Well I have, and it's not about quantity or market value, either. There've got to be limits to this business of depossession through legal abstractions.
Not everything an atheist thinks about is about science. Atheists also think about the human experience, how we relate to each other and to our world and how we can make like bearable for ourselves and others. We just try not to involve our superstitious beliefs into that process, and manage hypothetical assertions with some degree of rigor. If that makes me a "materialist", so be it, even though I did to choose to be called that. On the other hand, if "materialist" is a code word for "a selfish jerk who is not like us saintly believers and who will be up against the wall when the theocratic revolution comes", then I beg to differ.
Wow. I think I actually understand what you are getting to. My own studies in relativistic refractive gullibology indicate that there is a theoretical possibility that we will some day be able to wrap bundles of gullible moderators (+2, informative, indeed) into a negatively-curved Riemanian manifold shaped as a paper airplane and ship them all down that wormhole back to Planet Golgafrincham where they came from.
I've never had excited cheese before. Sounds interesting. But I have excited moderators to 60% of the speed of bad karma.
I might have said differently 5 years ago, but now the temperature trend is a proven fact. Deal with it.
Of course not all factors driving climate are anthropogenic. But in the case of the current warming trend, none of the possible causes you are citing disproves, nor does it have the same level of evidence as, the anthropogenic hypothesis.
I also have to point out that attacking the integrity of the researchers who work on climate change is pretty poor form, and even poorer argumentation. 'nuff said.
To suggest that all this work is a piece of trash because you don't like the implications is really not seeing the whole picture.
Cheap and clean power isn't a silly thing to wish for. "Limitless" is.
Where to begin, indeed. If you want to challenge decades of scientific work, as in "Global warming has hardly been proven to exist", you might do well to provide some substance to your own claims. I am a meteorologist in a national weather service that shall remain unnamed. Where I come from, they don't necessarily understand all the mechanisms at work in climatic change (nor do they claim to), but the warming trend has been measured; it's there, and it's beyond the temper tantrums of those who don't want to face it. The questions that need resolving are about the "hows" and the "whens" of global warming.
Your dismissal of the original poster's concerns about the environmental impact of heat release into the environment was as superficial as it was flippant. Heat isn't "contained". It is radiated, conducted, or turned into work. Eventually, every joule of energy we produce will seep out as heat into the environment, just as it does now with other forms of energy. (With "real world" results, such as the urban heat island effect).
In the context of your happy fusion utopia, supposing it were even feasible (what makes you think fusion would be cheap? Or even all that clean?), we would be looking at gigawatts upon gigawatts of "new" heat, orders of magnitude above our current energy consumption. So it's worth looking at the implications. Heat doesn't conveniently vanish like that.
Of course, the license plate example is a little bit flawed: you couldn't see a license plate from directly overhead, and if the camera were oriented at a sufficient angle to see a license plate, you would quickly get away from optimal resolution because of increased distance to the target, and more importantly, increased thickness of the layer of atmosphere to see through.
"They" would probably be able to make out the letters of the word "POLICE" on the top of a police cruiser. Or someone could be holding up the license plate for the satellite to see.;-)
Yes, language evolves, dialects form and become dominant, cross-polinate, and all that jazz.
Language is also a tool of power, not just, as you say, to buy into it, but also to spread and impose influence. There are multiple historical instances of this, not the least of which was the imposition of French on the Anglo-Saxons after the 1066 invasion of England. (I don't mention this to be provocative, but as a defining moment in the English language that may not have been all that willingly accepted by English-speakers of the time. How would you have felt?)
I will put to you that the current leadership of the US is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of culture and language, and has used this knowledge extremely well since the end of WWII.
As for the absence of a central authority on the English language, well, to each his own. In a disparate world, standardizing bodies have their uses, too.
As a French speaker, I can relate to this concerns. On the other hand, both Spanish and French have the depth they need to come up with perfectly suitable native terms to match the English ones. It's just a matter of imagination and a little work. And pride too: to slavishly borrow, or make litteral translations from another tongue, just cheapens the language.
I think it is important to develop technical terminology based on the native concepts (le "génie de la langue")
of Spanish or French. It's trickier than it seems, but also very satisfying, to design and adopt new words that seem to spring naturally from the language's own depth and richness.
I would be interested to know, for instance, how Spanish-speakers would translate the word "shell". Strangely enough, I haven't seen a French translation of that word yet that truly satisfied me ("Interpréteur de commandes"? How boring). As an example of something better: I once used a shell called "gulam", which means "servant" in Hindi(?). Perhaps a shell should be called a "valet" in French.:-)
...and there is evidence that such a cloud-borne ecosystem does exist, and might even have considerable importance in driving the earth's climate. Here is a quote from a the abstract of a presentation made by Dr Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck.
