i've been writing software since Carter was president and i've noticed a subtle shift in the Indian programmers with whom I've worked. When I first started working with Indian guys they were invariably college graduates from prestige Indian universities augmented with a Masters degree from someplace like U of Mich. In other words, smarter than me. After a few years I noticed the Indian guys just had Bachelors degrees but were still plenty advanced. Today, I work with a really great Indian guy, but his skillset is entry-level.
It doesn't take a Harvard MBA to figure out the appeal of hiring an Indian guy for $400 a month over there versus hiring a guy just like him for $4000 a month here. And this appeal will remain until you run out of smart guys over there. (Or the smart guys there figure out that a big payday is only a plane-ticket away.)
as a working engineer i see outsourcing as a knife held at my throat. but i'm also a Reaganite free trader, so I don't gripe about it. (and the knife is a good thing, it helps motivate me.) the market tends to balance things out. if america is too rich and her engineering graduates too stupid, the work will go overseas until india runs out of smart guys who'll work for cheap or america runs out of money.
and this won't happen. things will balance out. rich spots like the US and Western Europe will outsource work to 3rd world hell-holes until those hell-holes are filled up with cash. After that the idealist in me hopes that whoever works smartest and hardest will win on an even playing field. yeah, i'm an idealist, but i figure it's a better form of "foreign-aid" than anything the UN or the State Department is doing.
(call me a troll for being on the right of Karl Marx.)
The abstract includes this quote, "projectiles generating pressures as high as 250 tons per square centimeter." This may be useful to armorers, but the layperson thinks, "as opposed to what?" Ferinstance, if the kevlar vests that the president's bodyguards or our troops in the field wear have a stopping power of 249 tons, I'll yawn. If this stuff will stop a.357 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the whole world and would blow your head clean off, that's also a useful comparison. If it'll stop a.50 calibre machinegun round at point blank range, that's also handy to know. This 250 tons figure means nothing to me.
I happen to know that back in the (post-Watergate) Reagan 1980s, if any American citizen were to pick up the phone in Mao's office, and ring Brezhnev in the Kremlin for a chat, that the NSA was prohibited by law from intercepting that call. That's the way the law worked back then. (If you think of how NSA works, you can see how stupid this was.) I don't think the Clinton administration or anybody else changed this until after 9/11.
When I heard this story, it was pretty clear to me that this is what the Feds changed.
There's 9/11 and then there's bureaucrats. Thus I'll bet that the people bugging my telephone are from the FBI, not the NSA, simply because the bureau's "turf" is domestic and the other agencies "turf" is international. But what happens when an enemy has part of its operation based locally and another part based overseas? No doubt we need a THIRD set of bureaucrats to cover this contingency.
My experience was with the post-Watergate "reforms" of a generation ago and I thought then that they candicapped the intelligence community for no good reason. They didn't stop the Clintons from using those FBI files that came in so handy during Impeachment. My suspicion is that when DIA did the data mining project called "Able Danger" they used open records in such a way that they violated at least the spirit of the post-Watergate rules and thus the product was destroyed before it could be used to thwart the USS Cole bombing or 9/11.
The real problem is that you have one set of domestic rules that protect the accused of a crime, and necessity dictates that there be a second set of international rules that advance the interests of nations. We can pass laws locally to set the first set of rules, but we can't set the second set of rules without considering what other nation-states are doing against us. The rub comes when these two rules sets differ and get applied inconsistently.
I went to Aeon Flux with a bunch of guys from Work Friday afternoon, and then to a late-night showing of Narnia with some friends from Church. I enjoyed both.
And each makes a cultural / mythic statement, touching a part of human nature. Aeon Flux did a good job of showing the MTV cultural milleiu from which it sprang. Fairly nihilistic / materialistic showing the alienation of living in a comfortable prosperous society. When Aeon says there's something wrong inside everyone, that wrongness resonates with me. (The Pope said something about America's "culture of death" and I wondered how much he had this in mind.) Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Aeon Flux a lot. I'd seen it on MTV but hadn't been able to catch enough episodes to grok the story arc. Seeing it all at once, it made sense. I thought it said something significant about human nature.
Narnia also said something about human nature. I like to think myself something better than I am. In truth, I'm more like Edmond the traitor in the Narnia story. Almost everyone in Narnia was flawed in some way. And that's the point of that story. How does one cope with one's own flaws? How does one cope with a loved one who betrays us?
Both movies' plots turned upon a traitor among siblings. Each story adopted a different strategy for dealing with traitors. Aeon Flux and Trevor Goodchild were heroes of one sort. The Pevensies were heroes of another sort.
