And that brings us right back to education again. And unfortunately for science, half the country thinks John Edwards really talks to dead people.
Maybe I don't give us enough credit, but try and explain why you can't make noise in space to the next 10 people who'll listen. It's not like they don't learn this stuff in school, they just don't give a shit afterwards. That's what our problem is. We've informed the populous, they just didn't pay attention.
That said, I really think if we got a good heir to Carl Sagan on TV, it would do a lot of good. Especially now that we're dealing with clones and anthrax and shit that's got people trying to sieze babies and buying glove boxes to open their mail in.
You listening MSNBC? I'm nerdy, telegenic* and willing to work for booze and rent money! You've already got Emo kid filling in for Nachman, what've you got to loose? *No, really, I swear.
For the purposes of weak humor, he interprets "mass destruction" as the destruction of mass, rather than destruction of an indeterminate, massive quantity. Since anti-matter destroys mass, he suggests that Iraq must posses anti-matter if they indeed have weapons of "mass destruction".
Well, I'm paying a little over 100 a month for basic cable and cable net (Cablevision/Optimum), so I guess I make up for you. We have the worst of both worlds here, though. Deregulation AND a monopoly.
So, you have an equal emotional conection to ethiopian children, astronauts, and everyone not related to you directly. Other people, probably most people have a more uneven distribution of caring.
Looking at this from a stupid philosophical perspective, God is really the only person who can get away with caring equally about everyone. He's the only one capable of infinite love, and as such able to devote infinite love to everyone. People can't do it, since with our limited capacity for love, caring about everyone just makes us look like a heartless bastard to those nearest to us. If you focus your love nearby, you look more caring, but, ironically, you're actually not being that great a person, you're just getting more credit for your goodness. And if you go there, is falling in love with someone evil? You're devoting all this love to one person, so you're clearly taking it from other people, although suppose that being in love actually creates love. In that case I guess there's a theoretical max-holiness point at which you create the most love and use it in the most effective manner.
Or maybe you're just a dick trying to make yourself look better by making people feel guilty for caring.
It was about 2 and a half years. Unless we see some amazing restraint from some powerful people this time, I'm betting Disovery and Atlantis won't be going back up at all.
NASA did the same thing for Challenger. The pieces were getting fished out of the ocean before they admitted anything beyond a "problem". Not that I really blame them, the sooner they tell everybody what went wrong, the sooner their program starts getting dismantled. They got so much shit about their secrecy with Challenger, though, I'd think they'd have learned something about how to handle this stuff.
What I'm wondering is why the news guys seem to have this focus on disproving the possibility that somebody hit it with a missile. Why don't they disprove that it got attacked by aliens why they're at it? I can't think that anybody would seriously suspect a missile attack here, even clueless people speculating on the couch. If you think it's terrorism, you'd be thinking about sabotage on the ground, not some guy launching SAMs into space from his pickup truck.
It's like the TWA 800 thing they keep connecting their debunkings to. They spent that whole story disproving theories nobody but news anchors had come up with too. They HAD a theory that the Navy was testing smart missiles that would avoid passenger jets, and screwed up. It kind of made sense since there was solid rocket fuel on the seats near the hole in the plane, and the Navy was doing ops right under the plane when it went down. Then the FBI and CNN went crazy disproving that an armed SAM got shot at it by terrorists. People were saying it was a test missile without a warhead. The news guys paid no attention to that whatsoever, and went around proving that the solid rocket fuel on the seats wasn't explosive residue. Yeah, I shouldn't bring up stupid conspiracy theories.
Wow. How many Dirk Pitt fanboys so far?/. has the most bizzare tastes.
All I ever read was the one with Howard Hughes' secret moon base. I think I stopped after I realized Dirk was gonna try and fuck the rich old Jackie-O impersonator. Actually, no, it was after they got on the blimp the second time. I always say you can't have more than one blimp scene in a story. Did Indy go back to the Nazi blimp? Nooo. He moved on to exciting new vehicles. Dirk can't let go of the damn blimp. It's like Hamlet or something. Blimps are Dirk's tragic flaw. They'd probably have been his downfall if I'd finished the story, too. I'll bet he has dreams where the blimp talks to him, the poor bastard.
