Against a fascist totalitarian U.S. (which isn't there yet but is really close now, I think)
Get a grip there, Kos boy.
As long as there's a better than one-to-one ratio of private firearms to adults to wield them, there is no danger of a totalitarian state being able to assume control. Examine the history of Communist China, Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and any other state you deem "totalitarian". What is the common thread to consolidation of power? Yup, firearm confiscation.
And in present U.S. society, it's the allegedly totalitarian-minded party which defends the right to bear arms, the only historical right that has been shown to stop totalitarianism dead in it's tracks, whilst it's the party running around clucking and cooing about loss of rights who are the ones who are bound and determined to take away that particular right, the only one which can protect the rights they profess to be concerned about. Weird, that. It's like they don't believe their own rhetoric. Or they're utterly ignorant of history. Or both, I suppose...
Are you saying flirting is 95% ineffective? You have got to be kidding.
Well, let's assume I am, shall we?
In that case, explain the existence of the site I faux-quoted and its ilk.
Methinks that if I was indeed kidding, there would not exist the market which this class of business caters to. (Or, for that matter, the porn/prostitution/yadayadayada classes of business.) However, since they do exist, we can deduce that the market that they are addressing does indeed exist, and it would appear to further be a reasonable assumption that if people could undercut 95% inefficiency on a consistent basis, then that market would not exist. But it does. So, I am not kidding. QED.
Can you imagine any other form of communication that was 95% inefficient?
Flirting.
Let us pick some text randomly off a googled link and exercise our imagination.
"First for Emailing - UK's only Emailing Academy
We are offering you two free e-courses value $45 each. One is our new success emailing communication programme and the other is our popular lifestyle coaching programme
SUCCESS EMAILING Communication Tips - series of 4 communication tips modules. Designed to get you connecting and interacting more easily and effectively plus monthly success emailing newsletter with tips, quotes and news..."
When there is a large industry which advertises itself in terms like that instead of the original then perhaps there would be a point to be made that email communications are unusually inefficient. In the meantime, well, sure looks to me like anyone who has ever interacted with the opposite sex should have no problem imagining a form of communication in which 5% efficiency would be a striking -- well nigh unbelievable actually -- increase, and somehow that communication medium has not died out in several millions of years.
Well, there is the not-so-subtle difference that a perfectly good boot image of OS 9 (aka "Classic") came with OS X for PPC, so you weren't actually *forced* to use the new OS until OS X 10.4u shipped with the Intel processor switch, and a Carbon app could link against both the OS 9 and OS X versions, so application programmers could start to add OS X only features whilst still retaining compatibility with a customer base that didn't switch boot OSes until they saw a clear benefit to doing so from the OS X-only features available in the latest release of their favorite program. Many, many major programs remained CarbonLib-linked and therefore compatible with OS 9 with only a tiny bit of extra care (although in the last few years many weren't even bothering with that) up until they released a version intended for Intel machines, which requires Mach-o binaries.
Anyway, I diverge into unnecessary detail, but the essential point here is that the individual OS 9 customer decision to change their working environment was generally driven by desire for specific applications providing OS X only advantage, not the fiat of Apple. So 10.0 sucked hard, and 10.1 still sucked, big deal, trip to 'Boot Disk' panel of System Preferences and you've got that sorted. So the early adopters bitched and whined, hey they always do. The community at large didn't get particularly bothered, they carried on cheerfully in Classic and most of them started running OS X fulltime around the time I did with 10.2, when it wasn't sucking for the most part and compelling OS X only featured apps started to ship.
don't have a style of their own,... Simon R. Green?
Oh, come ON. You telling me I can't pick any random page out of any random book Simon R. Green has ever had published, and you wouldn't know it was written by him within half a dozen sentences at the most? Whilst I suppose strictly speaking it isn't literary style exactly aside from "parody", he certainly has an absolutely unique voice.
And strong female characters. Those are cool. Heh-heh. Cool.
Well, Ben, there's nothing that rises to the level of courtroom proof in the way of evidence excavated yet no, but the concept is not exactly new.
Basically, the Haida band, who are the indigenous First Nation of Haida Gwaii (the archipelago which you non-PC foreigners are probably more familar with as "the Queen Charlotte Islands") display such a number of cultural similarities to the Norsemen that many reasonable people find it less of a stretch to presume that there was contact between them than to assume a remarkable cascade of coincidences. Let us take an example, boat design.
Now, contrary to the learned discourse above, these are not actually characteristic of Haida design. There is one other culture that designed its ocean-going vessels with those same "characteristic" traits. Care to guess what that culture was? http://www.geocities.com/dragar.geo/WSP/Pix/longship.gif
Those are just the first two images Google search came up with for each; if you look into it further, you'll find that the similarities are more striking than those two make apparent. Striking enough that when Haida/Tlingit take their canoes on cultural exchanges to Europe, they constantly get questions along the lines of "why did you make a longship out of a single tree trunk and paint it funny?", as Europeans just assume that the design is a conscious imitation of the Norse, not their own.