There are disputed reports that this sort of data mining was used to identify the terrorists who attacked the USS Cole and flew airplanes into the World Trade Center (the official 9/11 commission's findings notwithstanding). The project is well documented on the right-side of the web and was called "Able Danger." According to rumor the project was shut down after identifying Mohammed Atta but it also pointing to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton as potential foreign spies.
This raises the issue of false alarms in any data mining operation. Rigorous secondary testing must be in place to weed out false positive signals. I heard Richard Feynman say that (in nuclear physics) it is painfully easy to fool yourself.
OK, the USG has only een around since 1776. The Swiss government has been around a few hundred years more. Nuclear waste remains hot for a lot longer than that. Has any institution been around longer than the Catholic Church? So, these guys are used to long planning cycles, maybe they'd work out.
Could I see some kind of comparison between the amount of CO2 emitted by these fuel cells versus other sources of CO2. Every time I read about these fuel cells on Slashdot, I see the same caveat that they emit CO2. My suspicion is that if they emit so much CO2 that they'll measurably impact the atmosphere, they'll also be unsafe to operate indoors.
Greenhouse emissions may kill us all, but I think we have to worry a lot more about the Chinese burning coal than these fuel cells.
We need to keep some perspective here. Afterall humans generate CO2, too.
I believe this tech was devised just after WW2 by captured German scientists in something called the Morfino[?] Institute. A friend told me this is all described by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his book _The Gulag Archipelago_.
There was a 1960s project called NERVA that used fission to superheat exhaust gasses at higher-than-chemical speeds. Though the German author says only a nuclear fusion (Kernfusionstriebwerk) engine could achieve the exhaust gas speeds of this plasma mhd thang, I think a fission engine (uber-NERVA) might suffice. Since NERVA was cancelled, obviously no working nuclear engine uber or otherwise exists.
Unless I'm badly misinformed, the restriction on Federal funding of EMBRYONIC stem cells does not extend to UMBILICAL stem cells. I understand that stem cells come from distinct sources: adult bone marrow, the placenta & umbilical cords of newborns, and human embryos. I've even read that cancerous tumors contain something like one in a million stem cells.
Embryonic/fetal stem cells have the advantage of not triggering an immune response in the transplant recipient. Apparently, this advantage is shared by umbilical stem cells. However, some people think that consuming fetal stem cells constitutes a taking of human life. (You may disagree, citing a lack of proof. But lack of proof of the Kyoto Accord's efficasy hasn't precluded its political support.) If the aformentioned considerations raise your blood pressure, note that whereas fetal stem cell use triggers ethical arguments, that umbilical stem cell use does not. We can use the energy we'll otherwise spend arguing supporting research.
I favor stem cell research, but I'd prefer to avoid the ethical, indeed metaphysical, argument posed by fetal stem cells. This is neatly avoided via umbilical stem cells. Moreover, I believe we'll find useful applications of adult stem cell lines. I suspect that CANCER stem cells may have a role in metastasis.
The real mark of shame was "Made In Japan." When I was a kid (60s), Japanese goods were synonymous with cheap and shoddy. I recall playing with toys of flimsy sheet metal and the backside was painted like it was from a recycled tin can. The reputation for making junk must have stung and the Japanese reversed this SO thoroughly, that in 1985 the movie "Back To The Future's" Dr. Brown of 1955 claims the time-machine was made of junk b/c of "made in Japan" on the electronic components. Marty replies that "all the best stuff comes from Japan."
I think that the Post-WW2 experience of Japan and Germany will serve as textbook examples of howto do redevelopment after disaster. I'm proud of how America helped them succeed.
Apologies. I was saying nothing of the sort. I thought the immediate context of altruism and reconciliation with deity sufficed to make it clear that I was talking about my "good works."
However, you do make an interesting point. If human good works are insignificant, how can we attach significance to bad works?
I agree with you that bad acts are significant and offensive. St. Anselm, a thousand years ago, followed a similar line of reasoning and wrote an essay to explain it.
Nevertheless, I am offended by Mr. Robertson's words and suspect deity is, too. If you read the Bible, you'll note that Jesus addressed all his hell-talk to religion leaders, so Mr. Robertson has cause for discomfort.
Come come now. We know from the computer models that CO2 emissions must surely cause global warming. Computer models are unquestionable oracles. Just look at the predicted tracks of Katrina and Rita.
This is the same NASA that promised the Space Shuttle would make the cost of putting stuff into orbit 10x cheaper than Apollo. Mindful of this track record, I hope the astronaut corps has its life insurance paid up.