If they got dressed in hooker clothes, went to a seedy part of town, got very drunk and woke up in someone else's bed and claimed "rape!", then I'd call them stupid.
No, he's right. He's pointing out that the little addictions people devolop around smoking all stem from the addiction to nicotine. If your body wants nicotine you're not gonna get little voices telling you to "go buy us some nicotine", you just get an urge that'll go away when you get more.
Your brain learns that holding something in your hand or mouth and going outside lead to placating that need, and that creates a psychological addiction. It's brain stem shit like balancing and typing and throwing a ball, only it leads to a physical need, and thus eventually works a lot closer to something involentary than typing.
The parent up wherever is trying to say that he's not addicted just because his psychological routine becomes irresistable faster than his nicotine hunger.
Don't get all pissed about people using the word addiction anyway. The WAR ON DRUGS has just got you predjudiced against it. An addiction isn't something you HAVE to resist. I'm addicted to the internet, as I'm sure a lot of people here are. I'm also addicted to going to the movies and compliments from women and driving and buying electronics and the feeling of panic I get when a deadline's approaching, but I'm not going to change my life to avoid all of that.
You avoid an addiction when it kills you or makes your life suck. Up until then, feh. At least that's me.
Wow. Did the three of you just dive for Slashdot right after that commercial?
Re:Did that Matrix trailer 0wn of what?!?!
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
No, no. He's good as both. He's handsome-yet-unsettlingly-plasticy. Good for an elf or a computer. Something like that anyway.
BUT WHY DOES SMITH CRUSH A CAR!?! Why!? Did he let himself go and gain a couple tons? Does being able to split into a hundred of himself mean he has to weigh as much as all of them? Or do they just not have inertia in the Matrix? Aw, well, I can't stay mad at such a cute little physics error.
Re:Forgive the obvious question...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
A-men baby. Someone answer this, because I just lost AMC for this Speed channel thing when Cablevision did their monthly ass-raping this week.
How do you watch this shit? I've seen posts here ever so often extolling the glories of circling cars going maybe twice the speed I've done in my minivan. All you get is what I'm pretty sure is a 3 minute tape loop the camera guys set up before they went to Dunkin' Donuts and some droning announcers talking about how some random guy in a helmet is having a kid soon or some shit.
I could see if they were rocket cars doing an obstacle course at 500 mph, and maybe if they laid out a wall of light behind them as they went, but the track's frikkin' BANKED to keep them from sliding off on the curves! Come on now.
And cricket CAN be fun, if only when you try and play it pissed drunk in someone's driveway with only the back of the box as a clue to the rules.
Well, there is strong nationalism. The Nazis were basically the last time Germany had a level of nationalism comparable to the US. You wander around there, you get flags on government buildings, maybe. Not cars, houses, hats, shirts, trees, stores, parking lots, and whatever the hell else you can slap one on. I like to think it'd be tougher to channel our nationalism into mass genocide, but if you can channel it into presidential aproval ratings, hey, who knows.
I don't know what he meant, but it looks to me like they're doing stuff for the hell of it now, kinda like the prequels.
The first movie had creative shots that looked cool, and they came up with a brilliant, cheap way to get them. Now they're doing fucked-up shit for the sole reason of making the effects so overblown and expensive that nobody can reproduce them. Crazy-flips with guns: good. Agent Smith buckling the front-end of a speeding car into the ground as if he weighed about 6 tons: bad. I liked the first movie because they kept the CGI unobtrusive. Now they've got Neo with this pole thing flipping around like a rubber doll tied to a power drill. I'm hoping that's just going to be an effect of the TV, or an unfinished shot they spit out for the ad, but I was hoping that with Spiderman too. (the rest was pretty good though, I'll admit, that and the flying thing were the only two that looked generated, and I don't know how you make flying look realistic anyway.)