Also, the Haida are physiologically distinct, rather dramatically so in fact, from every other American aboriginal culture; they are taller, whiter, grow facial hair, and produce significant quantities of brunettes and redheads.
"Marchand also described the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands whom he visited in 1791. He found them not differing materially in stature from Europeans, better proportioned and better formed than the Sitkans and without the gloomy and wild look of the latter. Their color he found did not differ from that of Frenchmen, and several were less swarthy "than the inhabitants of our country places' (Edward L. Keithahn, MONUMENTS IN CEDAR: The Authentic Story of the Totem Pole, Bonanza books, New York 1971:19-23, emphases supplied)."
This is not consistent with Haida mixing with Asian genetic pools, or any other Western North American genetic pool, or hell any other race bordering the entire Pacific for that matter. On the other hand, this is remarkably suggestive of significant admixture with a Scandinavian genetic pool, yes?
Anyhoo, if you'd like to look further into the theory that the "Vinland" of the sagas is actually British Columbia, specifically the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, here's a page for you:
Actually living in British Columbia, I can attest to the plausibility of all the little details. The one that really struck me was his identification of the Oregon grape with the always-problematic 'grapes' of the sagas. As pointed out on this page, the presentation in the sagas does seem facially invalid:
"As for the grapes in the Sagas, James Robert Enterline wrote in VIKING AMERICA (1972): In the Saga of Eirik the Red, after Thorhall the Hunter went off by himself, some writers have inferred that he found grapes and ate of them, becoming intoxicated, for he was discovered on a steep crag where:" he lay gazing up into the air with wide-open mouth and nostrils, scratching and pincing himself and muttering something." The corresp
es, you can be a libertarian rather than a complete Laize Faire economic privatization libertarian.
Actually, your latter characterization is more correctly referred to as "anarcho-capitalist", not libertarian.
The really hard-core philosophical libertarian is anything but, for the simple reason that the really hard-core philosophical libertarian is against the very idea of limited liability corporations, since no one should have a legal way to escape full responsibility for their actions. That makes any social structure even vaguely related to "capitalism" well-nigh impossible. Also anything vaguely related to modern technological society, most likely, but hey, there's a lot of people who think that would be admirable...
Nice to see you admit that your opinions are worthless.
Well, not exactly, I'm saying that my opinions are directly opposed to the AGW-supporting conclusions I'm paid to prove. Those conclusions could very well be right, I don't know. All I'm saying is that simulations are not proof. They match C02 increases very well indeed, since I do a good job of what I'm paid to produce. Their relation to the real world is orthogonal.
And even then, it would only count for your own simulations.
Okay, friend, news flash: All simulations are based on "thesis" + "adjustments to make past predictions substantiate thesis". I could subsitute "my age" for "C02 levels" and the simulations would be well-nigh identical, and with basically the same scientific justification. If the thesis turns out to be correct, well and good -- but simulations of the thesis are not proof of it. Only actual, real-world, measurements are proof. And of those measurements, I think only satellite measurements are unbiased enough to be worth spending any time on. And they show no significant trend line.
My question, what kind of person tries to obfuscate the facts about global warming by trying to smear the researchers, saying they are only in it for the money?... So... are you paid, or a dupe?
Well, I presume you're referring to my other posts in this thread, so let's put it this way.
Were all AGW media-pushed theories to be 100% correct, or underestimated, I would be in a rather privileged position, as I happen to be a Canadian citizen. Were the AGW alarmism pushed by the media to be correct, I would be laughing, because all I would need to do would be to invest my money in Nunavut tundra soon to be the breadbasket of North America as the current American Great Plains dry up; and into the Ellesmere Island Club Arctic properties soon to replace the current Club Med resorts.
However, I just put a shade under a quarter-million of my own money into a development in Ecuador.
So, you tell me. Does that make me paid, a dupe, or... someone who evaluates both the solar theorists' and the AGW alarmists' actual science, and puts his own money where the sense is?
Doesn't matter to me what you think, since the money's sunk now, but go ahead, tell us what you think, and in 10 years we'll come back and figuure which of us is the numbskull.
Well, I *am* claiming -- I can substantiate it if there's some reason I should care about proving it to you, but just take my word for it to save irrelevancy -- to be a top simulation author, which within the context to which you are most probably referring does actually mean MORE authoritative than "top climatologist", since none of them have any fucking clue about anytihing that they haven't measured themselves. (I'd be more specific than that, but that would be discourteous.)
Actually, I'll take back that last paragraph's offer. All climate simulations are written to prove whatever the researcher thinks is the preferred thesis of the source of their funding. Accept that, or don't, it doesn't affect me either way, whatever your opinion is I don't give a shit about confirming or denying it. (Gee, I am --so-- much more relaxed after a long Friday lunch... funny, that...)
"A lot of people can write a paper that looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth what its printed on."
True dat. By 2015 it should be perfectly clear from actual observations whether the solar theorists or the AGW Chicken Littles are right. My bet would be on the first group, but hey I could very well be wrong.