"In fact, think that performing charitable acts is actually usually in your own interests, even if it's only to satisfy your conscience or to appear generous."
Ayn Rand, who was no friend of altruism, echoed this in her essays on the virtue of selfishness. And I agree with her analysis.
I've found that charitable acts bring me pleasure, and they are most gratifying when performed ANONYMOUSLY. The anonymous good deed makes it clear that one's motives are pure.
To think of heaven/hell in transactional terms is probably suboptimal. One should do right because it is right and eschew wrong because it is wrong. Such actions make a man good or evil and being a good or evil man causes him to perform good or evil acts. A bit circular, that.
Despite the Objectivist tone of this note, I am a Christian and the aformentioned transactional observation is made in light of the cosmic transaction performed by Christ on the Cross. In light of what has been done for me, anything I might do is laughably irrelevant. The only thing I can do is express gratitude.
Though I agree that this is a very interesting and telling, observation, it overlooks a couple other factors in post-war Japanese industrial success.
1) The Japanese adopted the statistical process control methods of Western Electric developed by Edwards Deming. In the '80s, the Japanese were eating Detroit's lunch by producing higher quality cars using these methods.
2) The Japanese industrial base was severely damaged by WW2 bombing and all those factories were rebuilt according to state-of-the-art designs. Once the rebuilding expense was amortized, this gave them a competitive advantage.
I recall from History class that "unicausal" explanation of historical trends are generally inferior to multicausal explanations.
Apologies if I created the impression that I was ignoring "evidence." This is probably because of my dismissive handling of the theories build upon the evidence that has been collected.
I've done a bit of modelling of chaotic, dynamical systems myself. And one thing i know about iterated models is that boundary conditions are important. (And it's disgustingly easy to fool yourself with an unvalidated model.)
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way I can imagine arriving at a model of 2020s climate is to build it upon a model of 2019s climate. And so on back until we get 2005s climate where we establish boundary conditions from current evidence.
This climate modelling businesws has been going on since the Cold War warnings of nuclear winter. Thus, there should be several models predicting 2005's climate. How well did they fit this year's observations? (you know, that "evidence" I was ignoring.)
If reliable predictions exist, then money can be made in futures contracts for commodities like fuel oil. Since environmentalists still ask for money, they must not be making enough money this way. This does not prove reliable models do not exist, but it suffices to make me dismissive of doomsayers.
Since you didn't like that haiku, you probably won't like this one:
Technology ruins Not as much as ignorance Clean up your own mess
"Interesting, because this directly contradicts the Nova mini-series Origins that just finished running on PBS. Science never stops moving."
Those inclined to believe the Bible and feel skeptical when science apparently contradicts it, should take comfort in the fact that science's story has changed over the century whereas (relatively) the Bible's has not.
This is does not mean that religion ought to ignore and deprecate science. Things like that Galileo business provide powerful insights into how to interpret scripture. If the Bible says "sunrise" it should be interpreted phenomenologically. That is as an observation of brute phenomena and one should not take that as an explanation of the mechanism that gave rise to the phenomena. (Incidentally, the weatherman is not a flat-earther because he tells us sunrise/sunset times.)
With this phenomenological principle in mind, someone who believes in the Bible will be able to interpret its statements about God according to that same phenomenological principle. Troubling verses about God "doing evil" are thus explained. To wit, God establishes things like gravity and hydrodynamics that move in predictable patterns. When those patterns conspire to crush us, via tsunami or hurricane, we perceive evil fom God's hand.
But the character behind these phenomena is more reflective of the scientific principles of natural law.
I suppose I should ask for an offering at this point. Instead, I'll ask that we all work a little harder at our science so we can better predict natural forces and prepare for them.
i recall reading Environmentalists in the '70s who would point to the Jimmy Carter gasoline lines and overpopulation, and claim that if we didn't Do Something Now (that generally included sending them money), the acid rain would kill us all by 1990. But I was busy with work and didn't notice the end of everything. How was it?
The Global Warming Problem was presented as a problem that was SO BAD we had to Do Something before we fully understood the problem. Then Kyoto came along and told us to sacrifice trillions on the altar of C02 emissions. NO, we must understand the problem before we can effect a solution thereto, otherwise we're no smarter than savages before a stone idol manipulated by its priests.