I'm getting pissed off about CGI these days. I watch Jurassic Park and the CG effects are better than Spiderman. They're better than SW2, they're better than the fucking Hulk by about a century. How the hell did they get dinosaurs to work fabulously, but Titanic can manage to make a frikkin' flat piece of metal look computerized for about 4 times the budget? I'm thinking that a lot of the stuff recently is just about trying to computer-generate people, and that I'm a lot less forgiving about wierdness in familiar objects, but if that's the case then they shouldn't be doing it when it's unecessary.
Maybe, no, definately I'm a little too critical here, but I'm sure there's other people out there who are irritated when they can tell it's CGI. CG lets directors do basically anything, and it only looks a little off, but I'm still waiting for either myself to get used to it, the technology to get better, or the directors to get over the coolness and use it a little less liberally.
Alright, I'm done, feel free to point out the errors of my angst.
Jesus! The radiator just made this freaky squealing noise right at the end your comment. I swear to god I thought it was that damn song for a second. Scared the fucking shit out of me.
I'd probably be halfway happy if we did. We can either:
1) Prop up some asshole dictator who'll give us cheap oil until he goes nuts and starts eating jailed Saddam supporters
2) Prop up some half-assed democracy that'll degenerate into a extremist Islamic state within 3 elections since the people aren't ready or happy for it
3) Make it into another horribly hot, non-english speaking, tourist-oriented, semi-socialist, low-taxed territory that we'll use as a bombing range
4) Make it a state and have some of the most hilarious national elections in years. Yee-haw!
Yeah, but it was also the closest Roosevelt could get Congress to come to helping out Europe. Nobody wanted some stupid war, we were too busy trying not to be poor. That's why there's always been some idea that Roosevelt might have had something to do with Perl Harbor, even if only by making attractive military targets and pissing off Japan. He was the only one pushing for war. That's why we got attacked by Japan and yet ran straight for France anyway.
Re:Some references please?
on
Tuxedo Park
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· Score: 1
1) The professor's just hoping one of the students will figure it out so he can steal the answer and publish it. 2) See the black hole into which everything I learned in Intro to Neurosci went the minuite after the final. All I know is playing the Gundam Wing SNES game made my cousin's kid puke all over the floor. 3) Will accept: brief history of CLAMP studios, rant about roomate's inability to appreciate Ranma, questioning the sexual orientation of the Inital D character designs without coming off as homophobic, "What the fuck's with Utena?" 4) Find some orphans, some scientists, Russian or German, some unobtainium, and either harness the power of a minor diety or drug a creepy psychic kid. If nothing happens, draw more Kabalistic symbols on the walls. 5) Up the budget for the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division.
Just pretend I came up with something funny in there somewhere.
I'm starting to think we've just hit a cultural sinkhole or somthing. We've got this conservative, suburban, anal-retentive 50s-esque decade going here, only this time the black people aren't opressed enough to write any good music. Punk has the potential to come back, but they've gotten so caught up in the look that they're too mainstream to keep their anger going.
Osama could have produced some great music. After 9-11 all the music guys were all so fucking excited that pop would die and we'd have the 60s all over again, but our attention span was so fucked that Laden sat in a cave for 3 months and we forgot all about him.
There's no conflict or anything. I'm thinking maybe by 2010 anti-corporatism will kick up a little, some insurance company reception areas will get firebombed, and we'll maybe get some decent art out of the whole deal.
It's not just music. Movies are losing it, books are coasting but slacking off, even games are just upgrades on older releases. I think I'll be able to tolerate whatever social unrest's gonna end up knocking us out of this comfortable slump if I'll be able to see movies without feeling embarassed for the filmmakers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is a heavy plot one, so it's written by the Ws. Directed by the Blue Submarine #6 guy.
Morimoto's one looks the best. Creepy haunted houses are bugs in The Matrix? That's sweet.
And that brings us right back to education again. And unfortunately for science, half the country thinks John Edwards really talks to dead people.
