Not particularly concerned about being poisoned by copper from water pipes. I was just saying that, if it isn't a problem from water pipes, it's unlikely to be a problem from keyboard keys.
As for PEX and bacterial binding, I'd like to swing this back around to the UV sterilizing keyboard and point out that one big downside of PEX is that it degrades like crazy under UV exposure. Pity, because it would otherwise be a great way to clean out bacteria from inside the pipes.
It looks like the critical thing in those alloys to make them anti-microbial is copper. So, in other words, copper keyboards. I'd complain that, if it's actually that effective against microbes, it might slowly poison humans as well, except that the water pipes in my home are made of copper, so I doubt that it would contribute very much to any copper poisoning I might be experiencing. As far as it being a tried and tested technology that works well, the article you linked to seems to indicate that the jury is still out.
I think what we really need is some sort of reasonably standardized detachable membrane keyboard mat that can easily be taken out of laptops, keyboards, etc. Something that sits over the actual electronics, but can be taken off (without detaching a hundred or so keys and fiddly plastic clips), then washed, maybe even in a dishwasher. The problem is, that's probably pretty hard to implement for very little benefit. You'd probably have residue from soap or calcium buildup, etc. on the contacts in short order. Plus, no-one would ever get around to cleaning it anyway. Still, it would be nice if someone started making keyboards so that it didn't seem like they're actually _designed_ to catch crumbs and trap them forever.
The keyboard from this article seems to be just a gimmick made to appeal to well to do germophobes. The same people who buy ionic air purifiers. Note that this doesn't mean that I don't think ionic air purifiers work. They kinda sorta do, just like these keyboards kinda-sorta sanitize themselves. It's just that the net health benefits of either are going to be practically nil for your average person.
I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about our meager human-produced sources of UV light providing the evolutionary niche for UV resistant super bugs. There's this thing called the sun that puts out a lot of UV light of its own.
They killed it because it barely provided enough power to keep the phone in standby, if that. That's not the same as not working. The GP was interested in anything that would prolong battery life. Whether or not it would usefully prolong battery life is another question. It depends on the users usage pattern. Someone who doesn't actually spend a lot of time on the phone might find this very useful to their battery life. Someone who uses their phone a lot, on the other hand, would probably use up their battery in very close to the same amount of time.
Sorry, I must have missed the part where the parent poster was the hulk. For a better example, look at the big fuss recently about all the "stolen" moon rocks. It's exactly the kind of security show he's talking about. 30 years after the fact, a bunch of moon samples that were essentially given away or loaned out indefinitely by people who had de facto or outright official authority to do so, are now being treated as if they were stolen by the people who have them now. Basically, they left the barn door wide open in the past, now they've locked it up tight, but they want to act as if the horses that got out went through the locked door rather than the open one.
Ultimately it looks like we're arguing a matter of perspective. I certainly don't consider any particular form of evolution in any way moral or immoral (leaving eugenics out of the debate since ethical considerations clearly apply there). I think part of the problem with our disconnect is that I am thinking of traits that arise from a mutation and spread to a subset of the population to be, at that point, evolved. In other words, if it hasn't been selected against, then it has essentially made it. It may die off out of the population again before it gets a chance to convey an advantage to its carriers, or some environmental change or migration to a new niche might occur and give it a chance to shine. The way you seem to be looking at it, you don't consider it evolution until something happens that causes outright speciation with the old population gone or at least geographically or otherwise environmentally isolated.
So, it looked to me like you were saying that, when whatever environmental change occurs, evolution occurs only when individual x exists who happens to have had a beneficial mutation. Rather, it seems what you're saying is that trait X exists among a subset of the population which stems from an individual who had a mutation that wasn't beneficial at the time, but wasn't harmful enough to prevent it spreading to numerous descendants. All we really seem to be disagreeing on is how sharp or fuzzy the line of natural selection is and where exactly it falls. Whether or not a moment of natural selection from existing phenotypic variation is also the moment you call evolution.
For example, if we have population A, with subset Ax, who have mutation-derived genetic trait X that's been passed down for generations and whose members can still freely interbreed with the rest of A (the mutation doesn't make offspring infertile, nor does it make members of Ax undesirable enough that breeding is unlikely), I would argue that Ax has already been naturally selected for. In other words, from my point of view we're past the bright line where trait X can be considered to have evolved. However, A clearly has not yet been naturally selected against and Ax is clearly not a new species yet, so the trait has evolved, but no speciating natural selection event has yet occurred. Then a big enviromental change may happen that kills off all local members of A and leaves Ax. At that point, I think we can both agree that evolution has taken place, and possibly speciation. The problem there is that speciation has only occurred if all members of A are either dead, or if the other members are now isolated from Ax again. If all members of A are dead, then Ax is a new species or is inevitably on its way to becoming one. If they're just isolated, then A and Ax might get back together and be one species again. It will probably take many more mutations before they're a completely separate species. Then there's the whole problem of where you draw the line. There are species like lions and tigers and donkeys and horses that are still close enough that interbreeding still works and the hybrids are sometimes even fertile. There are other species that are fully genetically compatible but that simply don't mate because they're natural enemies or because they're not physically compatible or because they consider members of the other species too wierd (completely alien mating dance, for example) or ugly to mate with.