Environmentalism is not a new response to natural phenomena: "Behold! Moon goddess is eating the sun god. We'll all die unless you give me a sacrifice to appease her wrath." False prophets always run the risk of overplaying their hand. They get modest returns from modest promises and threats. Then they get greedy and escalate the promises/threats. But they feel control slipping from their grasp and then the threats become even more dire and their cries more shrill. All right, enviro-prophets, you've said the world shall surely end. Here's your haiku:
Rachel Carlson's Jeremiad predicts doom. Where are the Persians?
I seem to recall reading that most improvised explosive devices used by the Syrian/Saudi/Iranian terrorists deployed in Iraq use cell phone triggers. And I suspect the London bombs were triggered via cell phone, too.
I dearly hope that cell phone usage provide a window into this kind of activity. If the "privacy concerns" of this sort of cell-phone mapping are real, then the US military could exploit this in some kind of Able Danger style data-mining operation that might save some American soldiers' and Iraqi civilians' lives.
I am in two minds when someone cites privacy concerns. Part of me thinks, "it's bad for the government discover info that might falsely cast suspicion upon an innocent party." Another part of me thinks, "it's bad for the government to avert its eyes from information that could thwart an attempt to nuke New York City."
I've been writing software for a quarter-century and my vocational experience has NOT made a lot of direct use of my abstract studies in Mathematics and Computer Science (Masters' degrees in both). What I've found most useful, vocationally, is my undergraduate minor in Philosophy.
Computer Software is an abstraction, a map of some problem domain, you must understand the problem domain and then encode a model of a Use Case thereof in the language of the day, Fortrain, C++, Perl, whatever.
Ergo, study the seemingly useless abstract courses and know that you'll never be called upon to devise a heuristic tree search algorithm, but your ability to UNDERSTAND such things will be the tool you'll find most useful in your day to day tasking.
As for my trollish subject line: Plato had much more intresting things to talk about than Economics. If you want Marxist indoctrination, buy a subscription to the New York Times. I've found Socrates' Apology useful in work, because it got me to analyze issues from every angle. When you have to decide between trade-offs your best approach is to forget whose ideas are what and just seek to understand the consequences of technical decisions.
When I became disillusioned with the Creationists, my single dominant thought was, "if you're right and this isn't junk science, DO SOMETHING with it." I proposed specifics like manufacturing opals and stalagtites on shortened time frames. (Wouldn't it be cool to build a game room with real stalagtites?)
I also read Michael Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box" wherein he describes the "irreducible complexity" of things Mr. Dawkins would call designoids like mousetraps and specifically the molecular motor that powers the flagella of single celled organisms.
Since the guys doing "genetic algorithms" have had some success applying evolutionary thinking, perhaps this is an opportunity for Darwin fans to DO SOMETHING demonstrating how to overcome Mr. Behe's objections to Darwinism. Specifically, use some form of guided evolution (such as we see with dog or horse breeding) to develop the molecular motors discussed here.
(am I a Creationist/Darwinist? I am skeptical of both. and damned few people can decouple emotions enough discuss the issues rationally. maybe i AM trolling?)
Has anyone else noticed a disconnect between the people who tote rifles into harm's way and the people who write stories about toting rifles into harm's way? Back before Rumsfeld ended the draft (hehe, during the Nixon administration), there was a chance that an future playwrite or author would get drafted and come back writing something like Catch-22 or Platoon or somesuch. And the guys working on the movie with him would have a gut feel for what things are like based on their memories of Korea or Germany, etc.
Nowadays, the guy writing the screenplay for the TV show or movie that features military people doing military things will have no military experience. I cite as an example the stories about a heavy cruiser whose designation was NC-1701. When scripts for this warship were written in the '60s they reflected a passing familiarity with military protocol and decorum. The scripts for the recently cancelled series at the end of this franchise seemed not to.
I've heard that if a young black man studies hard in school, he's said to be "acting white." Similarly, my daughter (salutatorian) observed anti-intellectual attitudes by "the cool kids" at school. Since I'm a geek, and before that a nerd, I feel these kids' pain. I tell them that living well is the best revenge and their slacking peers may well find their vocation includes "do you want fries with that?"
Living well is the best motivation for our nation's youth. My son has an excellent grasp of technology. He also has an excellent legal mind. Though he could easily become a geek like his dad, I'm encouraging him to go into law.
If our government wants to encourage science and technology, it will have to make science & engineering a better career choice. I've made a lot of money as an engineer, but I would have made a lot more as a lawyer. I have friends who are geeks and a few years older than me who'll probably never work as engineers again: Age discrimination. I took the LSAT myself after I noticed that I see a lot more old lawyers than I see old engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
i've been writing software since Carter was president and i've noticed a subtle shift in the Indian programmers with whom I've worked. When I first started working with Indian guys they were invariably college graduates from prestige Indian universities augmented with a Masters degree from someplace like U of Mich. In other words, smarter than me. After a few years I noticed the Indian guys just had Bachelors degrees but were still plenty advanced. Today, I work with a really great Indian guy, but his skillset is entry-level.