Maybe I don't give us enough credit, but try and explain why you can't make noise in space to the next 10 people who'll listen. It's not like they don't learn this stuff in school, they just don't give a shit afterwards. That's what our problem is. We've informed the populous, they just didn't pay attention.
That said, I really think if we got a good heir to Carl Sagan on TV, it would do a lot of good. Especially now that we're dealing with clones and anthrax and shit that's got people trying to sieze babies and buying glove boxes to open their mail in.
You listening MSNBC? I'm nerdy, telegenic* and willing to work for booze and rent money! You've already got Emo kid filling in for Nachman, what've you got to loose?
*No, really, I swear.
And now, to needlessly explain the stupid pun...
For the purposes of weak humor, he interprets "mass destruction" as the destruction of mass, rather than destruction of an indeterminate, massive quantity. Since anti-matter destroys mass, he suggests that Iraq must posses anti-matter if they indeed have weapons of "mass destruction".
Ironically, mass destruction is not even a word.
Well, I'm paying a little over 100 a month for basic cable and cable net (Cablevision/Optimum), so I guess I make up for you. We have the worst of both worlds here, though. Deregulation AND a monopoly.
So, you have an equal emotional conection to ethiopian children, astronauts, and everyone not related to you directly. Other people, probably most people have a more uneven distribution of caring.
Looking at this from a stupid philosophical perspective, God is really the only person who can get away with caring equally about everyone. He's the only one capable of infinite love, and as such able to devote infinite love to everyone. People can't do it, since with our limited capacity for love, caring about everyone just makes us look like a heartless bastard to those nearest to us. If you focus your love nearby, you look more caring, but, ironically, you're actually not being that great a person, you're just getting more credit for your goodness. And if you go there, is falling in love with someone evil? You're devoting all this love to one person, so you're clearly taking it from other people, although suppose that being in love actually creates love. In that case I guess there's a theoretical max-holiness point at which you create the most love and use it in the most effective manner.
Or maybe you're just a dick trying to make yourself look better by making people feel guilty for caring.
It was about 2 and a half years. Unless we see some amazing restraint from some powerful people this time, I'm betting Disovery and Atlantis won't be going back up at all.
NASA did the same thing for Challenger. The pieces were getting fished out of the ocean before they admitted anything beyond a "problem". Not that I really blame them, the sooner they tell everybody what went wrong, the sooner their program starts getting dismantled. They got so much shit about their secrecy with Challenger, though, I'd think they'd have learned something about how to handle this stuff.
What I'm wondering is why the news guys seem to have this focus on disproving the possibility that somebody hit it with a missile. Why don't they disprove that it got attacked by aliens why they're at it? I can't think that anybody would seriously suspect a missile attack here, even clueless people speculating on the couch. If you think it's terrorism, you'd be thinking about sabotage on the ground, not some guy launching SAMs into space from his pickup truck.
It's like the TWA 800 thing they keep connecting their debunkings to. They spent that whole story disproving theories nobody but news anchors had come up with too. They HAD a theory that the Navy was testing smart missiles that would avoid passenger jets, and screwed up. It kind of made sense since there was solid rocket fuel on the seats near the hole in the plane, and the Navy was doing ops right under the plane when it went down. Then the FBI and CNN went crazy disproving that an armed SAM got shot at it by terrorists. People were saying it was a test missile without a warhead. The news guys paid no attention to that whatsoever, and went around proving that the solid rocket fuel on the seats wasn't explosive residue. Yeah, I shouldn't bring up stupid conspiracy theories.
Wow. How many Dirk Pitt fanboys so far? /. has the most bizzare tastes.
All I ever read was the one with Howard Hughes' secret moon base. I think I stopped after I realized Dirk was gonna try and fuck the rich old Jackie-O impersonator. Actually, no, it was after they got on the blimp the second time. I always say you can't have more than one blimp scene in a story. Did Indy go back to the Nazi blimp? Nooo. He moved on to exciting new vehicles. Dirk can't let go of the damn blimp. It's like Hamlet or something. Blimps are Dirk's tragic flaw. They'd probably have been his downfall if I'd finished the story, too. I'll bet he has dreams where the blimp talks to him, the poor bastard.
