Alchemists also believed the philosopher's stone (which was the thing they believed would turn base metals into silver and gold) could also heal all forms of illness, prolong life, create perpetually burning lamps, transmute common crystals into precious gems, revive dead plants, create flexible glass and create golems.
Let me just translate these goals into modern language: resources, health, lifespan, energy, money, death, materials, army. These days we believe that nanotechnology will solve all of these problems. Or will it be biotechnology? Gene technology? Drones? IT? MMT? Every time we open a new frontier of understanding into the world, we try to use it to solve our problems. This is why we do this progress thingy. Hoping that the next big thing will solve the problems is no more stupid now than it was then. It is also no more taken literally now than it was then.
What is stupid, and rather common these days, is believing that the philosophers stone was supposed to be anything more than the applied mastery of the alchemical method for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan. What is also stupid is to take word-for-word the language of then, and interpret it to be the language of the now. Have you heard the european medieval legends about the huge ants in India? Those ants were said to carry gold out from underground for people. Stupid, right? Except the legend was true - it was the best way possible to describe the important qualities of an elephant.
A way to define Qi would be 'the thing that makes acupuncture work'. Since acupuncture works, there must be something to make it work. Thus, empirical proof. If you go and practice some certain schools of meditation or martial arts, you will also find first-hand proof of this something.
Getting to the root cause has not been that much on the agenda of the eastern worldviews. Unlike the western world, that seeks to identify causation, the eastern cultures have more interest in correlations. In the center of a certain cluster of correlations then lies something that has been named Qi.
Homeopathy I would classify under placebo most probably, but I do not know much about that. While medicine probably could make some use of another method of administering placebo, I'm afraid it is detrimental for the general populace to believe in something that has such a wtf modus operandi.
The question of whether the method or the answer is important has also been debated in western philosophy. You might want to look at 'justified true belief' versus Gettier, and then Wittgentsein's ladder. Since it is by definition not provable that the input of any induction is sufficient and/or true, no method to reach an answer can be 100% relied upon. But for exactly the same reasons, it is possible that the answer is still 100% true!
Actually, Newton was an alchemist foremost. He only did physics and calculus to help with his alchemy. And no, alchemy was not the crackpot gold-seeking they teach it was in history class. Promises of gold were and still are what gets you the funding. Alchemy was a larger discipline concerned with truth about the world, a kind of philosophy 2.0 that finally recognized the need for empirical data and experiment; the most advanced worldview up to that point. Later, as it progressed, physics and chemistry were branched out from it, other parts merged into medicine, philosophy and humanities.
For what I gather, spaceX is mostly made up of ex-NASA people. From that it follows that spaceX probably did not invent the wheel, but simply copied and improved the one invented (and paid for) by NASA.
So, while spaceX stuff is better than the NASA stuff, it is not because spaceX is somehow hugely better at what they do. It is just that NASA paid for the initial development of space technology, and folded soon after delivering some proof-of-concept stuff. SpaceX was then simply able to pick up where NASA left off and beeline straight for the economy-of-scale phase.
the rise in mobile devices will continue and Perl will need to evolve to work with that
Does this mean Perl is considering to jump on to the tablet bandwagon? I cannot even imagine what that would mean for a programming language. All I do know is that we have lost many a great seamen to the sirens of tabletia. Shipwrecks, shipwrecks everywhere.
By that logic, you would want to do everything by yourself. Well, if you are a fisherman, you probably will not start a bank yourself even if being a bank looks profitable. Unless you are from Iceland, that is. There is a thing called the division of labour which says that if each of us specialize, we will get more stuff done as a whole. This is what built the civilization. Also, if you are looking into investing, you can choose between a high-risk high-profit endeavour, like building chips for your own mining operation, or a low-risk low-profit endeavour, like building chips for other's mining businesses. By going the second route, you can hedge yourself against the uncertain final success of bitcoin, while pulling your profit from the general public's current and certain interest in bitcoin.
Let me get straight to the point then. The existence of god has neihter been proved nor disproved scientifically, yet Dawkins goes around preaching about the "fact" of nonexistance. I call for a separation of church and science - a scientist should not be anything but agnostic concerning matters that have not been prooven nor disproven. And don't even get me started on any other world-describing/explaining discourses that are older than science - hogwash, they are said to be. Furthermore, even after we accept for a scientific fact the knowledge that kids should not talk to strangers, we still won't accept the Little Red Riding Hood for more than just fiction for kids.
