Socialism is not a form of government. It is an economic model. Tyranny does derive from economic models. Tyranny derives from the way in which a government approaches them.
Socialism is extraordinarily far from causal in this situation.
Why are there going to be "water wars"? Current water purification technologies can filter just about anything. It comes with a huge energy cost, but so what? Build a few nuclear plants in every state and call it a day.
There is no need to "mine" freshwater reserves. It seems unlikely to me that shipping water from some 3rd world country to the States is going to be more cost efficient than just purifying contaminated water we already have.
This isn't how Dropbox is really intended to function. The idea is that you keep a file structure as child to the drop box directory. Therefore, whenever you modify files within that hierarchy, they are automatically updated. I have my school and research directory as child to my dropbox directory and find it to be a god send.
This is an interesting question which I myself have puzzled over more than once. The explanation I am going to give you is one that is not based on any clear vein of research, so take it for what it is worth.
"Cussing" is making use of linguistic forms which have been deemed taboo. Whether or not you are cussing, in my opinion, depends upon whether or not you are violating a taboo from the perspective of yourself or your speaking partner. I could see the argument of justification for your friend going either way (he is mapping to the same concept which is itself taboo) or (the concept is not taboo only the word). If your friend honestly doesn't feel as if he is cussing then, to him, he is not cussing. He might be to you, or to others, depending upon what exactly each person has decided is the thing which is taboo.
In my opinion he is still "cussing" by doing this replacement but the fact that uptight sensors on stations like FOX let this stuff through is evidence that not everyone agrees.
Basically, I suppose it depends on what you think cussing *is*. There is quite a large body of work on it but I regret that I have no experience with it. Sorry about that.
The only time I've heard it used as one is to refer to an AM radio, by old people.
I'll get off your lawn now.
In the sentence "I like wireless.", "wireless" is a noun. Therefore, "wireless" is a noun.
Words don't have divine and immutable parts of speech or any other linguistic feature somehow ingrained in the fabric of the universe. "Wireless" can plop down in any open class position (noun, verb, adjective, adverb). It is even welcome to be a closed class word (determiner, pronoun, conjunction, etc) if we decide to start using it as such. "Wireless" can also be spoken with a "Z" at the end, or by dropping the first letter ("W"). In other words, we can do whatever we want so long as our speaking partner understands what we are doing. As a brilliant man said a very long time ago "The meaning of a word is its use in the language".
If you have noticed people annoyed by you in person when you say stuff like what you have posted here, it is because *you* are the one violating a norm by suggesting we cannot use language however we please. This norm is implicit in humans interaction and people are right to roll their eyes when you're around.
What damage has the USA suffered at the hands of wikileaks? I'll admit that many politicians and military personnel have been embarrassed, but that isn't an attack on the USA. It is an attack on politicians and military personnel who acted inappropriately. Revealing inappropriate behavior of government officers =/= attacking a government
There is an entire scientific discipline (cognitive science) devoted to the creation of an AI. It is nowhere near succeeding. Unless the US military has managed to perform its own research (and I mean including basics like underlying philosophy which isn't even settled) then it is not possible for the US military to be harboring an AI. I know this seems possible from the outside because they get so much money... but money can't really make a few closed door researchers produce something more significant than an army of thousands of researchers sharing their data (academia) unless the money is giving those closed door researchers access to requisite hardware for the science. Hardware isn't currently the problem with AI. Currently, the problem is just figuring out what the "I" in AI even means.
If you manage to simulate the mind of a nine month baby then you will know that it has a mind because it's body will be behaving just like a baby. Crying and sleeping. It would be quite striking.
I agree with you. However, if you meant this as an argument, then you actually meant to say "If you manage to simulate the *brain*..."
Philosophers have argued that if something behaves like a person, we should assign it personhood attributions. This is how many argue for the possible valuing of AI and some animals. You are suggesting the same; Since it behaves like something with a mind, we can assume that it has one.