If they got dressed in hooker clothes, went to a seedy part of town, got very drunk and woke up in someone else's bed and claimed "rape!", then I'd call them stupid.
I'll bet the ladies just love ya, don't they?
No, he's right. He's pointing out that the little addictions people devolop around smoking all stem from the addiction to nicotine. If your body wants nicotine you're not gonna get little voices telling you to "go buy us some nicotine", you just get an urge that'll go away when you get more.
Your brain learns that holding something in your hand or mouth and going outside lead to placating that need, and that creates a psychological addiction. It's brain stem shit like balancing and typing and throwing a ball, only it leads to a physical need, and thus eventually works a lot closer to something involentary than typing.
The parent up wherever is trying to say that he's not addicted just because his psychological routine becomes irresistable faster than his nicotine hunger.
Don't get all pissed about people using the word addiction anyway. The WAR ON DRUGS has just got you predjudiced against it. An addiction isn't something you HAVE to resist. I'm addicted to the internet, as I'm sure a lot of people here are. I'm also addicted to going to the movies and compliments from women and driving and buying electronics and the feeling of panic I get when a deadline's approaching, but I'm not going to change my life to avoid all of that.
You avoid an addiction when it kills you or makes your life suck. Up until then, feh. At least that's me.
What the fuck does that even mean? Dr. Kevorkian? Take chew serious? I think you're making fun of midwesterners or something, but why?
/. these days...
Too many damn schizophrenics on
I think this is the appropriate sentiment here.
Kidding. I lust after the sexy HD goodness too. Even if only to play Soldier of Fortune 2 like never before.
I kiss you you beautiful coward! Keep up the good work!
Wow. Did the three of you just dive for Slashdot right after that commercial?
No, no. He's good as both. He's handsome-yet-unsettlingly-plasticy. Good for an elf or a computer. Something like that anyway.
BUT WHY DOES SMITH CRUSH A CAR!?! Why!? Did he let himself go and gain a couple tons? Does being able to split into a hundred of himself mean he has to weigh as much as all of them? Or do they just not have inertia in the Matrix? Aw, well, I can't stay mad at such a cute little physics error.
A-men baby. Someone answer this, because I just lost AMC for this Speed channel thing when Cablevision did their monthly ass-raping this week.
How do you watch this shit? I've seen posts here ever so often extolling the glories of circling cars going maybe twice the speed I've done in my minivan. All you get is what I'm pretty sure is a 3 minute tape loop the camera guys set up before they went to Dunkin' Donuts and some droning announcers talking about how some random guy in a helmet is having a kid soon or some shit.
I could see if they were rocket cars doing an obstacle course at 500 mph, and maybe if they laid out a wall of light behind them as they went, but the track's frikkin' BANKED to keep them from sliding off on the curves! Come on now.
And cricket CAN be fun, if only when you try and play it pissed drunk in someone's driveway with only the back of the box as a clue to the rules.
Well, there is strong nationalism. The Nazis were basically the last time Germany had a level of nationalism comparable to the US. You wander around there, you get flags on government buildings, maybe. Not cars, houses, hats, shirts, trees, stores, parking lots, and whatever the hell else you can slap one on. I like to think it'd be tougher to channel our nationalism into mass genocide, but if you can channel it into presidential aproval ratings, hey, who knows.
I don't know what he meant, but it looks to me like they're doing stuff for the hell of it now, kinda like the prequels.