A common non sequitur I see in the science circles goes something like this: First, there is the scientist who is there to check out every idea out there. Second, the scientist somehow becomes certain that what has not been checked is not there. I mean, there is a logical fallacy here. Between the things that have been proved to exist and the things that have been proved not to exist, there lies a gray area of things that have neither been proved to exist nor been proved not to exist. Somehow your regular scientist does not differentiate the gray area from the things proved not to exist. This blind spot of course acts like a censorship mechanism, limiting scientific discourse. Where do you think this error comes from, and what could be done to improve the status quo?
Grow up. No war has ever been fought on the reasons of morality. There are only three reasons for a war: power, resources and land. Which, of course, are pretty much the same as long as you keep your shit together somewhat. Morality in a war is never more than a popular justification. The US Civil War? Not about the slaves, but it did use the promised freedom of slaves as a way to use them behind enemy lines. The invasion of Iraq? Not about freedom or democracy, but about keeping the dollar as the currency of oil trade. I dare you to find one that was really about morality.
For what i gather, government bonds are not much different from printing money. They are still injected into the economy out of thin air. The reason they print money in the form of bonds is supposed to be that these are believed to not cause (that much) inflation because they pay out interest. Which I have trouble wrapping my head around. But it more seems to me that bonds are a preferred way because of PR reasons. If they just print more money, everybody will be unhappy because of the indirect taxing and inflation. Everybody also might just go short on the sovereign currency, taking their business elsewhere. But issuing bonds gives the first buyers - the mayor banks - a chance to make a profit out of bond reselling and/or interest. This makes them go around singing happy songs about the bonds to everybody. It also creates a less painful route for the fresh print enter the economy - by the time they reach the more general public, they have already been through one circle of the games, having created a chain of trust behind them. This buys public acceptance and thus legitimizes the bonds. Going to the US, legitimization is very important, because the US budget deficit is around 50% now. This is the national debt clock issue. The public is made to be worried by saying this is the amount of debt owed to someone, but this is just political rhetoric, hardly accurate. A more fitting description for the national debt would be "the amount of bonds and newly printed money that has been put out there up to this point". While it is certainly true they do borrow some money (why shouldn't they, if they can), it is also certain it will never be payed back in any other way than issuing more bonds. Any interest will of course also be serviced by new bonds. This is why it is important for the US to have a preferrably triple-A rating. Dealers usually have policies to only deal in bonds of a certain rating - every time the US loses a rating, it will become more difficult to push out new bonds. Were they to fall to a certain low point, they will surely enter a spiral of death, taking the country and much of the world with it. Everybody of course knows the US bonds are junk, but as long as they have a good rating, they are at least liquid junk, which enables business on them. Which brings us to the question, how can the US sustain such an enormous bond output, without flooding the market or suffering the results thereof? This is got to do with two facts: being the world reserve currency and being the currency of oil trade. Being the reserve currency means that there is a big demand for dollar, which will be bought and taken out of circulation right away, therefore not creating inflation. Being the oil trade currency also means a lot. Oil is the lifeblood of our civilization. Nohting moves without it. Everything is made out of it. Everybody who wants to buy oil first has to buy dollars. Since everybody needs oil, everybody constantly has to buy dollars. The relative importance of this is still debated, but it is gaining more acceptance that the entire US Middle East policy is based solely on the need to keep the dollar the main currency of the oil trade. The reason of the Iraq invasion? Saddam switched his oil trade to Euro. The reason for the yet-to-happen Iran invasion? The Iranian Oil Bourse, which was created for the exact reason of breaking the dollar's monopoly.
As to how long all this will be sustainable, I don't know. The US might not be capable to take on Iran, in which case the market for dollar might take a strong hit in the mid-to-long term. The Chinese hold vast reserves of dollar bonds. AFAIK they are currently using these to buy up production around the world, but any attempt of theirs to sell bonds on a large scale would mean making them next-to-worthless. If they feel ballsy, they might still decide to short the bonds, probably destroying the US (and much of the world economy) in hours. Other than that, mostly everybody has an intrerest to keep the dollar afloat, even if this means that the world en
Where I live, the dumpers are usually stupid enough to include some personal information with the trash. Envelopes with ardessess and so on. Take a look and bring the law upon them.
They already have made Nokia their bitch, and that only cost them one incompetent manager. Remember Elop, the Troyan Horse running Nokia? He is handling all the good pieces to Microsoft on a silver plate for free, while scrapping everything not relevant to the Brave New Windows Smartphone Future(TM). Like Nokia's immensely profitable presence in the third world - Nokias featurephones were doing the smartphone revolution everywhere but the West. They had a headstart and were pretty much guaranteed to sell billions, until Elop came around and said 'does not run Windows, scrap it'. So, they already have what they want, and are already scuttling the rest, so why would they want to waste more money on it?