It doesn't take a Harvard MBA to figure out the appeal of hiring an Indian guy for $400 a month over there versus hiring a guy just like him for $4000 a month here. And this appeal will remain until you run out of smart guys over there. (Or the smart guys there figure out that a big payday is only a plane-ticket away.)
as a working engineer i see outsourcing as a knife held at my throat. but i'm also a Reaganite free trader, so I don't gripe about it. (and the knife is a good thing, it helps motivate me.) the market tends to balance things out. if america is too rich and her engineering graduates too stupid, the work will go overseas until india runs out of smart guys who'll work for cheap or america runs out of money.
and this won't happen. things will balance out. rich spots like the US and Western Europe will outsource work to 3rd world hell-holes until those hell-holes are filled up with cash. After that the idealist in me hopes that whoever works smartest and hardest will win on an even playing field. yeah, i'm an idealist, but i figure it's a better form of "foreign-aid" than anything the UN or the State Department is doing.
(call me a troll for being on the right of Karl Marx.)
The abstract includes this quote, "projectiles generating pressures as high as 250 tons per square centimeter." This may be useful to armorers, but the layperson thinks, "as opposed to what?" Ferinstance, if the kevlar vests that the president's bodyguards or our troops in the field wear have a stopping power of 249 tons, I'll yawn. If this stuff will stop a .357 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the whole world and would blow your head clean off, that's also a useful comparison. If it'll stop a .50 calibre machinegun round at point blank range, that's also handy to know. This 250 tons figure means nothing to me.
I happen to know that back in the (post-Watergate) Reagan 1980s, if any American citizen were to pick up the phone in Mao's office, and ring Brezhnev in the Kremlin for a chat, that the NSA was prohibited by law from intercepting that call. That's the way the law worked back then. (If you think of how NSA works, you can see how stupid this was.) I don't think the Clinton administration or anybody else changed this until after 9/11.
When I heard this story, it was pretty clear to me that this is what the Feds changed.
There's 9/11 and then there's bureaucrats. Thus I'll bet that the people bugging my telephone are from the FBI, not the NSA, simply because the bureau's "turf" is domestic and the other agencies "turf" is international. But what happens when an enemy has part of its operation based locally and another part based overseas? No doubt we need a THIRD set of bureaucrats to cover this contingency.
My experience was with the post-Watergate "reforms" of a generation ago and I thought then that they candicapped the intelligence community for no good reason. They didn't stop the Clintons from using those FBI files that came in so handy during Impeachment. My suspicion is that when DIA did the data mining project called "Able Danger" they used open records in such a way that they violated at least the spirit of the post-Watergate rules and thus the product was destroyed before it could be used to thwart the USS Cole bombing or 9/11.
The real problem is that you have one set of domestic rules that protect the accused of a crime, and necessity dictates that there be a second set of international rules that advance the interests of nations. We can pass laws locally to set the first set of rules, but we can't set the second set of rules without considering what other nation-states are doing against us. The rub comes when these two rules sets differ and get applied inconsistently.
I went to Aeon Flux with a bunch of guys from Work Friday afternoon, and then to a late-night showing of Narnia with some friends from Church. I enjoyed both.
And each makes a cultural / mythic statement, touching a part of human nature. Aeon Flux did a good job of showing the MTV cultural milleiu from which it sprang. Fairly nihilistic / materialistic showing the alienation of living in a comfortable prosperous society. When Aeon says there's something wrong inside everyone, that wrongness resonates with me. (The Pope said something about America's "culture of death" and I wondered how much he had this in mind.) Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Aeon Flux a lot. I'd seen it on MTV but hadn't been able to catch enough episodes to grok the story arc. Seeing it all at once, it made sense. I thought it said something significant about human nature.
Narnia also said something about human nature. I like to think myself something better than I am. In truth, I'm more like Edmond the traitor in the Narnia story. Almost everyone in Narnia was flawed in some way. And that's the point of that story. How does one cope with one's own flaws? How does one cope with a loved one who betrays us?
Both movies' plots turned upon a traitor among siblings. Each story adopted a different strategy for dealing with traitors. Aeon Flux and Trevor Goodchild were heroes of one sort. The Pevensies were heroes of another sort.