This argument is problematic. It assumes that we have somehow managed to perfectly simulate human brain function such that it leads to the emergence of a mind. It should be pointed out that, in order to accomplish this feat, *we must know things about the mind*. Successful models of the mind not only supply us with tools to help people with cognitive disorders, they also bring us closer to understanding how the mind actually emerges from the hardware (the brain).
This is not exactly the case. There is a brain in a jar down the hall from me, but presumably we should not expect it to be "running" a mind. The neural tissue found in other mammals is the same as ours (Pinker, How the Mind Works), yet ours does something different.
When you "simulate" something, you are building something to function in the same manner as something else. You can't "simulate" the brain without knowing what it is the brain is outputting (referred to as the mind here for brevities sake). I can build something that looks very much like a brain, say, a connectionist network. Unfortunately, there are problems with the model that make it a poor model for everything the mind does. Thus, it is a poor model for an actual brain. I can simulate the brain using cheesits and string, but a mind isn't coming out of it.
Modeling the mind is critical in order to evaluate whether the models of the brain we are building accurately reflect what is going on insofar as we care about the emergence of a mind. I assure you that Sejnowski does care about the ermergence of mind. His claim would be uninteresting in the extreme if he did not.
One of the problems in cognitive science is finding a model which bridges our understanding of the mind with our understanding of the brain.
There are currently four academic disciplines working on the reverse engineering of a human mind. Linguistics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy. You can count neurology too if you want to start talking about the *actual* brain. Several tens of thousands of individuals are directly and indirectly working on this problem. We've come a long way in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we have a pretty long way to go. For the moment we lack a model which accurately describes how mental processes work. There isn't even a consensus on how the processing is done.
"modeling the brain" is not even really the hard part. One only needs sufficient computing power to model what they *think* is going on logically (there isn't even a consensus here). The trick is modeling the mind. We are very, very far away from that.
A fun number to throw around is how many synaptic connections are present in the brain. Synaptic connections are widely believed to be the best indicator of overall memory storage and processing speed (to an extent). There are about 10 to the 15th (Peta I believe?) synaptic connection in a normal human brain. A significant number of these are active at any given time. In other words, the brain is performing a HUGE number of "calculations" simultaneously at all times. Modeling just the hardware is obviously not easy... modeling the software is currently not possible. I doubt it will be in the next 50 years.
For a good read on what many cognitive scientists think is going on, though it is clearly not an accurate model but rather a best guess, go read up on "connectionism".
Then as a 40 something guy who has rode the rollercoaster of business (and done well) let me offer you one piece of advice: The only security you have is in what you can do. You will face layoffs, you will face hard times. If you keep increasing your skills, learning new skills, and improving yourself, then you are less likely to be the one to get laid off. And if you are, you will find it much easier to get a job.
The "constant layoffs" are not new to 2007, it has been going on for decades. The 80's had a bad reputation for the decade of greed for the same reason. Again, all you have is what you know you can do. No company will ever "give" you security. One of the main points in this article is that the people who DID work hard and improve themselves were the ones who got laid off. Saying they [skilled workers] can just go get a better job elsewhere seems shortsighted since, if they could easily go get a better job, one would presume they'd have already done so.
Clearly you are very confused as to what "logically impossible" means. Logical impossibility is most often defined as "a proposition that is false in all possible worlds". I can easily imagine a possible world in which I put "We reserve the right to enslave you at our discretion" in to a contract. Thus, it is not logically impossible.
What you are trying to say is that it is contradictory, in some sense. As far as this is concerned, you are missing the point. My point isn't that you coercion clauses in contracts void themselves because they breach law, my point is that ANY clause in a contract makes the contract void if the clause is a breach of law. If coercion doesn't sit well with your mistaken views on logical necessity and social contract theory, then insert your own example.
No, it doesn't work that way. They can say whatever they want in their contract and you can sign it, but if just because you sign it does not mean the contract will hold. There are things a contract cannot do. Even if the contract explicitly states it and the person signs it, the contract can still be considered void if the contract violates a law. If I sign a contract that says "We reserve the right to enslave you at our discression", that contract WILL be considered void and they will be arrested if they try to act on it.
