Dude, I'm totally with you. Although I just got married a couple of months ago, so I have to renege on that claim now, but as a single guy I agree with you completely.
Basically, a new way of doing this comes into being, and suddenly there is an 'explosion' of examples of that pattern in use for all kinds of different and often unrelated goals.
The example I learned about in university was the explosion of hominids after bipedalism was evolved. Suddenly, the African savannah was inundated with all these new weird and wonderful bipedal apes walking around taking benefits of the advantages afforded by bipedalism. Eventually, all but one of them (Homo sapiens) die out through direct or indirect competition.
Coming back to web 2.0 - a new way of doing things comes to light (i.e. AJAX), and people use it for myriad different applications. Those applications that actually deliver the goods stay and evolve and those that don't deliver are weeded out by market forces (natural selection).
Gods, I miss being a student and learning this more-or-less useless stuff...
You realize it was an analogy, right? In reality we're not talking about linear walking on a 3-D sphere. We're talking about walking through a world of thousands of dimensions (the number of possible genes). Two seperate populations, seperated (i.e. no interbreeding) over a million years will diverge to a large degree.
"If the Watusi and Mbuti had experienced macroevolution, one tribe would have wings and the other would have venom and fangs." Did you read the parent post? The difference is time. To go back to his walking analogy, he's saying they've walked in opposite directions for 30 seconds and are 20m apart. If this continued for a million years - well they'd be a lot farther apart.
The current difference in their height is equivalent to the 20m in walking distance. This is rather small in both scope (as you agree) and in the time taken to evolve (I don't have any numbers but likely not more than a few thousand years, if not MUCH less). If there was no gene flow between the two tribes for millions of years, you would see *differences* equal to wings and fangs at the end of that time.
1) How far would the money in the B&MGF go towards creating a permanent settlement in space (moon, Mars, etc.)?
2) Is it completely selfish to think this would be a better way to spend the money than on world health? (I say this as a relatively well off Canadian with no one I know dying from starvation or AIDS.)
Here's one way around the Fermi paradox: Galactic police.
I'm assuming that the theory of natural selection applies to all life everywhere. Maybe that's a false assumption, but I have no reason (in my ignorance) to think that the assumption is false.
So all life is in competition. It is the default state. Part of the competition is the desire to reproduce and expand. Humans have already shown that when a more 'advanced' group meets a less 'advanced' group, it spells disaster for the less advanced group. Likely all advanced aliens contacting us would be disastrous to us whether it was intentional or not.
If an early civilization realized this, they could have developed the power to stop other groups from interfering from one another - somehow setting up each civilization in its own 'reserve'. Perhaps once (or 'if') any group developed to the stage when they are not belligerent expansionists, they are welcomed into the 'elite' groups of galactic citizens.
I'm not talking about God or anything here. Simply more advanced species evolved through simple natural selection who recognize that competition is not always a good thing.
I've heard the argument that the States won't change to the metric system because it gives their businesses an advantage in dealing with other American companies. A reasonable analogy is they speak a code language that others have to fight to understand but comes naturally to them. For companies outside the US, there is a cost associated to converting. It provides Americans with a way to impose a tariff to protect US business, but without actually doing something the WTO could complain over.
And since we're at it - to all the Brits, Irish, Aussies, Japanese, etc. out there... When are you gonna learn to drive on the right side of the road? I'd argue that's at least as disruptive to a nice happy global family as Americans using an outdated measuring system. Surely driving on the left has caused MUCH more physical harm than the Imperial system ever has.
Oh yeah - UK, Denmark, Sweden - get the Euro.
And just to stir the pot a little more - English really has become the global language. Two years living in Holland and meeting less than 10 people who weren't completely fluent in English just sealed it for me. So can't we do away with those other funny languages? Or at least make English a national language of each country, much like India?
Bottom line - why can't we all be like me?:)
(Yes I realize I'm getting more and more self centred, but I was on a roll.)
Then you are the one who should be shouting the loudest. The problem with the moderates is that they enable the zealots. If there were no moderates backing the wackos - or better, refuting them - it would be easy to dismiss them.
Thank you so much for that. Maybe because this whole thing is so sad, but that made my stomach hurt from laughing. I can't drink my Canada Dry or I'll spit it up on the screen...
As scary as it sounds, my friend's Christian fundamentalist grandfather has said for 15 years that "'we' must have lots of kids because the Muslims are and we can't let them outnumber us."
Am I the only one who thinks we should agree to leave this new island pristine and uninhabited and study it as nature takes hold? I think it would be fascinating to watch as plants then birds then whatever else begin to colonize the island. Perhaps in a few hundred to a few thousand years we'd see some natural selection a la Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands.
"Most people aren't concerned with those costs since the insurance pays for it..."
