What you fail to appreciate is that he changed the rules of the game. Where using previous crops, the world could only support x number of people, using his enriched crops, the world could support X+Y people. He increased the efficiency of agriculture, and thereby bushed back the numeric threshold for 'overpopulation' considerably. And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Are there still problems? Yeah. But this guy was a giant, and too an overwhelming problem and made it a little less insurmountable.
I suppose Scifi can be a great tool for introducing social commentary - Blade Runner, for example. So, maybe they thought that it could stand a fresh facelift in that regard. Or maybe the writers thought they had something new to contribute to the story. As devil's advocate, sometimes retellings can improve on the story.
What's awful is it totally misses what made Dances with Wolves not suck, and it went right for a whole load of imperialistic garbage. The dialog would have to be really ****ing good to make up for "white-guy-proxy is now king-of-the-tribe and will lead the natives to salvation." And that's ignoring the whole "Furries gone mainstream" thing.
I learnt about Avatar the other night, when I saw an ad for it. I looked it up on Wikipedia, read it over, and I thought, "This looks like Dances with Wolves in Space." I was curious whether anyone else made that analogy, so I googled "avatar film dances with wolves."
The first hit I got was "James Cameron: Yes, 'Avatar' is 'Dances with Wolves' in space..."
At this point, it would have to be really damn good for me to see it. I don't need blue aliens telling me how bad White Manifest Destiney was in the United States. But I definitely don't need the overtones of insert-enlightened-human-here going in and saving the tribe^H^H^H^H^H by becoming it's leader, which is what the director was talking about.
I seem to grok that this is more for the brass, to manage day to day things. Obviously, it'd be more like this:
Hi! It looks like you're writing a justification for an un-winnable war against a nebulous enemy. Would you like help? * Get help distancing yourself from the blunders of the previous commander. * Just stumble through this conflict alone.
but so many people seem unwilling to even get up to the speed limit, let alone exceed it by a few miles per hour, as if you're going to get a ticket for 48 in a 45...
Tell that to my officemate, who got a ticket for doing 48 in a 45 zone. It's utter BS, but they do give tickets.
You're bathed in EM fields. Constantly. Even if I went to the furthest point on the globe, I'd still be surrounded by Electromagnetic radiation. Most of it is from space/the sun. The only people I know who claim are allergic to it are vampires. Well, I guess the hungover are also fairly allergic to sunlight. People wouldn't be able to function in a city if they really were allergic to what they claim they are.
... though I suppose most of the Slashdotters would say "Someone really is out to get me!" Maybe. Let's ignore that for a moment, and address a question that arose multiple times in the comments. What possible use was this developed for?
Is there a potential for abuse? Sure. There's lots of things with abuse potential. But I hate to break it to you, but they tracked Pablo Escobar in 93 from his phone. And it's only got easier since. If you want perfect privacy, don't get a cellphone.
Exactly. I have to wonder, if mammals' radiation is the cause of their shrinking genome, what powerful radiation did pufferfish undergo to shed so much of theirs? And where's all the left over diversity from that radiation? Every now and then people publish papers announcing they've solved the C-value paradox. I think it's like a bunch of undergrads who think they've solved the problem of induction the first time they hear about it. Except these guys have Ph.Ds, and get slashdot stories for their whole-lot-of-nothing...
Exactly what the parent said. Saying he has a hormone imbalance is technically true, but it's akin to saying a car that's been in a horrible wreck has dirty oil.
I don't think even if they/did/ lie about it... I don't think it's technically criminal mis-information. But IANAL?
Technically, he did have an hormone imbalance. They (very carefully) didn't lie about that. But that's like saying the a burning building has stuffy air problems. Or saying a sinking ship is moving sluggishly.
I don't know, "wandered off" doesn't really sound so bad... Almost peacefull, eh? If you have a better phrase to communicate how bad a situation, I'd be interested, but otherwise, point taken.
Critical means "Having the Potential to become Disastrous." And when Alzheimer's patients wander, it has just that potential. People who suffer from the condition can become easily lost, confused, and aren't likely to seek out help. In some cases, they can be belligerent, and combative toward people who do want to help. This puts them in direct danger. A humane way of tracking them in the event of these incidents helps empower people, and might allow people to keep lovedones with the condition at home, as opposed to in assisted care where oversight is tighter and they're less liable to wander off and get in this danger. "Critical Wandering Incident" is a good way to describe it, in my opinion.
Not that much. Flagstaff, AZ is/was (I don't know if it still is) a dark sky town, where they restrictions on night time lights pointed up. Also, I think they restrict the sort of lights they can use, but I could be mistaken on that. For the record, I had no problem navigating in the dark while there. Even when I was drunk out of my mind, on a barcrawl through unfamiliar territory, it was quite good. And you could still see the stars at night.