There are rights you cannot make people sign away. "Reserve the right to terminate at any time..." does NOT equal "Reserve the right to terminate for any reason..". False advertising is a violation of law and cannot be gotten out of, no matter how fancy your contract is worded.
I don't think this would have killed the series at all, it would simply bring about a modicrum of change (I realize change can be frightening). Simply because the setting changes to a ww2-ish one does not mean we cannot examine issue relevant to our day-to-day lives. How about the controversial topic of torture? The USA is doing it, maybe Riker encounters a situation where torturing someone could lead to saving a lot of human lives? There is no end to the topics that could be covered, it simply takes imagination.
If you argument is that we cannot "identify" with it because it has a major war, I'd say that's really short-sighted. We are talking about a show that presents us with humanity in a *completely* different situation than it is today. They are aware of alien species, hell, they work alongside and marry them. They have no monetary system, their motivations in life are drastically different than ours. I assure you that if we can identify with the Star Trek universe as it has been clasically portrayed, we can identify with the same universe in a state of war.
Yet another action show? Maybe, but that's not a result of the premise. That's a result of the talent (or lack thereof) of the writers.
To me, half of the fun with Star Trek was watching technology develop. From Enterprise NCC-1701 to Enterprise D, to the Defiant and on to Enterprise E and Voyager. The fun for me was watching what the writers did with new starships and how new technology was being implemented. It is the progression of the Star Trek universe that I took pleasure in, at least as much as I took pleasure in the interactions between characters. This is why enterprise was uninteresting to me. I knew where the federation was going to be in a few hundred years, so watching Scott Backula fly around in a starship that a 24th century shuttlecraft could tear apart in combat seemed like a waste of time.
If they had any balls at all they would have gone with the idea of having Captain Riker commanding the Titan in a time when the federation is being systematically destroyed in a major war (ie, the feds are losing). To see the federation being destroyed and fighting for it's life by spiting out warships would have been interesting to me. Watching a film about how kirk and spock originally fell in love is not. I'll probably see 11, but only at a friends house where it's on and I don't have a choice.
Color, as a phenomena, exists (as you point out in a neurilogical manner). You are right to point out that there is no "redness" floating around attached to objects. I'm not sure, however, how this is relavent to anything that I said.
I also assumed you were talking about early human evolution, not mammalian evolution as a whole. It seems hard enough to speculate about early human evolution, much less speculate about the evolution of mammals. This of course doesn't mean it's impossible, I just didn't expect anyone to be doing it so I filled in your argument with what I assumed you were talking about. Slip up in my interpretation of your meaning, I apologize.
This experiment is not valid unless you do it in the complete absence of artificial light. It takes very little artificial light to activate your cones, so little in fact that I would suggest being tens of miles away from the nearest active light-source.
I should have included references, since contradicting "common-sense" views often requires more substantial argument than mere lecture.
Cones do not detect color, rods do not detect black and white.
Cones are sensitive to daylight conditions while rods are sensitive to low-light conditions. Your cones are inactive during night lighting conditions and you still construct your visual field in color. As a result of being keyed to daylight, cones are also used for edge perception. As such, you will find it quite impossible to read by moonlight, as reading requires your cones to distinguish very fine edges and your cones are inactive in nigh-light. (regardless of how bright the moon is.) Rods are particularly good at sensing motion, though not edges. As you may guess, this means humans are better at sensing motion *at night*. As such, you will not be able to tell which claw a bear is swinging at you in your peripheral vision, though you will be able to tell a large object is hurtling toward you. In fact, due to the physical setup of your eye, it is advisable to "look" at objects in night conditions without focusing directly at them. You have a.3mm concentration of cones in the center of your eye, thus the center of your eye is completely incapable of helping you in these conditions. This setup (being able to distinguish edges and detail better during the day and being better at detecting motion at night) seems to suggest that humans were on the defensive at night and actively engaged in the world during the day. The human vision system is much more effective (for things that we need to be spending time on) in daylight conditions, I find it *highly* unlikely humans were nocturnal in anything that might resemble recent history.