Aye, there's the rub. People pay all this money into insurance to cover everyone else's claims then once it's their turn to claim, they think "Hell, I've paid for everyone else, now they can pay for me." And they get the expensive drug.
Same thing happens with all insurance - do you really think it costs $500 for a new bumber on a car? They can charge that because it's (usually) covered by insurance. If your repair is covered by insurance, do you go to the cheapest place to get the work done, or the big bucks place? Yup, me too.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, insurance is the best possible business to be in, because the more you pay out, the more you can justify charging and the more your "skim off the top" will be.
I'm not saying I have an alternative - just that insurance isn't a perfect solution to these problems.
Well, it encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life. And that's very sad. But it's even sadder if they are actively discouraged from understanding by a systematic attempt in the opposite direction, which is what many religions actually are. But that's only the first of my many reasons for being hostile to religion.
I'm no expert, but I believe the air is actually about 18-20% oxygen.
And I think you would get the 80% nitrogen from - well the air. When we breathe, we breathe in 80% nitrogen, but breathe it right back out. We don't metabolize it (into carbon dioxide) like we do with oxygen.
Perhaps. But do you think the planet is in better or worse shape because of human 'stewardship'?
Going back to the quote, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." I find it difficult to read 'subdue' and 'have dominion' as meaning 'take care of'.
I would suggest that humans do not need to multiply (at the rate we are now) and that the earth is sufficiently full of humans. I think we need to co-exist with nature as I co-exist with my friends and family, not 'subdue' and 'have dominion' over them.
Whoa - I never read the next part... It gets better:
God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
How much got screwed up by the Bible Genesis 1:27 "God created man in his own image."
Thanks to that phrase, people think humans are superior to all other forms of life. Everything else was put there for us to exploit. We don't have to live in any sort of harmony, it's all just for the consumption of us superior beings.
Don't get me wrong, I eat cows, pigs, and all that with the best of them. But I do that because I'm an omnivore, not because I'm superior to a fish.
...why would it matter if it was "homegrown" or "imported" as it were?
Interesting question - I don't have a bullet proof answer, but to me it feels like the difference between native and introduced species in Australia (for example). You can say that everything was introduced at some point, but somehow there is a difference. Not very scientific, I freely admit, but still at least somewhat valid (to me).
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone here played AGOT RPG? I got the book for Christmas last year and haven't really done much with it.
Any word one way or the other?
Dude, I'm totally with you. Although I just got married a couple of months ago, so I have to renege on that claim now, but as a single guy I agree with you completely.
Sounds like classic biological adaptive radiation.
Basically, a new way of doing this comes into being, and suddenly there is an 'explosion' of examples of that pattern in use for all kinds of different and often unrelated goals.
The example I learned about in university was the explosion of hominids after bipedalism was evolved. Suddenly, the African savannah was inundated with all these new weird and wonderful bipedal apes walking around taking benefits of the advantages afforded by bipedalism. Eventually, all but one of them (Homo sapiens) die out through direct or indirect competition.
Coming back to web 2.0 - a new way of doing things comes to light (i.e. AJAX), and people use it for myriad different applications. Those applications that actually deliver the goods stay and evolve and those that don't deliver are weeded out by market forces (natural selection).
Gods, I miss being a student and learning this more-or-less useless stuff...
Sorry, my bad. I replied to the wrong post.
You realize it was an analogy, right? In reality we're not talking about linear walking on a 3-D sphere. We're talking about walking through a world of thousands of dimensions (the number of possible genes). Two seperate populations, seperated (i.e. no interbreeding) over a million years will diverge to a large degree.
The current difference in their height is equivalent to the 20m in walking distance. This is rather small in both scope (as you agree) and in the time taken to evolve (I don't have any numbers but likely not more than a few thousand years, if not MUCH less). If there was no gene flow between the two tribes for millions of years, you would see *differences* equal to wings and fangs at the end of that time.
Two part question:
1) How far would the money in the B&MGF go towards creating a permanent settlement in space (moon, Mars, etc.)?
2) Is it completely selfish to think this would be a better way to spend the money than on world health? (I say this as a relatively well off Canadian with no one I know dying from starvation or AIDS.)
Here's one way around the Fermi paradox: Galactic police.
I'm assuming that the theory of natural selection applies to all life everywhere. Maybe that's a false assumption, but I have no reason (in my ignorance) to think that the assumption is false.
So all life is in competition. It is the default state. Part of the competition is the desire to reproduce and expand. Humans have already shown that when a more 'advanced' group meets a less 'advanced' group, it spells disaster for the less advanced group. Likely all advanced aliens contacting us would be disastrous to us whether it was intentional or not.