There are disputed reports that this sort of data mining was used to identify the terrorists who attacked the USS Cole and flew airplanes into the World Trade Center (the official 9/11 commission's findings notwithstanding). The project is well documented on the right-side of the web and was called "Able Danger." According to rumor the project was shut down after identifying Mohammed Atta but it also pointing to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton as potential foreign spies.
This raises the issue of false alarms in any data mining operation. Rigorous secondary testing must be in place to weed out false positive signals. I heard Richard Feynman say that (in nuclear physics) it is painfully easy to fool yourself.
OK, the USG has only een around since 1776. The Swiss government has been around a few hundred years more. Nuclear waste remains hot for a lot longer than that. Has any institution been around longer than the Catholic Church? So, these guys are used to long planning cycles, maybe they'd work out.
Could I see some kind of comparison between the amount of CO2 emitted by these fuel cells versus other sources of CO2. Every time I read about these fuel cells on Slashdot, I see the same caveat that they emit CO2. My suspicion is that if they emit so much CO2 that they'll measurably impact the atmosphere, they'll also be unsafe to operate indoors.
Greenhouse emissions may kill us all, but I think we have to worry a lot more about the Chinese burning coal than these fuel cells.
We need to keep some perspective here. Afterall humans generate CO2, too.
I believe this tech was devised just after WW2 by captured German scientists in something called the Morfino[?] Institute. A friend told me this is all described by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his book _The Gulag Archipelago_.
There was a 1960s project called NERVA that used fission to superheat exhaust gasses at higher-than-chemical speeds. Though the German author says only a nuclear fusion (Kernfusionstriebwerk) engine could achieve the exhaust gas speeds of this plasma mhd thang, I think a fission engine (uber-NERVA) might suffice. Since NERVA was cancelled, obviously no working nuclear engine uber or otherwise exists.
i hate blinkies. when i read a web page, I don't want distractions. i don't bother to block an ad until I notice it is distracting me.
Unless I'm badly misinformed, the restriction on Federal funding of EMBRYONIC stem cells does not extend to UMBILICAL stem cells. I understand that stem cells come from distinct sources: adult bone marrow, the placenta & umbilical cords of newborns, and human embryos. I've even read that cancerous tumors contain something like one in a million stem cells.
Embryonic/fetal stem cells have the advantage of not triggering an immune response in the transplant recipient. Apparently, this advantage is shared by umbilical stem cells. However, some people think that consuming fetal stem cells constitutes a taking of human life. (You may disagree, citing a lack of proof. But lack of proof of the Kyoto Accord's efficasy hasn't precluded its political support.) If the aformentioned considerations raise your blood pressure, note that whereas fetal stem cell use triggers ethical arguments, that umbilical stem cell use does not. We can use the energy we'll otherwise spend arguing supporting research.
I favor stem cell research, but I'd prefer to avoid the ethical, indeed metaphysical, argument posed by fetal stem cells. This is neatly avoided via umbilical stem cells. Moreover, I believe we'll find useful applications of adult stem cell lines. I suspect that CANCER stem cells may have a role in metastasis.
The real mark of shame was "Made In Japan." When I was a kid (60s), Japanese goods were synonymous with cheap and shoddy. I recall playing with toys of flimsy sheet metal and the backside was painted like it was from a recycled tin can. The reputation for making junk must have stung and the Japanese reversed this SO thoroughly, that in 1985 the movie "Back To The Future's" Dr. Brown of 1955 claims the time-machine was made of junk b/c of "made in Japan" on the electronic components. Marty replies that "all the best stuff comes from Japan."
I think that the Post-WW2 experience of Japan and Germany will serve as textbook examples of howto do redevelopment after disaster. I'm proud of how America helped them succeed.
Apologies. I was saying nothing of the sort. I thought the immediate context of altruism and reconciliation with deity sufficed to make it clear that I was talking about my "good works."
However, you do make an interesting point. If human good works are insignificant, how can we attach significance to bad works?
I agree with you that bad acts are significant and offensive. St. Anselm, a thousand years ago, followed a similar line of reasoning and wrote an essay to explain it.
Nevertheless, I am offended by Mr. Robertson's words and suspect deity is, too. If you read the Bible, you'll note that Jesus addressed all his hell-talk to religion leaders, so Mr. Robertson has cause for discomfort.
Come come now. We know from the computer models that CO2 emissions must surely cause global warming. Computer models are unquestionable oracles. Just look at the predicted tracks of Katrina and Rita.