I was wondering the same thing too. Apple prides itself on having gee-wiz hardware to go with. If I was reading the tea leaves, I would guess they couldn't get a reasonably priced parts contract with a co. that supplies Compact Flash, so they went with SD. Then again, it's apple. They're about as inscrutable as they get.
Not even all scientists. I use a lot of programs that are computationally intensive - stuff that you start running and walk away for a week - and I'd guess about half of the new programs are not written to take advantage of parallel processing. For us, this is seriously frustrating because... well, I don't like having to wait a week for the software to return a collection of answers, even using powerful machines.
A big problem for scientific computing - and maybe it's a problem elsewhere, too - is that too many programs are collections of legacy code squashed just-so to make it compilable on a new machine. While I typically applaud the path of least resistance when it comes to work, it makes the software inefficient as heck.
That was not the issue I had. The issue is that you don't really know what you're talking about, and tried to use big words to compensate.
Alas. You've caught me. I'm a naÃve fool who wraps myself in complex verbiage to cover my deep lack of understanding. I will now withdraw in disgrace. Have a cup of coffee. Calm down.
Theories aren't speculation. Theories are well tested, well vetted informational organizational systems that generate (typically) multiple hypotheses. This is speculation, in the same way that my looking at flying squirrels can inform me about bats (in that maybe it can, but it's not a perfect relationship and the relationship needs demonstrated). The legitimacy of their conclusions based on their data is questionable. The authors even disclaimed themselves based on that, so it can't just be me who thought that.
Niche is not just used in an ecological context. There's an "Ecological Niche," but I've heard people talk about "Behavioural Niches," "Morphological Niche," I've even seen people talk about "Genetic Niches," to name just a few examples. Sometimes, the person is linking ecology in to whatever else they're talking about. Other times, they're just talking about an organisms set of values in a field of possible values. It depends on context. You see it in journals, and I've yet to see someone write an angry rebuttal that `so-and-so et al. doesn't understand the term niche` over it. If the idea was communicated, well that is the goal, isn't it?.
Please, stop making up words. We don't seen any morphoniche filled, because there is simply no such thing.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Morphospace.asp And, for a word pedant, you seemed to have used the word 'Theory' incorrectly. The nearby gradstudent seemed to understand me just fine. So.
Clone them, or get some better impressions of soft tissue. I expect we'll eventually get some, given our history of finding such neat things, but I'm not holding my breath because it's like finding a needle in a haystack. Er, well, actually more like finding a rock among a planet full of other rocks.
This is all informed speculation - interesting, and it generates a testable hypothesis, but hardly revealing. There's a hundred different ways to go on the issue until they find impressions of soft tissue. The authors (of the paper, not TFA) hedge their bets heavily by saying that IF sauropods are directly comparable to extant taxa... a bet I wouldn't take myself, since sauropods seemed to form a morphoniche we don't see _appreciably_ filled in extant groups (obvious exception excluded).
For people who want their science undiluted, here's the paper: http://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app54-213.html Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals Michael P. Taylor, Mathew J. Wedel, and Darren Naish Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54 (2), 2009: 213-220
From the time I was in grade school until I started driving, I and all my bus-riding classmates had to remember our bus number. No "bus passes", no boarding stations, etc. We would get out of class, go out to where the buses were, find the bus, and get on it.
Same here. I can't remember a single time anyone ended up in the wrong place, and we managed to get home every time. 'course, some of the bus drivers were probably chronic drunks or mentally unstable in retrospect, but somehow we all managed to get home. I think this has a lot to do with how schools are essentially warehouses in some cities, now. When I left my hometown for life in the bigger world, I remember reading that the new highschool they were building was large enough to land a small aircraft inside. I can't imagine what that did to class-size...
I'm not a builder or an architect, but by way of pure hear-say, I was talking to someone I know who was building his own home about how shallow his roof seemed, and he'd told me there's a way to compute the angle of roof based on the deep 5% of snow years or something like that. It's a trade off between roofing material-usable space-insulation and structural sound-ness.
I'm an Alaskan (and I apologize for Palin), and so as one of those people in a cold place, I can say you _want_ snow on your roof. Snow traps heat in, because snow is a great insulator. Snow is good. And we don't get enough insolation in the winter to pick up much heating from that, anyhow. But in the summer, you have to cool your place (it gets into the high 80s here in Fairbanks) because of how much light is constantly bombarding your home. The other day, it was 95 inside my poorly designed home.
Slashdot Mirror
What you fail to appreciate is that he changed the rules of the game. Where using previous crops, the world could only support x number of people, using his enriched crops, the world could support X+Y people. He increased the efficiency of agriculture, and thereby bushed back the numeric threshold for 'overpopulation' considerably. And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Are there still problems? Yeah. But this guy was a giant, and too an overwhelming problem and made it a little less insurmountable.
Touché.