Serious congratulations here, friend. Very __ very __ rarely do I encounter anyone capable of getting past "OIL COMPANIES BAD PANIC GOOD" to at least the minimal sanity level of "without money to pay for the research, research doesn't get done." you display here. Which was pretty much my point, you're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source. Weird how many people think that blindingly obvious principle automatically invalidates all anti-AGW papers, no matter what their actual thesis or supporting evidence, yet somehow have a blind spot as to that same argument would automatically invalidate pretty much all pro-AGW papers as well, and with rather better financial motivation to boot...
And if you follow the trail of alarmists' funding, it leads back to sources with a vested interest in alarmism. Duh.
If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour, which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?
And, indeed, if the truth of climate change is anything other than the media-pushed line that it's all anthropogenic in cause and all negative in effect -- you wouldn't expect anything that might reveal that truth to get funded or studied by funders and researchers whose livelihood depends on continued panic, would you? And at some $50 billion spent on climate research over the last two decades, that's one hell of a lot of motivation to keep the panic at full boil, is it not now?
1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention: 2) 400,000 km^2 reclaimed from desert over the same period. (Remember the panics over desertification back in the '70s? Now there was an honest-to-god(s) no bullshit environmental catastrophe well worth all the panic it was generating and more besides. And you don't hear anything about it any more, do you? Thanks, global warming!) 3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past. 4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature. 5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans. 6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form. 7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps.
Anyway, I could go on here for a while, but if you're seriously interested, this is probably the best site for collecting actual scientific fact (as opposed to computer simulation nonsense) on the real world observed effects of increased temperature and elevated C02 levels. Strangely enough, the positive vastly outweighs the negative.
tough I'm sure some grammar super-Nazi will pull me up on this.
Your speculative deduction is both logical and original, lacking only the minor detail of veracity. There are two common explanations for the usage you cite:
A) It was all a big mistake (technical term, "folk etymology") by Normans. The mess which is the usage of " 's " in English arises from the genitive case of Saxon, which was kinda-sorta adopted, but not consistently. So the fellow who wrote "St. George his Channel" on that map was a Norman who, completely confused by the Saxon name of the place as the locals pronounced it in their genitive case, wrote down the nearest sense he could make of it the way he spoke the language.
B) It was a deliberate attempt to disambiguate. Take the phrase "the King of England's forests". Grammatically, this is ambiguous, as it could mean either "the King of the forests of England" or "the forests of the King of England", and is only parseable because we know that forests and non-forests do not have separate Kings. (A good example of the kind of thing that bedevils natural language AI researchers.) This problem was more vexing in medieval times, when the name of a geographical region, "England" here, could mean either "the lands of the region of England" or "the political ruler of England", so "England's ships" for instance could mean either "the merchant marine crewed by Englishmen" or "the navy of the King of England", which could vary your meaning enormously. "England his ships", on the other hand, unambiguously means the King's navy, and was deliberately adopted for that reason. As the conflation of a region with its ruler died out as a grammatical construct, so did the need for this disambiguation, and thus the possessive case was readopted universally.
> This of course is hogwash. To lose weight you MUST use more than you take in.
Okay, I phrased that inaccurately. What I meant was "without NOTICING THAT YOU ARE cutting back on calories". As in if you have smaller spread out meals with a proper calorie distribution, you won't feel hunger pangs, which is why most diets don't work consistently, people don't have the willpower to resist deprivation feelings. But the closer you go to a grazing model (the "Zone" or "Paleolithic" type diets) and therefore the closer you get to eating only what you need at the moment instead of gorging to store stuff up for later, you'll naturally tend towards eating only a couple hours' worth of calories instead of six to eight hours worth, which will work out for most people to less total intake even though you're actually feeling more full, thus you don't FEEL that you're cutting back. The trick to making that work is basically making your carb portion complex carbs so that you get the energy from them gradually as opposed to the rush and insulin spike from simple carbs.
That's correct, fat will give you the quickest way to feel full. The problem is that you're injesting exactly what you are trying to rid youself of, so that's not a great way to diet.
Actually, it is. That's why Atkins-type diets produce such spectacular (if generally unsustainable) results.
Fat produces short-term energy and sated feelings. However, it is *not* easily stored as fat. What *is* easily stored as fat is carbs, once they're broken down -- particularly processed simple carbs, such as white bread.
Where you get the strong correlation between eating fat and getting fat is that typically junk foods include large amounts of both fat and simple carbs, because that's how to get cheap crap to taste good. The simple carbs are broken down quickly -- how quickly, you ask? Chew a piece of white bread, hold it in your mouth for about 20 seconds, notice that sugar taste? Yeah, about that quickly -- and since none of your metabolism is requesting more energy at the time since it's awash in fat energy, all those broken down carb calories head straaaaaaight for the fat cells.