Considering your (and others) disapproval of Gnome 3. And also the controversy around Unity, Kde 4. Do you think there would be hope to create an official free desktop specification or an implementation or project thereof? It would e.g. at it's core hold the promise to offer a classic desktop for those of us who want to get work done? It seems to me that the desktop metaphor is rather mature at this point - in that case we would need someone with an explicit mission to mostly not mess with it. These days people seem to rather want to reinvent it out of boredom or just jump ship to get on the tablet market or follow the next fad or whatever. Would such a project rather unify or fragment the linux desktop?
Drm, yes, there is no other use case for this. But unbreakable, no more than every drm ever - reliant on the 'chain of trust' consisting of hardware, rootkitted operating systems, apps and the vendor, at every step distrusting the user. I wonder how far will this get this time.
Can you give me a link or something on eulexia? Googling it does not seem to give results. But I have been feeling like a white crow because of my dislike of serifs...
Nobody reckognizes TFA as being about phreaking? You know, this kind of stuff dates back ages. Kevin Mitnick even had the superpower to whistle nuclear missiles into flight... True Story(TM).
The Windows 8 maker This is actually quite a clever marketing slogan, it works in so many ways. Considering their new logos and stuff, it seems to me that they are distancing themselves from the Microsoft brand and trying to start clean with the Windows brand in a brave new post-pc era of whatever. And i can feel the marketing do it's work - the brave new era of lightness, sleek, simple and bright, just blossoming into a beautiful flower, once freed from the faint and distant, almost forgotten Mordor of Microsoft. Too bad it is still the same Microsoft.
Then this must be the case. You, sir, are still an indie developer, but he has transcended and "evolved" into the next stage: he is a hipster developer. Sad but true, the indie is the father of the hipster. So it is that you are wrong to look for reason in that one, for the hipster o/s code goes like this:
So whenever we would pause to think something through, to understand something, to get a grip on something, the hipster would already be a step ahead, smiling obliviously on his train of thought, incompetent and unaware of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Alchemists also believed the philosopher's stone (which was the thing they believed would turn base metals into silver and gold) could also heal all forms of illness, prolong life, create perpetually burning lamps, transmute common crystals into precious gems, revive dead plants, create flexible glass and create golems.
Let me just translate these goals into modern language: resources, health, lifespan, energy, money, death, materials, army. These days we believe that nanotechnology will solve all of these problems. Or will it be biotechnology? Gene technology? Drones? IT? MMT? Every time we open a new frontier of understanding into the world, we try to use it to solve our problems. This is why we do this progress thingy. Hoping that the next big thing will solve the problems is no more stupid now than it was then. It is also no more taken literally now than it was then.
What is stupid, and rather common these days, is believing that the philosophers stone was supposed to be anything more than the applied mastery of the alchemical method for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan. What is also stupid is to take word-for-word the language of then, and interpret it to be the language of the now. Have you heard the european medieval legends about the huge ants in India? Those ants were said to carry gold out from underground for people. Stupid, right? Except the legend was true - it was the best way possible to describe the important qualities of an elephant.
A way to define Qi would be 'the thing that makes acupuncture work'. Since acupuncture works, there must be something to make it work. Thus, empirical proof. If you go and practice some certain schools of meditation or martial arts, you will also find first-hand proof of this something.
Getting to the root cause has not been that much on the agenda of the eastern worldviews. Unlike the western world, that seeks to identify causation, the eastern cultures have more interest in correlations. In the center of a certain cluster of correlations then lies something that has been named Qi.
Homeopathy I would classify under placebo most probably, but I do not know much about that. While medicine probably could make some use of another method of administering placebo, I'm afraid it is detrimental for the general populace to believe in something that has such a wtf modus operandi.
The question of whether the method or the answer is important has also been debated in western philosophy. You might want to look at 'justified true belief' versus Gettier, and then Wittgentsein's ladder. Since it is by definition not provable that the input of any induction is sufficient and/or true, no method to reach an answer can be 100% relied upon. But for exactly the same reasons, it is possible that the answer is still 100% true!
Actually, Newton was an alchemist foremost. He only did physics and calculus to help with his alchemy.
And no, alchemy was not the crackpot gold-seeking they teach it was in history class. Promises of gold were and still are what gets you the funding. Alchemy was a larger discipline concerned with truth about the world, a kind of philosophy 2.0 that finally recognized the need for empirical data and experiment; the most advanced worldview up to that point. Later, as it progressed, physics and chemistry were branched out from it, other parts merged into medicine, philosophy and humanities.
For what I gather, spaceX is mostly made up of ex-NASA people. From that it follows that spaceX probably did not invent the wheel, but simply copied and improved the one invented (and paid for) by NASA.