This is the same NASA that promised the Space Shuttle would make the cost of putting stuff into orbit 10x cheaper than Apollo. Mindful of this track record, I hope the astronaut corps has its life insurance paid up.
"In fact, think that performing charitable acts is actually usually in your own interests, even if it's only to satisfy your conscience or to appear generous."
Ayn Rand, who was no friend of altruism, echoed this in her essays on the virtue of selfishness. And I agree with her analysis.
I've found that charitable acts bring me pleasure, and they are most gratifying when performed ANONYMOUSLY. The anonymous good deed makes it clear that one's motives are pure.
To think of heaven/hell in transactional terms is probably suboptimal. One should do right because it is right and eschew wrong because it is wrong. Such actions make a man good or evil and being a good or evil man causes him to perform good or evil acts. A bit circular, that.
Despite the Objectivist tone of this note, I am a Christian and the aformentioned transactional observation is made in light of the cosmic transaction performed by Christ on the Cross. In light of what has been done for me, anything I might do is laughably irrelevant. The only thing I can do is express gratitude.
Though I agree that this is a very interesting and telling, observation, it overlooks a couple other factors in post-war Japanese industrial success.
1) The Japanese adopted the statistical process control methods of Western Electric developed by Edwards Deming. In the '80s, the Japanese were eating Detroit's lunch by producing higher quality cars using these methods.
2) The Japanese industrial base was severely damaged by WW2 bombing and all those factories were rebuilt according to state-of-the-art designs. Once the rebuilding expense was amortized, this gave them a competitive advantage.
I recall from History class that "unicausal" explanation of historical trends are generally inferior to multicausal explanations.
Apologies if I created the impression that I was ignoring "evidence." This is probably because of my dismissive handling of the theories build upon the evidence that has been collected.
I've done a bit of modelling of chaotic, dynamical systems myself. And one thing i know about iterated models is that boundary conditions are important. (And it's disgustingly easy to fool yourself with an unvalidated model.)
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way I can imagine arriving at a model of 2020s climate is to build it upon a model of 2019s climate. And so on back until we get 2005s climate where we establish boundary conditions from current evidence.
This climate modelling businesws has been going on since the Cold War warnings of nuclear winter. Thus, there should be several models predicting 2005's climate. How well did they fit this year's observations? (you know, that "evidence" I was ignoring.)
If reliable predictions exist, then money can be made in futures contracts for commodities like fuel oil. Since environmentalists still ask for money, they must not be making enough money this way. This does not prove reliable models do not exist, but it suffices to make me dismissive of doomsayers.
Since you didn't like that haiku, you probably won't like this one:
Technology ruins
Not as much as ignorance
Clean up your own mess
"Interesting, because this directly contradicts the Nova mini-series Origins that just finished running on PBS. Science never stops moving."
Those inclined to believe the Bible and feel skeptical when science apparently contradicts it, should take comfort in the fact that science's story has changed over the century whereas (relatively) the Bible's has not.
This is does not mean that religion ought to ignore and deprecate science. Things like that Galileo business provide powerful insights into how to interpret scripture. If the Bible says "sunrise" it should be interpreted phenomenologically. That is as an observation of brute phenomena and one should not take that as an explanation of the mechanism that gave rise to the phenomena. (Incidentally, the weatherman is not a flat-earther because he tells us sunrise/sunset times.)
With this phenomenological principle in mind, someone who believes in the Bible will be able to interpret its statements about God according to that same phenomenological principle. Troubling verses about God "doing evil" are thus explained. To wit, God establishes things like gravity and hydrodynamics that move in predictable patterns. When those patterns conspire to crush us, via tsunami or hurricane, we perceive evil fom God's hand.
But the character behind these phenomena is more reflective of the scientific principles of natural law.
I suppose I should ask for an offering at this point. Instead, I'll ask that we all work a little harder at our science so we can better predict natural forces and prepare for them.
i recall reading Environmentalists in the '70s who would point to the Jimmy Carter gasoline lines and overpopulation, and claim that if we didn't Do Something Now (that generally included sending them money), the acid rain would kill us all by 1990. But I was busy with work and didn't notice the end of everything. How was it?
The Global Warming Problem was presented as a problem that was SO BAD we had to Do Something before we fully understood the problem. Then Kyoto came along and told us to sacrifice trillions on the altar of C02 emissions. NO, we must understand the problem before we can effect a solution thereto, otherwise we're no smarter than savages before a stone idol manipulated by its priests.