The ideal solution, for a generally applicable value of "ideal", is to break your eating up into four to six meals, with 1/3 of your calories from healthy fats (avocado, nuts, yadayadayada); 1/3 of your calories from protein; and 1/3 of your calories from *complex* carbs. Best to completely avoid all forms of grains, but at all costs avoid heavily processed white flour type stuff. Then you will, I pretty much guarantee, lose weight without cutting back on calories or increasing exercise, since you're evening out availability and usage of the energy taken in.
Alternatively, you can do a triathlete's daily training worth of ride/bike/swim every day. Then you can eat whatever the hell you want until you feel like bursting, and you will almost certainly still lose weight rapidly. Hell, I've known triathletes that lost weight on a 9000 cal/day diet while training...
Nope. That whole tree thing is mostly cribbed from Mesopotamian traditions, and in those men were naked to demonstrate their state of bestial ignorance; savage naked man acquired knowledge of right and wrong later from the gods when he became their servant and was taught the "Arts of Civilization" including how to spin wool and weave it and how to process plant fibers into cloth. An intriguing echo of this is in Ecclesiastes 3:16-21 (RSV):
"Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness...I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them TO SHOW THEM THAT THEY ARE BUT BEASTS..."
So it's not that man was doing evil, it's that man was a beast. By eating of the tree of knowledge, they become enlightened enough to be shamed by their evidence of bestiality and wish to become clothed, thus taking on a godly aspect. And God found this a threat, because God is a jealous little bitch. (Note that the First Commandment is not "Don't murder" or "Be Nice" or anything like that; no, it's "Me, God, I'm a jealous bitch, and you better not step out!" But I digress.) The Serpent in the Garden is man's benefactor, cluing in Eve that God is a liar -- God couldn't care less if she and Adam died, rather God's concern was that they would become like him, which just wouldn't do. Genesis 3:4-5:
"But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil..."
And just to hammer the point home, the narrator has God repeat back the Serpent's words in verse 22, thus confirming the Serpent's shrewd and penetrating analysis:
"Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil..."
Anyhoo, all snickering at God's insecurities aside, the point here is that if you want to make any sense whatsoever out of Genesis, you need a firm grounding in Mesopotamian theology.
Oh, the original aims of Greenpeace -- namely, stopping whaling of genuinely endangered species, ending toxic/radioactive waste dumping in the oceans, and stopping nuclear testing in oceanic areas (nuclear tests in the Aleutians were the spark that led directly to its creation) -- those were all quite genuine issues that really did need attention drawn to them.
The thing is, once those original aims were achieved (for most reasonable people's purposes, anyway) the bureaucrats running it were faced with the problem of how to sustain their incomes. That led to increasingly more hysterical rhetoric over increasingly less important issues to keep the sheep scared and their donations flowing, until now we've gotten all the way down to the really quite idiotic indeed "issue" this story is devoted to.
As Paul Watson said when he left to form the Sea Sheperd Society, Greenpeace is now "the Avon ladies of the environmental movement". As a one-sentence summation, pretty hard to beat that one.
Too much freedom brings paralysis, because you don't know what choice to make.
Interestingly enough, that's also been suggested as a reason for the radical growth behind incidence of depression in modern society. Fascinating book on it here:
In this he attempts to explain why by any quantifiable measure any member of society at any level in the present day has more riches, more opportunities, and more career options than their counterparts had at any time in history, psychological measures keep insisting that we're more miserable; most spectacularly in the case of females, who have had their career choices open up radically since WWII and have had their incidence of clinical depression skyrocket pretty much in tandem.
To compress an excellent book down to a sentence, your quote above basically gets it almost right. When your options are all but limitless, you can never be sure you've made the _best_ choice... and that's where the depression comes from, your always-optimizing subconscious second-guessing yourself into a breakdown. This applies to everything from what brand of dish detergent you picked at the supermarket to your career choice.
And therefore, we have the paradox that people are actually happier when they have a restricted option of poor choices than when they have an effectively unrestricted option of much better choices; because the first problem is optimizable, the second isn't, and our happiness apparently comes from certainty that we have optimized the available selections, not from the absolute value of the selection.
those of us longtime Macworld and WWDC attendees that Rendezvous (cum Bonjour) lives up to its name
Well, MacWorld yes indeed, as you can expect from getting a large number of healthy mixed sex people together for any avidly shared interest, but WWDC? Since the crowd there almost exclusively conforms to neither of my qualifiers to "people" above, poster must have an amazing ability to find Teh Magic Invisible Babes, or has... undiscriminating... sexual preferences, I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
Against a fascist totalitarian U.S. (which isn't there yet but is really close now, I think)
Get a grip there, Kos boy.
As long as there's a better than one-to-one ratio of private firearms to adults to wield them, there is no danger of a totalitarian state being able to assume control. Examine the history of Communist China, Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and any other state you deem "totalitarian". What is the common thread to consolidation of power? Yup, firearm confiscation.
