good day:P ).
No, if you ask they don't stamp a US Passport. It's the same as in Israel, because other middle eastern countries won't admit someone with a stamp from Israel, if you ask they'll just stamp a temporary page for you that you can get rid of after you leave.
Can't you legally visit Cuba by flying through Mexico? I have friends who have done this.
No, it's illegal for an American to go under any circumstances (other than "educational" trips and a few exceptions like that), though it is rarely enforced. So yes, plenty of people go through another country, but you can't tell the guys at customs and immigration you were there on your return or you may find yourself getting fined.
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I had to get fingerprinted to get a drivers license in Texas and that was 10 years ago.
I got my first drivers license in Texas in 1991 and didn't have to give fingerprints. I had to get a license in Texas again (from scratch) two years ago and didn't have to give fingerprints.
We do that already. I can't think of any first world country where birth control isn't completely normal and accepted by most as a matter purely of convenience and economics. There's no reason to expect that not to be the case with every other country as they catch up, since every country so far has behaved the exact same (economically inevitable) way. Nobody is expecting infinite population growth, but the idea that a permanent global population collapse is only a decade or two away is equally silly.
Yeah, pretty much every MAJOR fundamental technology. The wheel, electric lights, refrigeration, the integrated circuit, printing press, internal combustion engine, etc. Sure, every one of those has negative consequences as well, but you'd be pretty hard-pressed to say that any of them have negative consequences that outweigh the positive. The only controversial one on that list would be the internal combustion engine, and there the issue has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the use of convenient (but limited and polluting) fuels.
Cheap and easy desalination would be right up there with irrigation and crop rotation in terms of basic technologies that would enable population growth with minimal negative impact.
I can't even tell if I'm an optimist or a pessimist by this standard, since it seems clear that both cases are true. I don't know why it is pessimistic to believe population will grow to 9 billion, I'd think that was the "good news" scenario, where mortality declines and resources are used more effectively, the way both trends have gone for the past several hundred years.
Sure, when a society gets to a certain economic and technological stage, your birth rate declines (and in some first world countries is already below the replacement rate). So as the rest of the world catches up to our standard of living, we'll eventually reach some sort of rough global population plateau, but I seriously doubt we're going to hit that limit in a matter of decades. Africa could easily hold another one or two billion people with no new technology, just economic maturity.
Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.
Things don't need to be heated in space, they need to be cooled. Radiation is generally not a very efficient way to get rid of waste heat, so it's usually quite warm in any enclosed space. So no, you can't really keep stuff cool without active refrigeration, which generates heat of its own that has to be radiated, so you don't want to do any more than necessary.
Indeed, I've been pulled over a half-dozen times in my life (never gotten a ticket, so I'm not terribly reckless) and I'd say that half the cops were absolute paragons of professionalism who I raved about afterwards. I would have happily posted great "reviews" of them the same way I've posted about good doctors I've encountered -- in part precisely so that if they read it afterwards they'd know their skill and attitude was genuinely appreciated by joe public and it wasn't just some guy kissing ass to get out of a ticket.
So you think Apple shouldn't patch security vulnerabilities, just because some people have used those vulnerabilities for good things?
You're certainly not *required* to update your iPhone, it will continue to work the same as it did the day you bought it.
Apple's attitude has clearly been of complete indifference to the hacking that goes on. They're not spending any energy trying to stop it, they're not spending any energy trying to help it. Some updates broke the hacked phones (by fixing the vulnerabilities they relied on), other updates didn't. The last update actually restored some previously "bricked" hacked iPhones to working order.
Any time the subject of hacking iPhones comes up in public statements from Apple execs, you can practically hear their shoulders shrugging.
Congress as a whole always has low approval ratings, "everyone else's congressmen" are always hated. People rate their own congressmen in the 80s-90s, which is all that matters come November (unless Congress does specific, party-driven ideological things that turn off voters as a whole, which hasn't happened, the only affect this Congress' unimpressive record might have is to suppress voting by Democrats who feel let down).
Because, separate from the maximum you're willing to pay under any circumstances, is your desire to get it at the least possible amount. That means being aware of competitors and their activities -- if someone else lists the same item for less money, I'd prefer to buy the second one at half price than to pay the maximum amount for the first. In between the beginning and end of a single auction, other information comes into the possession of both the buyers and the sellers which can cause the perceived value of the items to change.
If 20 different people are selling an identical item in auctions that close during the next 6 hours, it would be stupid to put in your max allowable bid on the first item and then let the 10th one expire with no bids because everyone who needed one already "won" an earlier auction at their max allowable amount.
I'd bet against it, too, but there's nothing in evolutionary theory itself that *requires* dinosaurs to go extinct before man. There is more than enough evidence to believe that was the historical case, but if we dug up evidence tomorrow that showed some dinosaurs managed to eke out an existence in some particular environmental niche for millions of years after we thought they were extinct (ala "Nessie"), it would not necessarily change our our understanding of human evolution.
I believe the original poster was asking "why are we here" in the philosophical sense, which religion answers but science does not.