RedGreen said it best,
Edgar Montrose: That native actor in Dances With Wolves was really good, they shoulda given him the Oscar.
:)
I suppose Scifi can be a great tool for introducing social commentary - Blade Runner, for example. So, maybe they thought that it could stand a fresh facelift in that regard. Or maybe the writers thought they had something new to contribute to the story. As devil's advocate, sometimes retellings can improve on the story.
What's awful is it totally misses what made Dances with Wolves not suck, and it went right for a whole load of imperialistic garbage. The dialog would have to be really ****ing good to make up for "white-guy-proxy is now king-of-the-tribe and will lead the natives to salvation." And that's ignoring the whole "Furries gone mainstream" thing.
I learnt about Avatar the other night, when I saw an ad for it. I looked it up on Wikipedia, read it over, and I thought, "This looks like Dances with Wolves in Space." I was curious whether anyone else made that analogy, so I googled "avatar film dances with wolves."
..."
The first hit I got was "James Cameron: Yes, 'Avatar' is 'Dances with Wolves' in space
At this point, it would have to be really damn good for me to see it. I don't need blue aliens telling me how bad White Manifest Destiney was in the United States. But I definitely don't need the overtones of insert-enlightened-human-here going in and saving the tribe^H^H^H^H^H by becoming it's leader, which is what the director was talking about.
Just say'n.
Tell that to my officemate, who got a ticket for doing 48 in a 45 zone. It's utter BS, but they do give tickets.
You're bathed in EM fields. Constantly. Even if I went to the furthest point on the globe, I'd still be surrounded by Electromagnetic radiation. Most of it is from space/the sun. The only people I know who claim are allergic to it are vampires.
Well, I guess the hungover are also fairly allergic to sunlight.
People wouldn't be able to function in a city if they really were allergic to what they claim they are.
... though I suppose most of the Slashdotters would say "Someone really is out to get me!" Maybe. Let's ignore that for a moment, and address a question that arose multiple times in the comments. What possible use was this developed for?
Research. That's right. Research. Actually finding out what people are doing/eating/etc. is actually really hard. People's recollection is full of holes. Think about it: What were you doing exactly 1 hour ago? Most people will be able to name the task, but not what specific activity in that task they were doing. Where you talking? Where you typing. Where you taking a two minute mental break and staring off into space? Yeah. It's hard to recall these inane details. But things like how many people you have contact with, how often you're in public-public (and not in an office, etc.) are hard to get at. How many times have I been to the café down the street in the last week? Hell if I know. But if I volunteer for a study - let's say, time spent in a restaurant by number of colds people get (totally made up on the spot for the purpose of illustration), this way the researcher doesn't have to trust a potentially erroneous recollection... they can get another, good estimate. It's made to be opt-in, and for research of this, that or the other thing.
Is there a potential for abuse? Sure. There's lots of things with abuse potential. But I hate to break it to you, but they tracked Pablo Escobar in 93 from his phone. And it's only got easier since. If you want perfect privacy, don't get a cellphone.
Exactly. I have to wonder, if mammals' radiation is the cause of their shrinking genome, what powerful radiation did pufferfish undergo to shed so much of theirs? And where's all the left over diversity from that radiation?
Every now and then people publish papers announcing they've solved the C-value paradox. I think it's like a bunch of undergrads who think they've solved the problem of induction the first time they hear about it. Except these guys have Ph.Ds, and get slashdot stories for their whole-lot-of-nothing...
Obviously, the flute was burried by the flood. Because like dinosaurs, flutes were put there by the devil to fool us. Thus the phrase "devil music."
Exactly what the parent said. Saying he has a hormone imbalance is technically true, but it's akin to saying a car that's been in a horrible wreck has dirty oil. I don't think even if they /did/ lie about it... I don't think it's technically criminal mis-information. But IANAL?
Technically, he did have an hormone imbalance. They (very carefully) didn't lie about that. But that's like saying the a burning building has stuffy air problems. Or saying a sinking ship is moving sluggishly.
I don't know, "wandered off" doesn't really sound so bad... Almost peacefull, eh? If you have a better phrase to communicate how bad a situation, I'd be interested, but otherwise, point taken.
Critical means "Having the Potential to become Disastrous." And when Alzheimer's patients wander, it has just that potential. People who suffer from the condition can become easily lost, confused, and aren't likely to seek out help. In some cases, they can be belligerent, and combative toward people who do want to help. This puts them in direct danger. A humane way of tracking them in the event of these incidents helps empower people, and might allow people to keep lovedones with the condition at home, as opposed to in assisted care where oversight is tighter and they're less liable to wander off and get in this danger. "Critical Wandering Incident" is a good way to describe it, in my opinion.