Anyway, the more I think about this, the more I get overwhelmed by the possibilities. The whole thing is gigantic and chaotic. We understand the general process. We can look at the genetics of all kinds of things and get a pretty good idea of what went down, but we can't really be 100% sure about many of the specifics. We're probably both wrong and both right to a degree. I suppose we should just thank our lucky stars we're not creationists or Lamarckians or something like that.
I was thinking more along the lines of themselves and people like them. You know, people who already use Unix, computer geeks, etc. I'm not sure ducks are even in the set of what you would call users in this context. I'm pretty sure that most computer using ducks are using kiosk-type systems where the underlying OS is completely irrelevant. In any case, I'm pretty sure they never get to choose their OS.
Maybe the creators of Linux (and naturally the various flavours of Unix it comes from) also thought about users, but simply had a different subset of users in mind?
Believe me, I have no fantasies about evolution being a kind process or having an end goal. I have a major problem with your notion that the traits to adapt to new conditions always exist within the population already. Maybe one reason I have such a problem with this is that it's an argument heavily used by creationists. They use it to explain away examples of adaptation, essentially claiming that mutation never produces useful new traits but that all useful traits are already extant in the population.
In any case, if conditions change extremely suddenly and in such an extreme fashion that all members of a population that don't have the right adaptive trait die off right away, then the situation you posit is the only way evolution can occur. The changes that drive evolution, however, usually aren't quite that sudden or absolute. It is very hard to make an absolute statement about what actually happens more in nature, however. It does seem likely that most environmental changes driving evolution are going to happen over such a time period that numerous generations are going to occur.
Just to be clear, I'm not rejecting it, but I am arguing against making it mandatory. History is full of examples of the poor being subjected to all kinds of things "for their own good" in order to receive public aid. The Great Famine, in Ireland started because of potato blight, but the true horrors of the famine mostly came from politics. Some people had a thinly veiled extermination agenda (in some cases not veiled at all) and others genuinely wanted to help and thought that the way to do that was to drill a work ethic into those lazy good for nothing Irish in workhouses. The end results approached genocide.
Now, I'm not suggesting that's what you have in mind. I'm just saying that history should teach us that broad brush approaches to social problems can be disastrous, or at least a waste. For that matter, treating things as social problems when they may be more a case of people falling into the wrong part of the prosperity statistical curve may be a problem in and of itself.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life. Sounds great. Try to teach a man who lives far from any bodies of water to fish while assuring him it will "correct" his poor lifestyle and you're just being insufferable and wasting your time and his.
Of course, if this is true, then it may well mean that this debate is transitional. 100 years ago, we couldn't maintain people like that and 100 years from now we may be able to do it so well that we're not just maintaining them, but effectively restoring them.
The problem as I see it is that your fundamental position is that you believe strongly in self-determination. You seem to be coming from a position where you believe that the world naturally gives people what they deserve based on the effort they put in and any form of social welfare is artificial intervention in that process. The real world is more complicated than that. As amazing as it may seem to you, people, even those with an impeccable work ethic, can end up in hopeless situations that they can't get out of without help.
The reason being that environmental conditions in fact often do change slowly enough that numerous generations exist during the transition. Now, the conditions that drive evolution often are harsh and involve massive die offs, but it's a long way from universally true that beneficial mutations always pre-exist the event that drives change. Sometimes there isn't even an event that drives change. Sometimes a subspecies branches off from another species not because conditions changed, but because the mutation allowed the subspecies to move into an adjacent environmental niche it previously couldn't survive in.
Still, it's probably stretching for me to say that your scenario is in the minority. The fact is that we understand the basic method of evolution, but the exact circumstances are going to be broad and varied and no-one really can say what circumstances dominate.
But the results are always inferences. Every observation is, ultimately an inference. You cut them as finely as you can but millions of years ago (why are you fixated on that?) or picoseconds ago, you always have to infer what happened whether you're looking at the measurements your instruments have taken or you're interpreting the photons that have struck your retinas.
As I responded to you in another response (more or less): huh? Where are you getting the extrapolation to thousands or millions of years? We were talking about 150 years of recorded history.