We also do not detect 3 colors and then construct other colors out of a combination of these. Our S, L and M cones are tuned to respond most agressively to specific wavelengths of light, though they are still responsive to wavelengths that are "near" those. There is even a theory that some women posses a gene (that can only be carried on a second x chromosome) that produces a fourth type of cone. These cones are tuned to detect light in between the wavelengths of the L and M cones, giving these women the ability to distinguish between colors that a tri-chromatic individual would see as identicle. These women are ingeniously deemed "Tetrochromatic superwomen".
Don't be sad if all this contradicts what you were told in high school. High school teachers, by and large, aren't on the bleeding edge of cognitive science.
This situation is the result of what is now popularly known as a "broken arrow". A nuclear weapons accident that does not produce the risk of nuclear war. The weapon (a missing weapon on the nuclear scale)would actually be known as an "empty quiver".
As reported by wikipedia, there are currently 11 such weapons known to be missing from the United States arsenal. It should be noted that these weapons are not the pitiful 1-5 kiloton weapons that Korea is detonating. It is likely they are 10+ megaton city-killers.
All that being said, I wouldn't worry too much about the situation. Anyone (or anything) with the capability to decipher how to actually set one of these missing weapons off is most likely nothing short of a country. Countries with nuclear weapons aren't something terribly dangerous, due to nuclear deterrance (MAD). Add to that the fact that the US is unable to find these weapons (Some are presumed destroyed or at least damaged beyond repair)and I find it much less likely these will be a threat than, say, the car that passes by me when I walk to school.
You are a perfect example of one of the worst forms of professors. I absolutely require a laptop in my class's. Taking notes on a laptop is so unbelievably potent. The notes can be searched instanly for keywords while studying, a student can type way faster than they can handwrite (thus, their notes are more detailed), a laptop allows for easy and effective organization of notes, laptops save paper, I could go on.
You deny students these benefits... why? Because maybe some students won't attend class for some reason? I attend all my class's because I wouldn't learn enough without doing it, but what if I didn't attend those class's? Well, I would either fail the exam or I would pass it. If I pass it, I have a level of knowledge you deem acceptable. If I fail, I do not. Why would actually being there make any difference in the least if I learn/already know the material sufficiently to ace your test?
Treat your students like kids and they will act that way. Treat them like adults and some will still act like kids, but they'll fail your class. Them failing your class is NOT your problem.
So what I'm really saying is you should treat your students with respect and try to create a positive **learning** enviroment instead of trying to be professor gestapo.
It almost seems as if the RIAA is actually *trying* to piss off as many people as possible. Has anyone examined the current chairman to see if he has any inclings towards being a comedian?
You will surely die.
- Genesis 2:17
For you are dust, and to dust you will return.
- Genesis 3:19.
For this is the way God loved the world: He gave His one and only Son, that whoever who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
- John 3:16.
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.
- Romans 3:23.
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
- Romans 6:25.
Although I salute your obvious knowledge and respect for the bible, do these quotes really have anything to do with us genetically altering ourselves so we don't age?
Obviously, the lack of aging wouldn't make us immortal, there are plenty of ways to die, age being one of them.
I think the only thing that bugs us about this (age) is that until now, or at least the near future, we had absolutely no control over it. It was inevitable, if something else didnt kill us first, age would eventually. I think this is why it was so focused upon in many religious writings.
However, in our world today religion is taking a backseat to science. Perhaps in the past a scientist who saw such an amazing opportunity as stopping the aging process may have quit his research in fear of God's wrath, but I assure you if there is even a chance that this could be done today, it will be.
---The problem with being better than everyone is that most people tend to think your pretencious.
Slashdot Mirror
Socialism is not a form of government. It is an economic model. Tyranny does derive from economic models. Tyranny derives from the way in which a government approaches them.
