Easy, killer. If you read carefully, my point is not that I'm omniscient (which I am not, despite my best efforts), but that that was a truly useless story. It provided no serious exploration of the science behind these disaster scenarios, offered no real evaluation of their relative likelihoods, and no suggestion about averting any of them. And what was that crap about divine intervention? I thought discover.com was supposed to have something to do with science news...
As for my personal evaluation of the relative likelihoods of the various EOTW scenarios, I base it on my own reading and my understanding of the evidence case-by-case - gamma ray bursts have happened far away and therefore far back in time, under condictions that do not seem to match our local conditions too closely. There is, however, ample evidence that asteroid and comet fragments hit our planet relatively frequently. I don't claim my own evaluation as fact, but I do value it over fluff journalism.
As for your dice-rolling analogy about our local conditions actually being very unlikely, that's just nitpicky sophistry. It's possible that our local conditions are unlikely, but that's, well - unlikely. It would also undermine all our ideas about physics on scales larger than the solar system, and despite a few obvious gaps (dark matter, GRB's, etc.), that body of knowledge seems to hang together pretty well and is being refined daily.
To summarize: Back off. I don't claim omniscience, or even that I'm right. I do act like I'm right, because I base my opinion on what looks like good evidence, and because I find that playing the evidentiary odds makes one right more often than not.
That article was easily one of the shoddiest pieces of science reporting I've ever seen that didn't come from a right-wing lobbying firm... The only remotely likely items on the list are nuclear war, pandemic, and asteroid impact - though global warming is an up-and-comer.
That should have been a "Top 5" list - Corey S. Powell needs to find some line of work more suited to his talents than digging through back issues of Discover magazine to fill 5000 words. Either that, or liven up the writing and put it in the "Humor" section. What an awful fluff piece...
Ah! I thought it might have been disTastes, with a T, which is confusing, unless the world can end with and all-you-can-eat liver and onions special at the diner.
OK,
- B
As to why the CC and the FotF oppose this, who can say? Their reasoning has often been inscrutable to those of us outside the organizations. But this fact is instructive in pointing out the real motivation behind this bill.
The Republicans who put this bill forward are hoping that nobody will care enough about Congressional procedure to look at the causes of this bill, but that they'll blame the effects on Bill Clinton, and by extension, Al Gore.
Think about it: If El Presidente passes this piece of crap, he looks like (a) he's flip-flopped on the library filtering issue, and (b) has done something in clear opposition to the wishes of the majority of Americans. Besides that, it will have the potential effect of denying funds to libraries, and this batch of Congressional Republicans have, by and large, been hostile to public libraries specifically and an educated populace in general.
So what if the President vetoes it? He holds off funding for Labor, Education, and other favorite departments that the Republican leadership would like to eradicate. Further, they probably hope to blame him for another federal government shutdown.
Nobody in Congress wrote this bill because the people they represented want it, and nobody anywhere actually believes that this joke of a law will survive court review. A few Congressmen just wanted to give Clinton and Gore an election-year catch-22.
Well, that's part of what makes the culture that allows Echelon so disturbing - not only do we have governments that participate in this sort of thing, but when someone confronts this manifestly Bad and Wrong behavior, they identify the problem as intellectual property theft, rather than invasion of individual privacy or violation of any other basic human right.
Somehow, people (or anyway, most people) in the industrialized nations have gotten into a mindset that assumes that their governments are benevolent, and not only do they not feel called to personal vigilance and action to change how they are governed, but when something like Echelon makes it into the news, they willfully ignore it and assume it doesn't concern them.
I have no idea what to do about it, either.
Anyway, I'm going to go vote, send irate emails to my Congressman, strengthen my end-to-end crypto, and sulk about what idiots people are. If anyone cares, drop me a line and we can discuss buying an island and seceding...
...and every software engineer knows that the ideal tool for the job is the one that you personally know best, right?:)
Yes, but good software engineers don't mind learning another tool.;)
I agree re: media/memes being governed by laws of complex/self-organizing systems, by the way. The Darwinian methaphor, though, has limited application in the meme pool, and Katz just blew past those limits.
In this age, media defy natural laws of the survival of species.
Hold on... I'm having an epiphany here... Feels like a deep one...
Yes! That's it! That's the reason! Media are not species, and thus are not bound by the laws governing organisms! Wow! Jon Katz has led me to the mountaintop yet again...
Slashdot Mirror
As for my personal evaluation of the relative likelihoods of the various EOTW scenarios, I base it on my own reading and my understanding of the evidence case-by-case - gamma ray bursts have happened far away and therefore far back in time, under condictions that do not seem to match our local conditions too closely. There is, however, ample evidence that asteroid and comet fragments hit our planet relatively frequently. I don't claim my own evaluation as fact, but I do value it over fluff journalism.
As for your dice-rolling analogy about our local conditions actually being very unlikely, that's just nitpicky sophistry. It's possible that our local conditions are unlikely, but that's, well - unlikely. It would also undermine all our ideas about physics on scales larger than the solar system, and despite a few obvious gaps (dark matter, GRB's, etc.), that body of knowledge seems to hang together pretty well and is being refined daily.
To summarize: Back off. I don't claim omniscience, or even that I'm right. I do act like I'm right, because I base my opinion on what looks like good evidence, and because I find that playing the evidentiary odds makes one right more often than not.
OK,
- B
That should have been a "Top 5" list - Corey S. Powell needs to find some line of work more suited to his talents than digging through back issues of Discover magazine to fill 5000 words. Either that, or liven up the writing and put it in the "Humor" section. What an awful fluff piece...
OK, - B
Ah! I thought it might have been disTastes, with a T, which is confusing, unless the world can end with and all-you-can-eat liver and onions special at the diner. OK, - B
The Republicans who put this bill forward are hoping that nobody will care enough about Congressional procedure to look at the causes of this bill, but that they'll blame the effects on Bill Clinton, and by extension, Al Gore.
Think about it: If El Presidente passes this piece of crap, he looks like (a) he's flip-flopped on the library filtering issue, and (b) has done something in clear opposition to the wishes of the majority of Americans. Besides that, it will have the potential effect of denying funds to libraries, and this batch of Congressional Republicans have, by and large, been hostile to public libraries specifically and an educated populace in general.
So what if the President vetoes it? He holds off funding for Labor, Education, and other favorite departments that the Republican leadership would like to eradicate. Further, they probably hope to blame him for another federal government shutdown.
Nobody in Congress wrote this bill because the people they represented want it, and nobody anywhere actually believes that this joke of a law will survive court review. A few Congressmen just wanted to give Clinton and Gore an election-year catch-22.
OK, - B
Somehow, people (or anyway, most people) in the industrialized nations have gotten into a mindset that assumes that their governments are benevolent, and not only do they not feel called to personal vigilance and action to change how they are governed, but when something like Echelon makes it into the news, they willfully ignore it and assume it doesn't concern them.
I have no idea what to do about it, either.
Anyway, I'm going to go vote, send irate emails to my Congressman, strengthen my end-to-end crypto, and sulk about what idiots people are. If anyone cares, drop me a line and we can discuss buying an island and seceding...
OK,
- B
Yes, but good software engineers don't mind learning another tool. ;)
I agree re: media/memes being governed by laws of complex/self-organizing systems, by the way. The Darwinian methaphor, though, has limited application in the meme pool, and Katz just blew past those limits.
OK,
- B
--
Hold on... I'm having an epiphany here... Feels like a deep one...
Yes! That's it! That's the reason! Media are not species, and thus are not bound by the laws governing organisms! Wow! Jon Katz has led me to the mountaintop yet again...
OK,
- B
--