I didn't say anything about extrapolating data from the 1800s to thousands and millions of years ago. I think you jumped a track somewhere there. This about looking at the last 150 years of records of the Atacama desert and seeing if there's been any waist deep snowfall in the region during that time period. And what does the fact that many of the people (not all of them since we're talking about a time period extending up to this year) those records came from are dead have to do with anything? Do they need to be alive so we can interrogate and torture them to see if they were lying?
As for inferences versus facts, they're not really absolutely different things. They're more a continuum. Ultimately, you have no way of truly knowing that you can trust the input of your senses. You don't know that any facts are really facts. You don't know that you can trust your sensory organs. You don't know that you even have sensory organs and that you're not just a brain in a jar. You don't even know if you have a brain or that there's such a thing as brains or jars for that matter. You don't even know that reading what I've written isn't an implanted memory. Sure you have a sense that it's happing as you read it, but, after you've read it, wait ten seconds, then try to prove to yourself that the entire universe wasn't just created at that moment with an implanted memory of having read this created along with it.
Some people would say that you have to take certain things on faith. I say faith isn't really necessary, but you do have to behave as if some things are real. At some point, you have to decide that you'll treat some things as facts until future evidence either disproves them or adds additional support to their validity, but you can never know anything 100%.
Just because it's Peru doesn't mean that it's the stone age. Even during times of civil war, they had priests, they had librarians, they had university researchers, they had newspapers, they had regular people writing things down in diaries and sending correspondence. Remember that we're not talking about a minute daily record of exact, hour by hour weather conditions, we're talking about an extraordinary event: a nearly three foot snowfall in a desert that gets virtually no precipitation ever. This is the sort of thing that people take note of. No program to keep records of weather reports necessary. The idea that no record would exist of that kind of event is preposterous.
Just so you know, virtually all knowledge, by the definition you give here, belongs in the opinions column rather than the facts column. You seem to be struggling with the basic foundations of all knowledge.
You're hopelessly stuck in the present aren't you? You wrote: "If a mining company is interested to know whether it was snowing in that desert or not 150 years ago and they are willing to fund the soil analysis, then it is their business". You do understand that people have been mining there for a long time, right? Activity and scientific analysis have been going on in the area, and in areas of interest all over the world, probably for that entire 150 year period if not longer. As for it being your right to challenge the project if tax money is being used to fund environmental geology and meteorology... Well, aside from this being in Chile and Peru and a lot of the money coming from private sources you might have a point. Except of course, that it's still stupid. Meteorology and geology are absolutely things government should spend tax money on for the public good. At the very least for the whole protecting people from fire/flood/earthquakes/tsunamis/mudslides/volcanos/poisoned food and water/constructing buildings that fall down or sink into the ground/constructing cities in places that won't have water in a few decades/etc. Climate change is a long way from being the only reason to study this stuff. I mentioned 100 year flood levels, for example. Climate change can affect those, but other human activity, like all that well drained construction we're fond of, affects them even more. When those change, lots of people can die and billions of dollars of damage can occur. A little study beforehand then is wise, even if it spends a few of your precious tax dollars.
As for what you said about me being "overly sensitive about [my] area of expertise", it's not actually my area of expertise. I'm actually an IT guy myself. I've only taken a few classes in geology. I don't underestimate the value of other disciplines just because I'm not personally up to my elbows in them, however. I also don't underestimate the importance of being able to tell the difference between fact and opinion. For example, on this snowfall in the Atacama desert issue. I'm perfectly capable of believing that it's possible that there has been a heavier snowfall in the past 150 years but, without doing a very extensive study, all available evidence very strongly indicates that it's the case. You seem to doubt it only for the sake of contrariness.
You wrote: "I'm not even sure it would be possible to find records for the last 50 years in that region". See, this is evidence that you're not even living in the same reality as the rest of us. 50 years ago is the early 1960's, not the early Holocene. Your incredulity that records would exist for Chile and Peru in that time period is almost incomprehensible. You seem to be demonstrating the same sort of modern era exceptionalism that sometimes leads small children to wonder if the whole world was colored in black and white before the 1950s. As for "evidence to support [my] claim". It's not my claim. It's just a fairly heavily reported fact that there's very little reason to doubt.
Also, I don't think anyone made any statements with quite as much hyperbole as ""it is the first snowfall there in 150 years". They said it was the largest snowfall there in that time. There's very little reason to believe that there wouldn't be a record of a snowfall that heavy in, for example, one of the local newspapers in the last 150 years. People in Peru do know how to read and write, you know. Even 150 years ago.
Feeling older and older all the time. Seriously though, when I used "we", I was referring to the human race as a whole. I'm currently a member, but I consider the we to apply both before my time and after it. So if I say "I think we'll have flying cars some day", I don't necessarily mean that I'll be alive to see it.