The first movie had creative shots that looked cool, and they came up with a brilliant, cheap way to get them. Now they're doing fucked-up shit for the sole reason of making the effects so overblown and expensive that nobody can reproduce them. Crazy-flips with guns: good. Agent Smith buckling the front-end of a speeding car into the ground as if he weighed about 6 tons: bad. I liked the first movie because they kept the CGI unobtrusive. Now they've got Neo with this pole thing flipping around like a rubber doll tied to a power drill. I'm hoping that's just going to be an effect of the TV, or an unfinished shot they spit out for the ad, but I was hoping that with Spiderman too. (the rest was pretty good though, I'll admit, that and the flying thing were the only two that looked generated, and I don't know how you make flying look realistic anyway.)
I'm getting pissed off about CGI these days. I watch Jurassic Park and the CG effects are better than Spiderman. They're better than SW2, they're better than the fucking Hulk by about a century. How the hell did they get dinosaurs to work fabulously, but Titanic can manage to make a frikkin' flat piece of metal look computerized for about 4 times the budget? I'm thinking that a lot of the stuff recently is just about trying to computer-generate people, and that I'm a lot less forgiving about wierdness in familiar objects, but if that's the case then they shouldn't be doing it when it's unecessary.
Maybe, no, definately I'm a little too critical here, but I'm sure there's other people out there who are irritated when they can tell it's CGI. CG lets directors do basically anything, and it only looks a little off, but I'm still waiting for either myself to get used to it, the technology to get better, or the directors to get over the coolness and use it a little less liberally.
Alright, I'm done, feel free to point out the errors of my angst.
Jesus! The radiator just made this freaky squealing noise right at the end your comment. I swear to god I thought it was that damn song for a second. Scared the fucking shit out of me.
I'd probably be halfway happy if we did. We can either:
1) Prop up some asshole dictator who'll give us cheap oil until he goes nuts and starts eating jailed Saddam supporters
2) Prop up some half-assed democracy that'll degenerate into a extremist Islamic state within 3 elections since the people aren't ready or happy for it
3) Make it into another horribly hot, non-english speaking, tourist-oriented, semi-socialist, low-taxed territory that we'll use as a bombing range
4) Make it a state and have some of the most hilarious national elections in years. Yee-haw!
I like it.
Yeah, but it was also the closest Roosevelt could get Congress to come to helping out Europe. Nobody wanted some stupid war, we were too busy trying not to be poor. That's why there's always been some idea that Roosevelt might have had something to do with Perl Harbor, even if only by making attractive military targets and pissing off Japan. He was the only one pushing for war. That's why we got attacked by Japan and yet ran straight for France anyway.
Here.
1) The professor's just hoping one of the students will figure it out so he can steal the answer and publish it.
2) See the black hole into which everything I learned in Intro to Neurosci went the minuite after the final. All I know is playing the Gundam Wing SNES game made my cousin's kid puke all over the floor.
3) Will accept: brief history of CLAMP studios, rant about roomate's inability to appreciate Ranma, questioning the sexual orientation of the Inital D character designs without coming off as homophobic, "What the fuck's with Utena?"
4) Find some orphans, some scientists, Russian or German, some unobtainium, and either harness the power of a minor diety or drug a creepy psychic kid. If nothing happens, draw more Kabalistic symbols on the walls.
5) Up the budget for the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division.
Just pretend I came up with something funny in there somewhere.
I'm starting to think we've just hit a cultural sinkhole or somthing. We've got this conservative, suburban, anal-retentive 50s-esque decade going here, only this time the black people aren't opressed enough to write any good music. Punk has the potential to come back, but they've gotten so caught up in the look that they're too mainstream to keep their anger going.
Osama could have produced some great music. After 9-11 all the music guys were all so fucking excited that pop would die and we'd have the 60s all over again, but our attention span was so fucked that Laden sat in a cave for 3 months and we forgot all about him.
There's no conflict or anything. I'm thinking maybe by 2010 anti-corporatism will kick up a little, some insurance company reception areas will get firebombed, and we'll maybe get some decent art out of the whole deal.
It's not just music. Movies are losing it, books are coasting but slacking off, even games are just upgrades on older releases. I think I'll be able to tolerate whatever social unrest's gonna end up knocking us out of this comfortable slump if I'll be able to see movies without feeling embarassed for the filmmakers.