And in present U.S. society, it's the allegedly totalitarian-minded party which defends the right to bear arms, the only historical right that has been shown to stop totalitarianism dead in it's tracks, whilst it's the party running around clucking and cooing about loss of rights who are the ones who are bound and determined to take away that particular right, the only one which can protect the rights they profess to be concerned about. Weird, that. It's like they don't believe their own rhetoric. Or they're utterly ignorant of history. Or both, I suppose...
please don't whine about linguistic errors.
Fixed that for you.
Are you saying flirting is 95% ineffective? You have got to be kidding.
Well, let's assume I am, shall we?
In that case, explain the existence of the site I faux-quoted and its ilk.
Methinks that if I was indeed kidding, there would not exist the market which this class of business caters to. (Or, for that matter, the porn/prostitution/yadayadayada classes of business.) However, since they do exist, we can deduce that the market that they are addressing does indeed exist, and it would appear to further be a reasonable assumption that if people could undercut 95% inefficiency on a consistent basis, then that market would not exist. But it does. So, I am not kidding. QED.
Can you imagine any other form of communication that was 95% inefficient?
.... neee-ver mind.
Flirting.
Let us pick some text randomly off a googled link and exercise our imagination.
"First for Emailing - UK's only Emailing Academy
We are offering you two free e-courses value $45 each. One is our new success emailing communication programme and the other is our popular lifestyle coaching programme
SUCCESS EMAILING Communication Tips - series of 4 communication tips modules. Designed to get you connecting and interacting more easily and effectively plus monthly success emailing newsletter with tips, quotes and news..."
When there is a large industry which advertises itself in terms like that instead of the original then perhaps there would be a point to be made that email communications are unusually inefficient. In the meantime, well, sure looks to me like anyone who has ever interacted with the opposite sex should have no problem imagining a form of communication in which 5% efficiency would be a striking -- well nigh unbelievable actually -- increase, and somehow that communication medium has not died out in several millions of years.
*looks around* Ah
Well, there is the not-so-subtle difference that a perfectly good boot image of OS 9 (aka "Classic") came with OS X for PPC, so you weren't actually *forced* to use the new OS until OS X 10.4u shipped with the Intel processor switch, and a Carbon app could link against both the OS 9 and OS X versions, so application programmers could start to add OS X only features whilst still retaining compatibility with a customer base that didn't switch boot OSes until they saw a clear benefit to doing so from the OS X-only features available in the latest release of their favorite program. Many, many major programs remained CarbonLib-linked and therefore compatible with OS 9 with only a tiny bit of extra care (although in the last few years many weren't even bothering with that) up until they released a version intended for Intel machines, which requires Mach-o binaries.
Anyway, I diverge into unnecessary detail, but the essential point here is that the individual OS 9 customer decision to change their working environment was generally driven by desire for specific applications providing OS X only advantage, not the fiat of Apple. So 10.0 sucked hard, and 10.1 still sucked, big deal, trip to 'Boot Disk' panel of System Preferences and you've got that sorted. So the early adopters bitched and whined, hey they always do. The community at large didn't get particularly bothered, they carried on cheerfully in Classic and most of them started running OS X fulltime around the time I did with 10.2, when it wasn't sucking for the most part and compelling OS X only featured apps started to ship.
That's why the acronym stands for "Speculative Fiction" these days. Come on, keep up!
don't have a style of their own, ... Simon R. Green?
Oh, come ON. You telling me I can't pick any random page out of any random book Simon R. Green has ever had published, and you wouldn't know it was written by him within half a dozen sentences at the most? Whilst I suppose strictly speaking it isn't literary style exactly aside from "parody", he certainly has an absolutely unique voice.
And strong female characters. Those are cool. Heh-heh. Cool.
Well, Ben, there's nothing that rises to the level of courtroom proof in the way of evidence excavated yet no, but the concept is not exactly new.
."
Basically, the Haida band, who are the indigenous First Nation of Haida Gwaii (the archipelago which you non-PC foreigners are probably more familar with as "the Queen Charlotte Islands") display such a number of cultural similarities to the Norsemen that many reasonable people find it less of a stretch to presume that there was contact between them than to assume a remarkable cascade of coincidences. Let us take an example, boat design.
""Yakutat," or "Northern-style" canoes include a variety of design forms, including a characteristic curve and swelling near the bow. The prow of the canoe gracefully curves up from the water and can be adorned by elaborate carvings."
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Haida_Canoe/canoe.gif
Now, contrary to the learned discourse above, these are not actually characteristic of Haida design. There is one other culture that designed its ocean-going vessels with those same "characteristic" traits. Care to guess what that culture was?
http://www.geocities.com/dragar.geo/WSP/Pix/longship.gif
Those are just the first two images Google search came up with for each; if you look into it further, you'll find that the similarities are more striking than those two make apparent. Striking enough that when Haida/Tlingit take their canoes on cultural exchanges to Europe, they constantly get questions along the lines of "why did you make a longship out of a single tree trunk and paint it funny?", as Europeans just assume that the design is a conscious imitation of the Norse, not their own.