If an early civilization realized this, they could have developed the power to stop other groups from interfering from one another - somehow setting up each civilization in its own 'reserve'. Perhaps once (or 'if') any group developed to the stage when they are not belligerent expansionists, they are welcomed into the 'elite' groups of galactic citizens.
I'm not talking about God or anything here. Simply more advanced species evolved through simple natural selection who recognize that competition is not always a good thing.
I've heard the argument that the States won't change to the metric system because it gives their businesses an advantage in dealing with other American companies. A reasonable analogy is they speak a code language that others have to fight to understand but comes naturally to them. For companies outside the US, there is a cost associated to converting. It provides Americans with a way to impose a tariff to protect US business, but without actually doing something the WTO could complain over.
:)
And since we're at it - to all the Brits, Irish, Aussies, Japanese, etc. out there... When are you gonna learn to drive on the right side of the road? I'd argue that's at least as disruptive to a nice happy global family as Americans using an outdated measuring system. Surely driving on the left has caused MUCH more physical harm than the Imperial system ever has.
Oh yeah - UK, Denmark, Sweden - get the Euro.
And just to stir the pot a little more - English really has become the global language. Two years living in Holland and meeting less than 10 people who weren't completely fluent in English just sealed it for me. So can't we do away with those other funny languages? Or at least make English a national language of each country, much like India?
Bottom line - why can't we all be like me?
(Yes I realize I'm getting more and more self centred, but I was on a roll.)
Then you are the one who should be shouting the loudest. The problem with the moderates is that they enable the zealots. If there were no moderates backing the wackos - or better, refuting them - it would be easy to dismiss them.
Thank you so much for that. Maybe because this whole thing is so sad, but that made my stomach hurt from laughing. I can't drink my Canada Dry or I'll spit it up on the screen...
*stomach hurts!!!*
As scary as it sounds, my friend's Christian fundamentalist grandfather has said for 15 years that "'we' must have lots of kids because the Muslims are and we can't let them outnumber us."
Gods, religion scares me.
From Wikipedia:
p ng
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Metric_system.
I think perhaps what he meant to say was "you need to not be a rocket scientist to figure it out."
Am I the only one who thinks we should agree to leave this new island pristine and uninhabited and study it as nature takes hold? I think it would be fascinating to watch as plants then birds then whatever else begin to colonize the island. Perhaps in a few hundred to a few thousand years we'd see some natural selection a la Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands.
"Most people aren't concerned with those costs since the insurance pays for it..."
Aye, there's the rub. People pay all this money into insurance to cover everyone else's claims then once it's their turn to claim, they think "Hell, I've paid for everyone else, now they can pay for me." And they get the expensive drug.
Same thing happens with all insurance - do you really think it costs $500 for a new bumber on a car? They can charge that because it's (usually) covered by insurance. If your repair is covered by insurance, do you go to the cheapest place to get the work done, or the big bucks place? Yup, me too.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, insurance is the best possible business to be in, because the more you pay out, the more you can justify charging and the more your "skim off the top" will be.
I'm not saying I have an alternative - just that insurance isn't a perfect solution to these problems.
Gods, I love how witty the banter is here. Well, when in Rome...
"Oh yeah, the jerk store called and they're all out of you!"
...awww, it's not even worth answering an AC on this... You might somehow get the idea that you have a valid point.
Two words: fantasy football
Well, except the UI for ranking your players before the draft is godawful. The rest is pretty sweet, or at least a lot of fun.
I'm no expert, but I believe the air is actually about 18-20% oxygen.
And I think you would get the 80% nitrogen from - well the air. When we breathe, we breathe in 80% nitrogen, but breathe it right back out. We don't metabolize it (into carbon dioxide) like we do with oxygen.
Perhaps. But do you think the planet is in better or worse shape because of human 'stewardship'?
Going back to the quote, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." I find it difficult to read 'subdue' and 'have dominion' as meaning 'take care of'.
I would suggest that humans do not need to multiply (at the rate we are now) and that the earth is sufficiently full of humans. I think we need to co-exist with nature as I co-exist with my friends and family, not 'subdue' and 'have dominion' over them.
Whoa - I never read the next part... It gets better:
God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
How much got screwed up by the Bible Genesis 1:27 "God created man in his own image."
Thanks to that phrase, people think humans are superior to all other forms of life. Everything else was put there for us to exploit. We don't have to live in any sort of harmony, it's all just for the consumption of us superior beings.
Don't get me wrong, I eat cows, pigs, and all that with the best of them. But I do that because I'm an omnivore, not because I'm superior to a fish.
Interesting question - I don't have a bullet proof answer, but to me it feels like the difference between native and introduced species in Australia (for example). You can say that everything was introduced at some point, but somehow there is a difference. Not very scientific, I freely admit, but still at least somewhat valid (to me).