Socialism is extraordinarily far from causal in this situation.
I'll point out that humans thought the solar system WAS our own personal accretion disk until only the last few hundred years. For the lulz.
Why are there going to be "water wars"? Current water purification technologies can filter just about anything. It comes with a huge energy cost, but so what? Build a few nuclear plants in every state and call it a day.
There is no need to "mine" freshwater reserves. It seems unlikely to me that shipping water from some 3rd world country to the States is going to be more cost efficient than just purifying contaminated water we already have.
This isn't how Dropbox is really intended to function. The idea is that you keep a file structure as child to the drop box directory. Therefore, whenever you modify files within that hierarchy, they are automatically updated. I have my school and research directory as child to my dropbox directory and find it to be a god send.
This is an interesting question which I myself have puzzled over more than once. The explanation I am going to give you is one that is not based on any clear vein of research, so take it for what it is worth.
"Cussing" is making use of linguistic forms which have been deemed taboo. Whether or not you are cussing, in my opinion, depends upon whether or not you are violating a taboo from the perspective of yourself or your speaking partner. I could see the argument of justification for your friend going either way (he is mapping to the same concept which is itself taboo) or (the concept is not taboo only the word). If your friend honestly doesn't feel as if he is cussing then, to him, he is not cussing. He might be to you, or to others, depending upon what exactly each person has decided is the thing which is taboo.
In my opinion he is still "cussing" by doing this replacement but the fact that uptight sensors on stations like FOX let this stuff through is evidence that not everyone agrees.
Basically, I suppose it depends on what you think cussing *is*. There is quite a large body of work on it but I regret that I have no experience with it. Sorry about that.
As above.
The only time I've heard it used as one is to refer to an AM radio, by old people.
I'll get off your lawn now.
In the sentence "I like wireless.", "wireless" is a noun. Therefore, "wireless" is a noun.
Words don't have divine and immutable parts of speech or any other linguistic feature somehow ingrained in the fabric of the universe. "Wireless" can plop down in any open class position (noun, verb, adjective, adverb). It is even welcome to be a closed class word (determiner, pronoun, conjunction, etc) if we decide to start using it as such. "Wireless" can also be spoken with a "Z" at the end, or by dropping the first letter ("W"). In other words, we can do whatever we want so long as our speaking partner understands what we are doing.
As a brilliant man said a very long time ago "The meaning of a word is its use in the language".
If you have noticed people annoyed by you in person when you say stuff like what you have posted here, it is because *you* are the one violating a norm by suggesting we cannot use language however we please. This norm is implicit in humans interaction and people are right to roll their eyes when you're around.
Yes, IAAL. (I am a linguist)
What damage has the USA suffered at the hands of wikileaks? I'll admit that many politicians and military personnel have been embarrassed, but that isn't an attack on the USA. It is an attack on politicians and military personnel who acted inappropriately. Revealing inappropriate behavior of government officers =/= attacking a government
There is an entire scientific discipline (cognitive science) devoted to the creation of an AI. It is nowhere near succeeding. Unless the US military has managed to perform its own research (and I mean including basics like underlying philosophy which isn't even settled) then it is not possible for the US military to be harboring an AI. I know this seems possible from the outside because they get so much money... but money can't really make a few closed door researchers produce something more significant than an army of thousands of researchers sharing their data (academia) unless the money is giving those closed door researchers access to requisite hardware for the science. Hardware isn't currently the problem with AI. Currently, the problem is just figuring out what the "I" in AI even means.
If you manage to simulate the mind of a nine month baby then you will know that it has a mind because it's body will be behaving just like a baby. Crying and sleeping. It would be quite striking.
I agree with you. However, if you meant this as an argument, then you actually meant to say "If you manage to simulate the *brain* ..."
Philosophers have argued that if something behaves like a person, we should assign it personhood attributions. This is how many argue for the possible valuing of AI and some animals. You are suggesting the same; Since it behaves like something with a mind, we can assume that it has one.