Also, the Haida are physiologically distinct, rather dramatically so in fact, from every other American aboriginal culture; they are taller, whiter, grow facial hair, and produce significant quantities of brunettes and redheads.
"Marchand also described the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands whom he visited in 1791. He found them not differing materially in stature from Europeans, better proportioned and better formed than the Sitkans and without the gloomy and wild look of the latter. Their color he found did not differ from that of Frenchmen, and several were less swarthy "than the inhabitants of our country places' (Edward L. Keithahn, MONUMENTS IN CEDAR: The Authentic Story of the Totem Pole, Bonanza books, New York 1971:19-23, emphases supplied)."
This is not consistent with Haida mixing with Asian genetic pools, or any other Western North American genetic pool, or hell any other race bordering the entire Pacific for that matter. On the other hand, this is remarkably suggestive of significant admixture with a Scandinavian genetic pool, yes?
Anyhoo, if you'd like to look further into the theory that the "Vinland" of the sagas is actually British Columbia, specifically the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, here's a page for you:
http://www.spirasolaris.ca/sbb4g1ev.html
Actually living in British Columbia, I can attest to the plausibility of all the little details. The one that really struck me was his identification of the Oregon grape with the always-problematic 'grapes' of the sagas. As pointed out on this page, the presentation in the sagas does seem facially invalid:
"As for the grapes in the Sagas, James Robert Enterline wrote in VIKING AMERICA (1972):
In the Saga of Eirik the Red, after Thorhall the Hunter went off by himself, some writers have inferred that he found grapes and ate of them, becoming intoxicated, for he was discovered on a steep crag where:" he lay gazing up into the air with wide-open mouth and nostrils, scratching and pincing himself and muttering something
The corresp
... not on my iPhone.
es, you can be a libertarian rather than a complete Laize Faire economic privatization libertarian.
Actually, your latter characterization is more correctly referred to as "anarcho-capitalist", not libertarian.
The really hard-core philosophical libertarian is anything but, for the simple reason that the really hard-core philosophical libertarian is against the very idea of limited liability corporations, since no one should have a legal way to escape full responsibility for their actions. That makes any social structure even vaguely related to "capitalism" well-nigh impossible. Also anything vaguely related to modern technological society, most likely, but hey, there's a lot of people who think that would be admirable...
Nice to see you admit that your opinions are worthless.
Well, not exactly, I'm saying that my opinions are directly opposed to the AGW-supporting conclusions I'm paid to prove. Those conclusions could very well be right, I don't know. All I'm saying is that simulations are not proof. They match C02 increases very well indeed, since I do a good job of what I'm paid to produce. Their relation to the real world is orthogonal.
And even then, it would only count for your own simulations.
Okay, friend, news flash: All simulations are based on "thesis" + "adjustments to make past predictions substantiate thesis". I could subsitute "my age" for "C02 levels" and the simulations would be well-nigh identical, and with basically the same scientific justification. If the thesis turns out to be correct, well and good -- but simulations of the thesis are not proof of it. Only actual, real-world, measurements are proof. And of those measurements, I think only satellite measurements are unbiased enough to be worth spending any time on. And they show no significant trend line.
My question, what kind of person tries to obfuscate the facts about global warming by trying to smear the researchers, saying they are only in it for the money? ... So ... are you paid, or a dupe?
... someone who evaluates both the solar theorists' and the AGW alarmists' actual science, and puts his own money where the sense is?
Well, I presume you're referring to my other posts in this thread, so let's put it this way.
Were all AGW media-pushed theories to be 100% correct, or underestimated, I would be in a rather privileged position, as I happen to be a Canadian citizen. Were the AGW alarmism pushed by the media to be correct, I would be laughing, because all I would need to do would be to invest my money in Nunavut tundra soon to be the breadbasket of North America as the current American Great Plains dry up; and into the Ellesmere Island Club Arctic properties soon to replace the current Club Med resorts.
However, I just put a shade under a quarter-million of my own money into a development in Ecuador.
So, you tell me. Does that make me paid, a dupe, or
Doesn't matter to me what you think, since the money's sunk now, but go ahead, tell us what you think, and in 10 years we'll come back and figuure which of us is the numbskull.
Are you claiming to be a top climatologist?
... funny, that ...)
Well, I *am* claiming -- I can substantiate it if there's some reason I should care about proving it to you, but just take my word for it to save irrelevancy -- to be a top simulation author, which within the context to which you are most probably referring does actually mean MORE authoritative than "top climatologist", since none of them have any fucking clue about anytihing that they haven't measured themselves. (I'd be more specific than that, but that would be discourteous.)
Actually, I'll take back that last paragraph's offer. All climate simulations are written to prove whatever the researcher thinks is the preferred thesis of the source of their funding. Accept that, or don't, it doesn't affect me either way, whatever your opinion is I don't give a shit about confirming or denying it. (Gee, I am --so-- much more relaxed after a long Friday lunch
"A lot of people can write a paper that looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth what its printed on."