So, while spaceX stuff is better than the NASA stuff, it is not because spaceX is somehow hugely better at what they do. It is just that NASA paid for the initial development of space technology, and folded soon after delivering some proof-of-concept stuff. SpaceX was then simply able to pick up where NASA left off and beeline straight for the economy-of-scale phase.
...awk-ward!
the rise in mobile devices will continue and Perl will need to evolve to work with that
Does this mean Perl is considering to jump on to the tablet bandwagon? I cannot even imagine what that would mean for a programming language. All I do know is that we have lost many a great seamen to the sirens of tabletia. Shipwrecks, shipwrecks everywhere.
My guess is that they just want to ack some pressure on the big ISPs who all want Netflix to cough up for outbound traffic.
By that logic, you would want to do everything by yourself. Well, if you are a fisherman, you probably will not start a bank yourself even if being a bank looks profitable. Unless you are from Iceland, that is.
There is a thing called the division of labour which says that if each of us specialize, we will get more stuff done as a whole. This is what built the civilization.
Also, if you are looking into investing, you can choose between a high-risk high-profit endeavour, like building chips for your own mining operation, or a low-risk low-profit endeavour, like building chips for other's mining businesses. By going the second route, you can hedge yourself against the uncertain final success of bitcoin, while pulling your profit from the general public's current and certain interest in bitcoin.
imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
I'd also go with the fact that braille is 6-bit byte binary. That's about as simple i/o as you can get in this area.
Let me get straight to the point then. The existence of god has neihter been proved nor disproved scientifically, yet Dawkins goes around preaching about the "fact" of nonexistance. I call for a separation of church and science - a scientist should not be anything but agnostic concerning matters that have not been prooven nor disproven.
And don't even get me started on any other world-describing/explaining discourses that are older than science - hogwash, they are said to be. Furthermore, even after we accept for a scientific fact the knowledge that kids should not talk to strangers, we still won't accept the Little Red Riding Hood for more than just fiction for kids.
A common non sequitur I see in the science circles goes something like this:
First, there is the scientist who is there to check out every idea out there.
Second, the scientist somehow becomes certain that what has not been checked is not there.
I mean, there is a logical fallacy here. Between the things that have been proved to exist and the things that have been proved not to exist, there lies a gray area of things that have neither been proved to exist nor been proved not to exist. Somehow your regular scientist does not differentiate the gray area from the things proved not to exist. This blind spot of course acts like a censorship mechanism, limiting scientific discourse.
Where do you think this error comes from, and what could be done to improve the status quo?
And while you're at it, also leave Britney alone! Look at all she's been through!
Grow up. No war has ever been fought on the reasons of morality. There are only three reasons for a war: power, resources and land. Which, of course, are pretty much the same as long as you keep your shit together somewhat.
Morality in a war is never more than a popular justification. The US Civil War? Not about the slaves, but it did use the promised freedom of slaves as a way to use them behind enemy lines. The invasion of Iraq? Not about freedom or democracy, but about keeping the dollar as the currency of oil trade. I dare you to find one that was really about morality.
For what i gather, government bonds are not much different from printing money. They are still injected into the economy out of thin air. The reason they print money in the form of bonds is supposed to be that these are believed to not cause (that much) inflation because they pay out interest. Which I have trouble wrapping my head around.
But it more seems to me that bonds are a preferred way because of PR reasons. If they just print more money, everybody will be unhappy because of the indirect taxing and inflation. Everybody also might just go short on the sovereign currency, taking their business elsewhere. But issuing bonds gives the first buyers - the mayor banks - a chance to make a profit out of bond reselling and/or interest. This makes them go around singing happy songs about the bonds to everybody. It also creates a less painful route for the fresh print enter the economy - by the time they reach the more general public, they have already been through one circle of the games, having created a chain of trust behind them. This buys public acceptance and thus legitimizes the bonds.
Going to the US, legitimization is very important, because the US budget deficit is around 50% now. This is the national debt clock issue. The public is made to be worried by saying this is the amount of debt owed to someone, but this is just political rhetoric, hardly accurate. A more fitting description for the national debt would be "the amount of bonds and newly printed money that has been put out there up to this point". While it is certainly true they do borrow some money (why shouldn't they, if they can), it is also certain it will never be payed back in any other way than issuing more bonds. Any interest will of course also be serviced by new bonds.
This is why it is important for the US to have a preferrably triple-A rating. Dealers usually have policies to only deal in bonds of a certain rating - every time the US loses a rating, it will become more difficult to push out new bonds. Were they to fall to a certain low point, they will surely enter a spiral of death, taking the country and much of the world with it.