This argument is problematic. It assumes that we have somehow managed to perfectly simulate human brain function such that it leads to the emergence of a mind. It should be pointed out that, in order to accomplish this feat, *we must know things about the mind*. Successful models of the mind not only supply us with tools to help people with cognitive disorders, they also bring us closer to understanding how the mind actually emerges from the hardware (the brain).
This is not exactly the case. There is a brain in a jar down the hall from me, but presumably we should not expect it to be "running" a mind. The neural tissue found in other mammals is the same as ours (Pinker, How the Mind Works), yet ours does something different.
When you "simulate" something, you are building something to function in the same manner as something else. You can't "simulate" the brain without knowing what it is the brain is outputting (referred to as the mind here for brevities sake). I can build something that looks very much like a brain, say, a connectionist network. Unfortunately, there are problems with the model that make it a poor model for everything the mind does. Thus, it is a poor model for an actual brain. I can simulate the brain using cheesits and string, but a mind isn't coming out of it.
Modeling the mind is critical in order to evaluate whether the models of the brain we are building accurately reflect what is going on insofar as we care about the emergence of a mind. I assure you that Sejnowski does care about the ermergence of mind. His claim would be uninteresting in the extreme if he did not.
One of the problems in cognitive science is finding a model which bridges our understanding of the mind with our understanding of the brain.
There are currently four academic disciplines working on the reverse engineering of a human mind. Linguistics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy. You can count neurology too if you want to start talking about the *actual* brain. Several tens of thousands of individuals are directly and indirectly working on this problem. We've come a long way in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we have a pretty long way to go. For the moment we lack a model which accurately describes how mental processes work. There isn't even a consensus on how the processing is done.
"modeling the brain" is not even really the hard part. One only needs sufficient computing power to model what they *think* is going on logically (there isn't even a consensus here). The trick is modeling the mind. We are very, very far away from that.
A fun number to throw around is how many synaptic connections are present in the brain. Synaptic connections are widely believed to be the best indicator of overall memory storage and processing speed (to an extent). There are about 10 to the 15th (Peta I believe?) synaptic connection in a normal human brain. A significant number of these are active at any given time. In other words, the brain is performing a HUGE number of "calculations" simultaneously at all times. Modeling just the hardware is obviously not easy... modeling the software is currently not possible. I doubt it will be in the next 50 years.
For a good read on what many cognitive scientists think is going on, though it is clearly not an accurate model but rather a best guess, go read up on "connectionism".
Somewhere, a behavioral psychologist is quietly crying...
Better get them a virtual hugging vest. They'll feel better in no time.
The "constant layoffs" are not new to 2007, it has been going on for decades. The 80's had a bad reputation for the decade of greed for the same reason. Again, all you have is what you know you can do. No company will ever "give" you security. One of the main points in this article is that the people who DID work hard and improve themselves were the ones who got laid off. Saying they [skilled workers] can just go get a better job elsewhere seems shortsighted since, if they could easily go get a better job, one would presume they'd have already done so.
Clearly you are very confused as to what "logically impossible" means. Logical impossibility is most often defined as "a proposition that is false in all possible worlds". I can easily imagine a possible world in which I put "We reserve the right to enslave you at our discretion" in to a contract. Thus, it is not logically impossible.
What you are trying to say is that it is contradictory, in some sense. As far as this is concerned, you are missing the point. My point isn't that you coercion clauses in contracts void themselves because they breach law, my point is that ANY clause in a contract makes the contract void if the clause is a breach of law. If coercion doesn't sit well with your mistaken views on logical necessity and social contract theory, then insert your own example.
No, it doesn't work that way. They can say whatever they want in their contract and you can sign it, but if just because you sign it does not mean the contract will hold. There are things a contract cannot do. Even if the contract explicitly states it and the person signs it, the contract can still be considered void if the contract violates a law. If I sign a contract that says "We reserve the right to enslave you at our discression", that contract WILL be considered void and they will be arrested if they try to act on it.