True dat. By 2015 it should be perfectly clear from actual observations whether the solar theorists or the AGW Chicken Littles are right. My bet would be on the first group, but hey I could very well be wrong.
Serious congratulations here, friend. Very __ very __ rarely do I encounter anyone capable of getting past "OIL COMPANIES BAD PANIC GOOD" to at least the minimal sanity level of "without money to pay for the research, research doesn't get done." you display here. Which was pretty much my point, you're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source. Weird how many people think that blindingly obvious principle automatically invalidates all anti-AGW papers, no matter what their actual thesis or supporting evidence, yet somehow have a blind spot as to that same argument would automatically invalidate pretty much all pro-AGW papers as well, and with rather better financial motivation to boot...
And if you follow the trail of alarmists' funding, it leads back to sources with a vested interest in alarmism. Duh.
If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour, which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?
And, indeed, if the truth of climate change is anything other than the media-pushed line that it's all anthropogenic in cause and all negative in effect -- you wouldn't expect anything that might reveal that truth to get funded or studied by funders and researchers whose livelihood depends on continued panic, would you? And at some $50 billion spent on climate research over the last two decades, that's one hell of a lot of motivation to keep the panic at full boil, is it not now?
1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention:
2) 400,000 km^2 reclaimed from desert over the same period. (Remember the panics over desertification back in the '70s? Now there was an honest-to-god(s) no bullshit environmental catastrophe well worth all the panic it was generating and more besides. And you don't hear anything about it any more, do you? Thanks, global warming!)
3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past.
4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature.
5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans.
6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form.
7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps.
Anyway, I could go on here for a while, but if you're seriously interested, this is probably the best site for collecting actual scientific fact (as opposed to computer simulation nonsense) on the real world observed effects of increased temperature and elevated C02 levels. Strangely enough, the positive vastly outweighs the negative.
http://www.co2science.org/
tough I'm sure some grammar super-Nazi will pull me up on this.
Your speculative deduction is both logical and original, lacking only the minor detail of veracity. There are two common explanations for the usage you cite:
A) It was all a big mistake (technical term, "folk etymology") by Normans. The mess which is the usage of " 's " in English arises from the genitive case of Saxon, which was kinda-sorta adopted, but not consistently. So the fellow who wrote "St. George his Channel" on that map was a Norman who, completely confused by the Saxon name of the place as the locals pronounced it in their genitive case, wrote down the nearest sense he could make of it the way he spoke the language.
B) It was a deliberate attempt to disambiguate. Take the phrase "the King of England's forests". Grammatically, this is ambiguous, as it could mean either "the King of the forests of England" or "the forests of the King of England", and is only parseable because we know that forests and non-forests do not have separate Kings. (A good example of the kind of thing that bedevils natural language AI researchers.) This problem was more vexing in medieval times, when the name of a geographical region, "England" here, could mean either "the lands of the region of England" or "the political ruler of England", so "England's ships" for instance could mean either "the merchant marine crewed by Englishmen" or "the navy of the King of England", which could vary your meaning enormously. "England his ships", on the other hand, unambiguously means the King's navy, and was deliberately adopted for that reason. As the conflation of a region with its ruler died out as a grammatical construct, so did the need for this disambiguation, and thus the possessive case was readopted universally.
Take your pick.
> This of course is hogwash. To lose weight you MUST use more than you take in.
Okay, I phrased that inaccurately. What I meant was "without NOTICING THAT YOU ARE cutting back on calories". As in if you have smaller spread out meals with a proper calorie distribution, you won't feel hunger pangs, which is why most diets don't work consistently, people don't have the willpower to resist deprivation feelings. But the closer you go to a grazing model (the "Zone" or "Paleolithic" type diets) and therefore the closer you get to eating only what you need at the moment instead of gorging to store stuff up for later, you'll naturally tend towards eating only a couple hours' worth of calories instead of six to eight hours worth, which will work out for most people to less total intake even though you're actually feeling more full, thus you don't FEEL that you're cutting back. The trick to making that work is basically making your carb portion complex carbs so that you get the energy from them gradually as opposed to the rush and insulin spike from simple carbs.
That's correct, fat will give you the quickest way to feel full. The problem is that you're injesting exactly what you are trying to rid youself of, so that's not a great way to diet.
Actually, it is. That's why Atkins-type diets produce such spectacular (if generally unsustainable) results.
Fat produces short-term energy and sated feelings. However, it is *not* easily stored as fat. What *is* easily stored as fat is carbs, once they're broken down -- particularly processed simple carbs, such as white bread.
Where you get the strong correlation between eating fat and getting fat is that typically junk foods include large amounts of both fat and simple carbs, because that's how to get cheap crap to taste good. The simple carbs are broken down quickly -- how quickly, you ask? Chew a piece of white bread, hold it in your mouth for about 20 seconds, notice that sugar taste? Yeah, about that quickly -- and since none of your metabolism is requesting more energy at the time since it's awash in fat energy, all those broken down carb calories head straaaaaaight for the fat cells.