Well yes, but it's immaterial to the point. Whether it is God or aliens or time travelers, saying "some intelligent designer did it" is of no scientific value, because all it does is add a layer of needless complexity to the question without offering any real answers.
Well, I didn't make any statements about interpretation so I don't know how I could have underestimated it. Indeed, most of the details of a field change quite a bit over time, as new evidence comes in. Most scientists don't view this as a flaw, this is the nature of learning -- the more you know, the more you know you don't know, and then as you learn new things you realize the things you *thought* you knew were only approximations of the truth because you weren't yet able to grasp the subtle details. The shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics was one of those learning stages, but you'd be hard-pressed to say the study of gravity was flawed or half-assed simply because Newton didn't get everything right.
Evolutionary theory has certainly required some pretty spectacularly unintuitive predictions that were tested and found to be true.
As Jardine pointed out, there's a big difference between saying "dinosaurs and humans living at the same time would disprove evolution" and saying "humans existing before any primates or other mammals would disprove evolution".
Sure, dinosaurs living long after we thought they were extinct, or humans living long before we thought they came to be, would cause a lot of current biological timelines to be thrown off completely, and entire careers would be thrown out the window while the past few centuries of data were looked at all over again.
But there's nothing in evolutionary theory that says we can't be wrong about the exact timing of things, only that some things have to happen in a certain order. There's nothing in our understanding of the evolution of man that *requires* dinosaurs to be extinct before homo sapiens could be born. We only require that other primates existed before man, and certain other organisms before them, and certain others before them. What was happening in completely separate biological trees at the same time is certainly of great scientific importance, but not necessarily of evolutionary importance to the evolution of man.
It doesn't -- ID isn't disprovable, precisely because it isn't scientific. ID says "God did it". That's not of much use in a science class, because there's nothing scientific you can learn from that statement.
No, evolution says nothing about dinosaurs and humans being unable to live at the same time. We're from two completely different evolutionary trees -- reptiles and mammals. Geologists and paleontologists would be pretty shocked if such a thing were to be found, but evolution wouldn't be affected in any significant way.
There are, indeed, numerous things that COULD be found or occur that would disprove evolution, yet none of those things ever has. The fact that such things are able to be spelled out ahead of time, and then tested, is precisely what makes evolution science, and ID not science.
Evolution has nothing to say about the reasons we are here or how things began. It is not a religion, and requires no faith. You can be a staunch creationist opposed to evolution and you will get the exact same experimental results with DNA manipulation, genome sequencing, carbon dating, and fruit fly reproduction, as a fervent believer in evolution. Predictable, repeatable results independent of the experimenter are the hallmark of real science -- evolution has many, and ID has none.
It is indeed ONE OF the most iconic images in the world. Regardless of one's religion.
And, for what its worth, Muslims are quite familiar with the popular western images of Jesus. In their faith, he is one of the messengers of God, they just don't believe he was the son of God.
As opposed to our great system, where 2/3 of the people get equally mediocre care, 1/3 get horrible emergency-only care, and we pay twice as much for the privilege.
So if I shoot you, you can choose not to feel pain?
You're right, of course, that how we react to things is in great part up to our own interpretation of them. But just because different people interpret things differently doesn't imply that they have control over all of those interpretations.
For example, most people would find being punched in the face to be painful and react badly. Some people regard it as highly erotic and do it for fun. You're never going to convince members of those two groups to just "think themselves" into belonging to the other group.
No, that's not what the study says at all. "The point" is that many people are given antidepressants who don't need them (and that isn't groundbreaking news) and that for those people, they don't provide much more than a placebo effect (which, for a temporary condition like situational depression isn't necessarily a bad thing).
For people with actual long-term clinical depression, the study shows that drugs perform very well.
Hopelessness is, indeed, one of the symptoms of major depression. No doubt your years of clinical training have given you this amazing insight.
you are aware this is completely wrong, right? Granted, only Creationists try to invent an invisible line between micr- and macro-evolution, but regardless, speciation has been observed and documented numerous times. I think your education about Evolution is about 50 years out of date.
Gravity. No supernatural forces necessary.
Whoops!
You could try asking people to put a specific random word in their message subject when they write you, that way you know they've at least read your profile. It seems a little offputting, but for any attractive woman I think most guys realize you're inundated with messages and can use a tool like that to help decide which ones to read first when looking at a list of 100 messages. Or you could just move to Austin where we loves us some nerdy girls and guys.
I guess my mind is trying to wrap around this seeming contradiction. Or am I being overly optimistic in assuming the people writing you have bothered to read your nerdy profile?
But I agree with you 100% on the mail filtering, it would cut down on 90% of the useless messages my sister and friends get on OKCupid (as a guy of course I only get 3-4 messages on a good day
No, if you ask they don't stamp a US Passport. It's the same as in Israel, because other middle eastern countries won't admit someone with a stamp from Israel, if you ask they'll just stamp a temporary page for you that you can get rid of after you leave.
No, it's illegal for an American to go under any circumstances (other than "educational" trips and a few exceptions like that), though it is rarely enforced. So yes, plenty of people go through another country, but you can't tell the guys at customs and immigration you were there on your return or you may find yourself getting fined.