Environmentalism is not a new response to natural phenomena: "Behold! Moon goddess is eating the sun god. We'll all die unless you give me a sacrifice to appease her wrath." False prophets always run the risk of overplaying their hand. They get modest returns from modest promises and threats. Then they get greedy and escalate the promises/threats. But they feel control slipping from their grasp and then the threats become even more dire and their cries more shrill. All right, enviro-prophets, you've said the world shall surely end. Here's your haiku:
Rachel Carlson's
Jeremiad predicts doom.
Where are the Persians?
I seem to recall reading that most improvised explosive devices used by the Syrian/Saudi/Iranian terrorists deployed in Iraq use cell phone triggers. And I suspect the London bombs were triggered via cell phone, too.
I dearly hope that cell phone usage provide a window into this kind of activity. If the "privacy concerns" of this sort of cell-phone mapping are real, then the US military could exploit this in some kind of Able Danger style data-mining operation that might save some American soldiers' and Iraqi civilians' lives.
I am in two minds when someone cites privacy concerns. Part of me thinks, "it's bad for the government discover info that might falsely cast suspicion upon an innocent party." Another part of me thinks, "it's bad for the government to avert its eyes from information that could thwart an attempt to nuke New York City."
I've been writing software for a quarter-century and my vocational experience has NOT made a lot of direct use of my abstract studies in Mathematics and Computer Science (Masters' degrees in both). What I've found most useful, vocationally, is my undergraduate minor in Philosophy.
Computer Software is an abstraction, a map of some problem domain, you must understand the problem domain and then encode a model of a Use Case thereof in the language of the day, Fortrain, C++, Perl, whatever.
Ergo, study the seemingly useless abstract courses and know that you'll never be called upon to devise a heuristic tree search algorithm, but your ability to UNDERSTAND such things will be the tool you'll find most useful in your day to day tasking.
As for my trollish subject line: Plato had much more intresting things to talk about than Economics. If you want Marxist indoctrination, buy a subscription to the New York Times. I've found Socrates' Apology useful in work, because it got me to analyze issues from every angle. When you have to decide between trade-offs your best approach is to forget whose ideas are what and just seek to understand the consequences of technical decisions.
(apologies if this comes off as a troll)
When I became disillusioned with the Creationists, my single dominant thought was, "if you're right and this isn't junk science, DO SOMETHING with it." I proposed specifics like manufacturing opals and stalagtites on shortened time frames. (Wouldn't it be cool to build a game room with real stalagtites?)
I also read Michael Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box" wherein he describes the "irreducible complexity" of things Mr. Dawkins would call designoids like mousetraps and specifically the molecular motor that powers the flagella of single celled organisms.
Since the guys doing "genetic algorithms" have had some success applying evolutionary thinking, perhaps this is an opportunity for Darwin fans to DO SOMETHING demonstrating how to overcome Mr. Behe's objections to Darwinism. Specifically, use some form of guided evolution (such as we see with dog or horse breeding) to develop the molecular motors discussed here.
(am I a Creationist/Darwinist? I am skeptical of both. and damned few people can decouple emotions enough discuss the issues rationally. maybe i AM trolling?)
Has anyone else noticed a disconnect between the people who tote rifles into harm's way and the people who write stories about toting rifles into harm's way? Back before Rumsfeld ended the draft (hehe, during the Nixon administration), there was a chance that an future playwrite or author would get drafted and come back writing something like Catch-22 or Platoon or somesuch. And the guys working on the movie with him would have a gut feel for what things are like based on their memories of Korea or Germany, etc.
Nowadays, the guy writing the screenplay for the TV show or movie that features military people doing military things will have no military experience. I cite as an example the stories about a heavy cruiser whose designation was NC-1701. When scripts for this warship were written in the '60s they reflected a passing familiarity with military protocol and decorum. The scripts for the recently cancelled series at the end of this franchise seemed not to.
I've heard that if a young black man studies hard in school, he's said to be "acting white." Similarly, my daughter (salutatorian) observed anti-intellectual attitudes by "the cool kids" at school. Since I'm a geek, and before that a nerd, I feel these kids' pain. I tell them that living well is the best revenge and their slacking peers may well find their vocation includes "do you want fries with that?"
Living well is the best motivation for our nation's youth. My son has an excellent grasp of technology. He also has an excellent legal mind. Though he could easily become a geek like his dad, I'm encouraging him to go into law.
If our government wants to encourage science and technology, it will have to make science & engineering a better career choice. I've made a lot of money as an engineer, but I would have made a lot more as a lawyer. I have friends who are geeks and a few years older than me who'll probably never work as engineers again: Age discrimination. I took the LSAT myself after I noticed that I see a lot more old lawyers than I see old engineers.