The ideal solution, for a generally applicable value of "ideal", is to break your eating up into four to six meals, with 1/3 of your calories from healthy fats (avocado, nuts, yadayadayada); 1/3 of your calories from protein; and 1/3 of your calories from *complex* carbs. Best to completely avoid all forms of grains, but at all costs avoid heavily processed white flour type stuff. Then you will, I pretty much guarantee, lose weight without cutting back on calories or increasing exercise, since you're evening out availability and usage of the energy taken in.
Alternatively, you can do a triathlete's daily training worth of ride/bike/swim every day. Then you can eat whatever the hell you want until you feel like bursting, and you will almost certainly still lose weight rapidly. Hell, I've known triathletes that lost weight on a 9000 cal/day diet while training...
http://www.amazon.com/Job-Comedy-Justice-Robert-He inlein/dp/0345316509
Enjoy.
Nope. That whole tree thing is mostly cribbed from Mesopotamian traditions, and in those men were naked to demonstrate their state of bestial ignorance; savage naked man acquired knowledge of right and wrong later from the gods when he became their servant and was taught the "Arts of Civilization" including how to spin wool and weave it and how to process plant fibers into cloth. An intriguing echo of this is in Ecclesiastes 3:16-21 (RSV):
"Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness...I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them TO SHOW THEM THAT THEY ARE BUT BEASTS..."
So it's not that man was doing evil, it's that man was a beast. By eating of the tree of knowledge, they become enlightened enough to be shamed by their evidence of bestiality and wish to become clothed, thus taking on a godly aspect. And God found this a threat, because God is a jealous little bitch. (Note that the First Commandment is not "Don't murder" or "Be Nice" or anything like that; no, it's "Me, God, I'm a jealous bitch, and you better not step out!" But I digress.) The Serpent in the Garden is man's benefactor, cluing in Eve that God is a liar -- God couldn't care less if she and Adam died, rather God's concern was that they would become like him, which just wouldn't do. Genesis 3:4-5:
"But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil..."
And just to hammer the point home, the narrator has God repeat back the Serpent's words in verse 22, thus confirming the Serpent's shrewd and penetrating analysis:
"Then the Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil..."
Anyhoo, all snickering at God's insecurities aside, the point here is that if you want to make any sense whatsoever out of Genesis, you need a firm grounding in Mesopotamian theology.
if it even ever was credible in the first place
Oh, the original aims of Greenpeace -- namely, stopping whaling of genuinely endangered species, ending toxic/radioactive waste dumping in the oceans, and stopping nuclear testing in oceanic areas (nuclear tests in the Aleutians were the spark that led directly to its creation) -- those were all quite genuine issues that really did need attention drawn to them.
The thing is, once those original aims were achieved (for most reasonable people's purposes, anyway) the bureaucrats running it were faced with the problem of how to sustain their incomes. That led to increasingly more hysterical rhetoric over increasingly less important issues to keep the sheep scared and their donations flowing, until now we've gotten all the way down to the really quite idiotic indeed "issue" this story is devoted to.
As Paul Watson said when he left to form the Sea Sheperd Society, Greenpeace is now "the Avon ladies of the environmental movement". As a one-sentence summation, pretty hard to beat that one.
Too much freedom brings paralysis, because you don't know what choice to make.
... and that's where the depression comes from, your always-optimizing subconscious second-guessing yourself into a breakdown. This applies to everything from what brand of dish detergent you picked at the supermarket to your career choice.
Interestingly enough, that's also been suggested as a reason for the radical growth behind incidence of depression in modern society. Fascinating book on it here:
The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
In this he attempts to explain why by any quantifiable measure any member of society at any level in the present day has more riches, more opportunities, and more career options than their counterparts had at any time in history, psychological measures keep insisting that we're more miserable; most spectacularly in the case of females, who have had their career choices open up radically since WWII and have had their incidence of clinical depression skyrocket pretty much in tandem.
To compress an excellent book down to a sentence, your quote above basically gets it almost right. When your options are all but limitless, you can never be sure you've made the _best_ choice
And therefore, we have the paradox that people are actually happier when they have a restricted option of poor choices than when they have an effectively unrestricted option of much better choices; because the first problem is optimizable, the second isn't, and our happiness apparently comes from certainty that we have optimized the available selections, not from the absolute value of the selection.
those of us longtime Macworld and WWDC attendees that Rendezvous (cum Bonjour) lives up to its name
... undiscriminating ... sexual preferences, I'd say.
Well, MacWorld yes indeed, as you can expect from getting a large number of healthy mixed sex people together for any avidly shared interest, but WWDC? Since the crowd there almost exclusively conforms to neither of my qualifiers to "people" above, poster must have an amazing ability to find Teh Magic Invisible Babes, or has
I see women/females as being ... less competitive
Ho, ho, ho.
You, my friend, have apparently never encountered more than one woman at a time.
Women are _way_ more competitive than men are in regards to their social pecking order.