There are rights you cannot make people sign away. "Reserve the right to terminate at any time..." does NOT equal "Reserve the right to terminate for any reason..". False advertising is a violation of law and cannot be gotten out of, no matter how fancy your contract is worded.
I don't think this would have killed the series at all, it would simply bring about a modicrum of change (I realize change can be frightening). Simply because the setting changes to a ww2-ish one does not mean we cannot examine issue relevant to our day-to-day lives. How about the controversial topic of torture? The USA is doing it, maybe Riker encounters a situation where torturing someone could lead to saving a lot of human lives? There is no end to the topics that could be covered, it simply takes imagination.
If you argument is that we cannot "identify" with it because it has a major war, I'd say that's really short-sighted. We are talking about a show that presents us with humanity in a *completely* different situation than it is today. They are aware of alien species, hell, they work alongside and marry them. They have no monetary system, their motivations in life are drastically different than ours. I assure you that if we can identify with the Star Trek universe as it has been clasically portrayed, we can identify with the same universe in a state of war.
Yet another action show? Maybe, but that's not a result of the premise. That's a result of the talent (or lack thereof) of the writers.
To me, half of the fun with Star Trek was watching technology develop. From Enterprise NCC-1701 to Enterprise D, to the Defiant and on to Enterprise E and Voyager. The fun for me was watching what the writers did with new starships and how new technology was being implemented. It is the progression of the Star Trek universe that I took pleasure in, at least as much as I took pleasure in the interactions between characters. This is why enterprise was uninteresting to me. I knew where the federation was going to be in a few hundred years, so watching Scott Backula fly around in a starship that a 24th century shuttlecraft could tear apart in combat seemed like a waste of time.
If they had any balls at all they would have gone with the idea of having Captain Riker commanding the Titan in a time when the federation is being systematically destroyed in a major war (ie, the feds are losing). To see the federation being destroyed and fighting for it's life by spiting out warships would have been interesting to me. Watching a film about how kirk and spock originally fell in love is not. I'll probably see 11, but only at a friends house where it's on and I don't have a choice.
This reference is to NASA explaining just why you can't read text by moonlight. I should have included it earlier. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/28sep_stra ngemoonlight.htm
Color, as a phenomena, exists (as you point out in a neurilogical manner). You are right to point out that there is no "redness" floating around attached to objects. I'm not sure, however, how this is relavent to anything that I said.
I also assumed you were talking about early human evolution, not mammalian evolution as a whole. It seems hard enough to speculate about early human evolution, much less speculate about the evolution of mammals. This of course doesn't mean it's impossible, I just didn't expect anyone to be doing it so I filled in your argument with what I assumed you were talking about. Slip up in my interpretation of your meaning, I apologize.
This experiment is not valid unless you do it in the complete absence of artificial light. It takes very little artificial light to activate your cones, so little in fact that I would suggest being tens of miles away from the nearest active light-source.
a ngemoonlight.htm
I should have included references, since contradicting "common-sense" views often requires more substantial argument than mere lecture.
Here is NASA explaining just why you can't read by moonlight:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/28sep_str
Cones do not detect color, rods do not detect black and white.
.3mm concentration of cones in the center of your eye, thus the center of your eye is completely incapable of helping you in these conditions.
Cones are sensitive to daylight conditions while rods are sensitive to low-light conditions. Your cones are inactive during night lighting conditions and you still construct your visual field in color. As a result of being keyed to daylight, cones are also used for edge perception. As such, you will find it quite impossible to read by moonlight, as reading requires your cones to distinguish very fine edges and your cones are inactive in nigh-light. (regardless of how bright the moon is.)
Rods are particularly good at sensing motion, though not edges. As you may guess, this means humans are better at sensing motion *at night*. As such, you will not be able to tell which claw a bear is swinging at you in your peripheral vision, though you will be able to tell a large object is hurtling toward you. In fact, due to the physical setup of your eye, it is advisable to "look" at objects in night conditions without focusing directly at them. You have a
This setup (being able to distinguish edges and detail better during the day and being better at detecting motion at night) seems to suggest that humans were on the defensive at night and actively engaged in the world during the day.