"...we show that bacterial metabolism can play a measurable role in
the production and transformation of organic carbon in cloud droplets collected at high altitudes, even at temperatures at or well below 0 C. Although bacterial abundance and
biomass in cloud water is low compared to other aquatic environments, growth and carbon production rates per cell are approximately as high as in warm and eutrophic lakes. We
consider the atmosphere not only as a conveyor of organisms but as a site where significant microbial processes take place already during transport. Since ca. 60% of the earth
surface is covered by clouds, with a still increasing trend, we hypothesize that microorganisms suspended in cloud droplets could play a crucial role in the transformation of airborne
organic matter and the chemical composition of snow and rain."
Until then, it pointless to display files in 3-space. Aside from the text rendering problems, likening unordered, unfamiliar electronic bits to objects we deal with every day, like boxes and pillars, is foolish. What possible advantage can one gain by viewing files not as a list of words, but as boxes in a room?
No, no! This is great news. With force-feedback, this will solve the problems of many out-of-shape techies. After a few months of physically moving large files from one room to another, I'll bet quite a few/.ers would build bods that will make them quite popular with the ladies. Not to mention that you'll now be on equal terms with the old school bullies who ended up working in a warehouse...
The Japanese are carrying out an insanely ambitious project,for a 640 node, 40 sustained TeraFlops computer, housed in a building the size of a large hockey arena. They call it the "Earth Simulator" and its main purpose is to carry out atmospheric/climatological research and simulations of the simmering ball of lava we live on (volcano and earthquake research).
Construction is in full swing now;
hardware to come online first quarter 2001, software "will take a little longer".
They might want to find out if the lunar landing sites could qualify as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Then it's clearly "for all humanity", and they might get worldwide support for the idea.
Technology is the application of knowledge, and, as such, it is not morally neutral, even before end-users start perverting (or redeeming) it.
Technology is the result of human activity; tools are designed for a purpose; and inventors have an agenda in the technology, at least as much as the end-users. All of these (human activity, purpose, and the designer's agenda) are non-neutral.
This invention didn't fall out of the sky. People who designed it were smart enough to foresee the applications and weigh the good vs bad. I don't think this particular balance is always neutral. Most of the times, it probably isn't.
I view the "technology is neutral" argument with almost as much repulsion as the old "we were only following orders" bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Mods... before you rate this as insightful... read the article, maybe?
Well I have, and it's not about quantity or market value, either. There've got to be limits to this business of depossession through legal abstractions.
Not everything an atheist thinks about is about science. Atheists also think about the human experience, how we relate to each other and to our world and how we can make like bearable for ourselves and others. We just try not to involve our superstitious beliefs into that process, and manage hypothetical assertions with some degree of rigor. If that makes me a "materialist", so be it, even though I did to choose to be called that. On the other hand, if "materialist" is a code word for "a selfish jerk who is not like us saintly believers and who will be up against the wall when the theocratic revolution comes", then I beg to differ.
Wow. I think I actually understand what you are getting to. My own studies in relativistic refractive gullibology indicate that there is a theoretical possibility that we will some day be able to wrap bundles of gullible moderators (+2, informative, indeed) into a negatively-curved Riemanian manifold shaped as a paper airplane and ship them all down that wormhole back to Planet Golgafrincham where they came from.
I've never had excited cheese before. Sounds interesting. But I have excited moderators to 60% of the speed of bad karma.
Of course not all factors driving climate are anthropogenic. But in the case of the current warming trend, none of the possible causes you are citing disproves, nor does it have the same level of evidence as, the anthropogenic hypothesis.
I also have to point out that attacking the integrity of the researchers who work on climate change is pretty poor form, and even poorer argumentation. 'nuff said.
To suggest that all this work is a piece of trash because you don't like the implications is really not seeing the whole picture.
Cheap and clean power isn't a silly thing to wish for. "Limitless" is.
Where to begin, indeed. If you want to challenge decades of scientific work, as in "Global warming has hardly been proven to exist", you might do well to provide some substance to your own claims. I am a meteorologist in a national weather service that shall remain unnamed. Where I come from, they don't necessarily understand all the mechanisms at work in climatic change (nor do they claim to), but the warming trend has been measured; it's there, and it's beyond the temper tantrums of those who don't want to face it. The questions that need resolving are about the "hows" and the "whens" of global warming.
Your dismissal of the original poster's concerns about the environmental impact of heat release into the environment was as superficial as it was flippant. Heat isn't "contained". It is radiated, conducted, or turned into work. Eventually, every joule of energy we produce will seep out as heat into the environment, just as it does now with other forms of energy. (With "real world" results, such as the urban heat island effect).