Everybody of course knows the US bonds are junk, but as long as they have a good rating, they are at least liquid junk, which enables business on them. Which brings us to the question, how can the US sustain such an enormous bond output, without flooding the market or suffering the results thereof? This is got to do with two facts: being the world reserve currency and being the currency of oil trade. Being the reserve currency means that there is a big demand for dollar, which will be bought and taken out of circulation right away, therefore not creating inflation.
Being the oil trade currency also means a lot. Oil is the lifeblood of our civilization. Nohting moves without it. Everything is made out of it. Everybody who wants to buy oil first has to buy dollars. Since everybody needs oil, everybody constantly has to buy dollars. The relative importance of this is still debated, but it is gaining more acceptance that the entire US Middle East policy is based solely on the need to keep the dollar the main currency of the oil trade. The reason of the Iraq invasion? Saddam switched his oil trade to Euro. The reason for the yet-to-happen Iran invasion? The Iranian Oil Bourse, which was created for the exact reason of breaking the dollar's monopoly.
As to how long all this will be sustainable, I don't know. The US might not be capable to take on Iran, in which case the market for dollar might take a strong hit in the mid-to-long term. The Chinese hold vast reserves of dollar bonds. AFAIK they are currently using these to buy up production around the world, but any attempt of theirs to sell bonds on a large scale would mean making them next-to-worthless. If they feel ballsy, they might still decide to short the bonds, probably destroying the US (and much of the world economy) in hours.
Other than that, mostly everybody has an intrerest to keep the dollar afloat, even if this means that the world en
Where I live, the dumpers are usually stupid enough to include some personal information with the trash. Envelopes with ardessess and so on. Take a look and bring the law upon them.
They already have made Nokia their bitch, and that only cost them one incompetent manager.
Remember Elop, the Troyan Horse running Nokia? He is handling all the good pieces to Microsoft on a silver plate for free, while scrapping everything not relevant to the Brave New Windows Smartphone Future(TM). Like Nokia's immensely profitable presence in the third world - Nokias featurephones were doing the smartphone revolution everywhere but the West. They had a headstart and were pretty much guaranteed to sell billions, until Elop came around and said 'does not run Windows, scrap it'.
So, they already have what they want, and are already scuttling the rest, so why would they want to waste more money on it?
Considering your (and others) disapproval of Gnome 3. And also the controversy around Unity, Kde 4.
Do you think there would be hope to create an official free desktop specification or an implementation or project thereof? It would e.g. at it's core hold the promise to offer a classic desktop for those of us who want to get work done? It seems to me that the desktop metaphor is rather mature at this point - in that case we would need someone with an explicit mission to mostly not mess with it. These days people seem to rather want to reinvent it out of boredom or just jump ship to get on the tablet market or follow the next fad or whatever.
Would such a project rather unify or fragment the linux desktop?
what if a giant just wanted to buy Slashdot to shut it down because of the negative press it generates for them?
Easy.. we'll make our own slashdot, with blackjack and hookers. On second thought, scrap the /.
Drm, yes, there is no other use case for this. But unbreakable, no more than every drm ever - reliant on the 'chain of trust' consisting of hardware, rootkitted operating systems, apps and the vendor, at every step distrusting the user. I wonder how far will this get this time.
Can you give me a link or something on eulexia? Googling it does not seem to give results. But I have been feeling like a white crow because of my dislike of serifs...
Nobody reckognizes TFA as being about phreaking? You know, this kind of stuff dates back ages. Kevin Mitnick even had the superpower to whistle nuclear missiles into flight... True Story(TM).
The Windows 8 maker
This is actually quite a clever marketing slogan, it works in so many ways. Considering their new logos and stuff, it seems to me that they are distancing themselves from the Microsoft brand and trying to start clean with the Windows brand in a brave new post-pc era of whatever.
And i can feel the marketing do it's work - the brave new era of lightness, sleek, simple and bright, just blossoming into a beautiful flower, once freed from the faint and distant, almost forgotten Mordor of Microsoft.
Too bad it is still the same Microsoft.
... everybody loves inflatable tatas!
Then this must be the case. You, sir, are still an indie developer, but he has transcended and "evolved" into the next stage: he is a hipster developer. Sad but true, the indie is the father of the hipster.
So it is that you are wrong to look for reason in that one, for the hipster o/s code goes like this:
reason() { return 0; }
commonSense() { return 0; }
realityCheck() { return 0; }
So whenever we would pause to think something through, to understand something, to get a grip on something, the hipster would already be a step ahead, smiling obliviously on his train of thought, incompetent and unaware of it.