The human vision system is much more effective (for things that we need to be spending time on) in daylight conditions, I find it *highly* unlikely humans were nocturnal in anything that might resemble recent history.
We also do not detect 3 colors and then construct other colors out of a combination of these. Our S, L and M cones are tuned to respond most agressively to specific wavelengths of light, though they are still responsive to wavelengths that are "near" those. There is even a theory that some women posses a gene (that can only be carried on a second x chromosome) that produces a fourth type of cone. These cones are tuned to detect light in between the wavelengths of the L and M cones, giving these women the ability to distinguish between colors that a tri-chromatic individual would see as identicle. These women are ingeniously deemed "Tetrochromatic superwomen".
Don't be sad if all this contradicts what you were told in high school. High school teachers, by and large, aren't on the bleeding edge of cognitive science.
This situation is the result of what is now popularly known as a "broken arrow". A nuclear weapons accident that does not produce the risk of nuclear war. The weapon (a missing weapon on the nuclear scale)would actually be known as an "empty quiver".
As reported by wikipedia, there are currently 11 such weapons known to be missing from the United States arsenal. It should be noted that these weapons are not the pitiful 1-5 kiloton weapons that Korea is detonating. It is likely they are 10+ megaton city-killers.
All that being said, I wouldn't worry too much about the situation. Anyone (or anything) with the capability to decipher how to actually set one of these missing weapons off is most likely nothing short of a country. Countries with nuclear weapons aren't something terribly dangerous, due to nuclear deterrance (MAD).
Add to that the fact that the US is unable to find these weapons (Some are presumed destroyed or at least damaged beyond repair)and I find it much less likely these will be a threat than, say, the car that passes by me when I walk to school.
You are a perfect example of one of the worst forms of professors. I absolutely require a laptop in my class's. Taking notes on a laptop is so unbelievably potent. The notes can be searched instanly for keywords while studying, a student can type way faster than they can handwrite (thus, their notes are more detailed), a laptop allows for easy and effective organization of notes, laptops save paper, I could go on.
You deny students these benefits... why? Because maybe some students won't attend class for some reason? I attend all my class's because I wouldn't learn enough without doing it, but what if I didn't attend those class's? Well, I would either fail the exam or I would pass it. If I pass it, I have a level of knowledge you deem acceptable. If I fail, I do not. Why would actually being there make any difference in the least if I learn/already know the material sufficiently to ace your test?
Treat your students like kids and they will act that way. Treat them like adults and some will still act like kids, but they'll fail your class. Them failing your class is NOT your problem.
So what I'm really saying is you should treat your students with respect and try to create a positive **learning** enviroment instead of trying to be professor gestapo.
It almost seems as if the RIAA is actually *trying* to piss off as many people as possible. Has anyone examined the current chairman to see if he has any inclings towards being a comedian?
The "for dummies" line of books is intended to cover exactly the material you descirbe. Not only that, but it is already well established and popular.8 66/ref%3Dpd_sl_aw_bnag-1_software_9783603_6/002-65 19826-3681646
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/727
Although I salute your obvious knowledge and respect for the bible, do these quotes really have anything to do with us genetically altering ourselves so we don't age?
Obviously, the lack of aging wouldn't make us immortal, there are plenty of ways to die, age being one of them.
I think the only thing that bugs us about this (age) is that until now, or at least the near future, we had absolutely no control over it. It was inevitable, if something else didnt kill us first, age would eventually. I think this is why it was so focused upon in many religious writings.
However, in our world today religion is taking a backseat to science. Perhaps in the past a scientist who saw such an amazing opportunity as stopping the aging process may have quit his research in fear of God's wrath, but I assure you if there is even a chance that this could be done today, it will be.
---The problem with being better than everyone is that most people tend to think your pretencious.