In the context of your happy fusion utopia, supposing it were even feasible (what makes you think fusion would be cheap? Or even all that clean?), we would be looking at gigawatts upon gigawatts of "new" heat, orders of magnitude above our current energy consumption. So it's worth looking at the implications. Heat doesn't conveniently vanish like that.
Of course, the license plate example is a little bit flawed: you couldn't see a license plate from directly overhead, and if the camera were oriented at a sufficient angle to see a license plate, you would quickly get away from optimal resolution because of increased distance to the target, and more importantly, increased thickness of the layer of atmosphere to see through.
"They" would probably be able to make out the letters of the word "POLICE" on the top of a police cruiser. Or someone could be holding up the license plate for the satellite to see. ;-)
Yes, language evolves, dialects form and become dominant, cross-polinate, and all that jazz.
Language is also a tool of power, not just, as you say, to buy into it, but also to spread and impose influence. There are multiple historical instances of this, not the least of which was the imposition of French on the Anglo-Saxons after the 1066 invasion of England. (I don't mention this to be provocative, but as a defining moment in the English language that may not have been all that willingly accepted by English-speakers of the time. How would you have felt?)
I will put to you that the current leadership of the US is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of culture and language, and has used this knowledge extremely well since the end of WWII.
As for the absence of a central authority on the English language, well, to each his own. In a disparate world, standardizing bodies have their uses, too.
As a French speaker, I can relate to this concerns. On the other hand, both Spanish and French have the depth they need to come up with perfectly suitable native terms to match the English ones. It's just a matter of imagination and a little work. And pride too: to slavishly borrow, or make litteral translations from another tongue, just cheapens the language.
I think it is important to develop technical terminology based on the native concepts (le "génie de la langue") of Spanish or French. It's trickier than it seems, but also very satisfying, to design and adopt new words that seem to spring naturally from the language's own depth and richness.
I would be interested to know, for instance, how Spanish-speakers would translate the word "shell". Strangely enough, I haven't seen a French translation of that word yet that truly satisfied me ("Interpréteur de commandes"? How boring). As an example of something better: I once used a shell called "gulam", which means "servant" in Hindi(?). Perhaps a shell should be called a "valet" in French. :-)
...and there is evidence that such a cloud-borne ecosystem does exist, and might even have considerable importance in driving the earth's climate. Here is a quote from a the abstract of a presentation made by Dr Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck.
"...we show that bacterial metabolism can play a measurable role in the production and transformation of organic carbon in cloud droplets collected at high altitudes, even at temperatures at or well below 0 C. Although bacterial abundance and biomass in cloud water is low compared to other aquatic environments, growth and carbon production rates per cell are approximately as high as in warm and eutrophic lakes. We consider the atmosphere not only as a conveyor of organisms but as a site where significant microbial processes take place already during transport. Since ca. 60% of the earth surface is covered by clouds, with a still increasing trend, we hypothesize that microorganisms suspended in cloud droplets could play a crucial role in the transformation of airborne organic matter and the chemical composition of snow and rain."
The entire abstract is here.
Until then, it pointless to display files in 3-space. Aside from the text rendering problems, likening unordered, unfamiliar electronic bits to objects we deal with every day, like boxes and pillars, is foolish. What possible advantage can one gain by viewing files not as a list of words, but as boxes in a room?
No, no! This is great news. With force-feedback, this will solve the problems of many out-of-shape techies. After a few months of physically moving large files from one room to another, I'll bet quite a few /.ers would build bods that will make them quite popular with the ladies. Not to mention that you'll now be on equal terms with the old school bullies who ended up working in a warehouse...
The Japanese are carrying out an insanely ambitious project,for a 640 node, 40 sustained TeraFlops computer, housed in a building the size of a large hockey arena. They call it the "Earth Simulator" and its main purpose is to carry out atmospheric/climatological research and simulations of the simmering ball of lava we live on (volcano and earthquake research).
Construction is in full swing now; hardware to come online first quarter 2001, software "will take a little longer".
More tech-oriented info here.
They might want to find out if the lunar landing sites could qualify as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Then it's clearly "for all humanity", and they might get worldwide support for the idea.
Technology is the application of knowledge, and, as such, it is not morally neutral, even before end-users start perverting (or redeeming) it.
Technology is the result of human activity; tools are designed for a purpose; and inventors have an agenda in the technology, at least as much as the end-users. All of these (human activity, purpose, and the designer's agenda) are non-neutral.
This invention didn't fall out of the sky. People who designed it were smart enough to foresee the applications and weigh the good vs bad. I don't think this particular balance is always neutral. Most of the times, it probably isn't.
I view the "technology is neutral" argument with almost as much repulsion as the old "we were only following orders" bit.