Not that much. Flagstaff, AZ is/was (I don't know if it still is) a dark sky town, where they restrictions on night time lights pointed up. Also, I think they restrict the sort of lights they can use, but I could be mistaken on that. For the record, I had no problem navigating in the dark while there. Even when I was drunk out of my mind, on a barcrawl through unfamiliar territory, it was quite good. And you could still see the stars at night.
I was wondering the same thing too. Apple prides itself on having gee-wiz hardware to go with. If I was reading the tea leaves, I would guess they couldn't get a reasonably priced parts contract with a co. that supplies Compact Flash, so they went with SD. Then again, it's apple. They're about as inscrutable as they get.
Not even all scientists. I use a lot of programs that are computationally intensive - stuff that you start running and walk away for a week - and I'd guess about half of the new programs are not written to take advantage of parallel processing. For us, this is seriously frustrating because... well, I don't like having to wait a week for the software to return a collection of answers, even using powerful machines.
A big problem for scientific computing - and maybe it's a problem elsewhere, too - is that too many programs are collections of legacy code squashed just-so to make it compilable on a new machine. While I typically applaud the path of least resistance when it comes to work, it makes the software inefficient as heck.
That was not the issue I had. The issue is that you don't really know what you're talking about, and tried to use big words to compensate.
Alas. You've caught me. I'm a naÃve fool who wraps myself in complex verbiage to cover my deep lack of understanding. I will now withdraw in disgrace.
Have a cup of coffee. Calm down.
Theories aren't speculation. Theories are well tested, well vetted informational organizational systems that generate (typically) multiple hypotheses. This is speculation, in the same way that my looking at flying squirrels can inform me about bats (in that maybe it can, but it's not a perfect relationship and the relationship needs demonstrated). The legitimacy of their conclusions based on their data is questionable. The authors even disclaimed themselves based on that, so it can't just be me who thought that.
Niche is not just used in an ecological context. There's an "Ecological Niche," but I've heard people talk about "Behavioural Niches," "Morphological Niche," I've even seen people talk about "Genetic Niches," to name just a few examples. Sometimes, the person is linking ecology in to whatever else they're talking about. Other times, they're just talking about an organisms set of values in a field of possible values. It depends on context. You see it in journals, and I've yet to see someone write an angry rebuttal that `so-and-so et al. doesn't understand the term niche` over it. If the idea was communicated, well that is the goal, isn't it?.
Please, stop making up words. We don't seen any morphoniche filled, because there is simply no such thing.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Morphospace.asp
And, for a word pedant, you seemed to have used the word 'Theory' incorrectly.
The nearby gradstudent seemed to understand me just fine. So.
Clone them, or get some better impressions of soft tissue. I expect we'll eventually get some, given our history of finding such neat things, but I'm not holding my breath because it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
Er, well, actually more like finding a rock among a planet full of other rocks.
This is all informed speculation - interesting, and it generates a testable hypothesis, but hardly revealing. There's a hundred different ways to go on the issue until they find impressions of soft tissue. The authors (of the paper, not TFA) hedge their bets heavily by saying that IF sauropods are directly comparable to extant taxa... a bet I wouldn't take myself, since sauropods seemed to form a morphoniche we don't see _appreciably_ filled in extant groups (obvious exception excluded).
For people who want their science undiluted, here's the paper: http://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app54-213.html
Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals
Michael P. Taylor, Mathew J. Wedel, and Darren Naish
Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54 (2), 2009: 213-220
From the time I was in grade school until I started driving, I and all my bus-riding classmates had to remember our bus number. No "bus passes", no boarding stations, etc. We would get out of class, go out to where the buses were, find the bus, and get on it.
Same here. I can't remember a single time anyone ended up in the wrong place, and we managed to get home every time. 'course, some of the bus drivers were probably chronic drunks or mentally unstable in retrospect, but somehow we all managed to get home.
I think this has a lot to do with how schools are essentially warehouses in some cities, now. When I left my hometown for life in the bigger world, I remember reading that the new highschool they were building was large enough to land a small aircraft inside. I can't imagine what that did to class-size...
I'm not a builder or an architect, but by way of pure hear-say, I was talking to someone I know who was building his own home about how shallow his roof seemed, and he'd told me there's a way to compute the angle of roof based on the deep 5% of snow years or something like that. It's a trade off between roofing material-usable space-insulation and structural sound-ness.
Flamebait? Seriously? I was making a serious point about why having snow on the roof is a /good/ thing in areas with cooler temperatures.
I'm an Alaskan (and I apologize for Palin), and so as one of those people in a cold place, I can say you _want_ snow on your roof. Snow traps heat in, because snow is a great insulator. Snow is good. And we don't get enough insolation in the winter to pick up much heating from that, anyhow. But in the summer, you have to cool your place (it gets into the high 80s here in Fairbanks) because of how much light is constantly bombarding your home. The other day, it was 95 inside my poorly designed home.