But then wouldn't you consider the money spent on those shopping and cooking classes a waste as well? And would they be able to opt out? Perhaps by taking a test demonstrating that they already understand the material? And how would you ensure that these classes aren't just a patronizing insult to people whose situations leave them unable to take advantage of the shopping and cooking advice (for example people who pretty much just have time for working and sleeping but can't make ends meet).
If you'd taken a minute and read my actual post, you'd have noticed that I mentioned that there are important mining interests there. Hence extensive soil analysis. Engineers, including mining engineers, find it very important to know what kind of rainfall and flooding to expect as well as how the rock and soil will react to such conditions. Not to mention that such considerations are important for the location and construction of towns, roads, etc. You specifically said that you would put such information into your museum of "least optimally spent money". That, from my perspective, is you mocking and dismissing an entire field of study. You can't really escape from that statement. Nor the one where you mocked another poster as a basement-dwelling non-taxpayer for rightfully calling you out on it.
I have to confess that I'm quite curious what discipline _you_ work in where you can look down on fields like geology and meteorology as wastes of money.
Oh, I completely agree with you that there's tons of evidence of miniscule precipitation in the region and that it can be seen in all kinds of places, including mountain ice. I may have overstated things saying that there's no glaciers, but glaciation in the area is known to be very sparse precisely because it gets so little precipitation. This area is extremely dry and is known from many sources to have been very dry for a very long time. Only an idiot would come blustering along ridiculing the idea that it's a dry region in which heavy snowfall is an amazing event and demanding proof from everyone discussing it. And yet...
Good grief. By your standards, clearly nothing would ever count as proof. What does this even have to do with theory vs. practice anyway? You're just being obstinate for no good reason. It's a desert. It was famous as one of the driest places in the world before this freak snowfall happened and before you turned your sceptical eye on it. The records I talked about were normal records for people living in the region to keep. Yet, you don't believe that such records exist. So, do you not believe that anyone lived there? Or do you believe that they were bizarre people who took no note whatsoever of unusual precipitation? Do you believe that the region is so backwards that they've never situated weather stations in this desert?
The simple fact is that there was recently a large snowfall in a normally very, very dry place. I never claimed that it signified anything important, but you've made bizarre claims that it's somehow unlikely or even impossible that we'd have any sort of records or evidence of what precipitation has been like in this region. As it happens, I don't have the evidence you demand right in front of me. I'd probably have to get in touch with some Chilean meteorologists, geologists and historians. Why would I go to all that trouble? There was snowfall this year that was extraordinarily strange for the region and no-one with extensive knowledge of the region seems to be disputing that. Do you have some sort of problem with that statement?
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Not particularly concerned about being poisoned by copper from water pipes. I was just saying that, if it isn't a problem from water pipes, it's unlikely to be a problem from keyboard keys.
As for PEX and bacterial binding, I'd like to swing this back around to the UV sterilizing keyboard and point out that one big downside of PEX is that it degrades like crazy under UV exposure. Pity, because it would otherwise be a great way to clean out bacteria from inside the pipes.
It looks like the critical thing in those alloys to make them anti-microbial is copper. So, in other words, copper keyboards. I'd complain that, if it's actually that effective against microbes, it might slowly poison humans as well, except that the water pipes in my home are made of copper, so I doubt that it would contribute very much to any copper poisoning I might be experiencing. As far as it being a tried and tested technology that works well, the article you linked to seems to indicate that the jury is still out.
I think what we really need is some sort of reasonably standardized detachable membrane keyboard mat that can easily be taken out of laptops, keyboards, etc. Something that sits over the actual electronics, but can be taken off (without detaching a hundred or so keys and fiddly plastic clips), then washed, maybe even in a dishwasher. The problem is, that's probably pretty hard to implement for very little benefit. You'd probably have residue from soap or calcium buildup, etc. on the contacts in short order. Plus, no-one would ever get around to cleaning it anyway. Still, it would be nice if someone started making keyboards so that it didn't seem like they're actually _designed_ to catch crumbs and trap them forever.
The keyboard from this article seems to be just a gimmick made to appeal to well to do germophobes. The same people who buy ionic air purifiers. Note that this doesn't mean that I don't think ionic air purifiers work. They kinda sorta do, just like these keyboards kinda-sorta sanitize themselves. It's just that the net health benefits of either are going to be practically nil for your average person.
I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about our meager human-produced sources of UV light providing the evolutionary niche for UV resistant super bugs. There's this thing called the sun that puts out a lot of UV light of its own.
They killed it because it barely provided enough power to keep the phone in standby, if that. That's not the same as not working. The GP was interested in anything that would prolong battery life. Whether or not it would usefully prolong battery life is another question. It depends on the users usage pattern. Someone who doesn't actually spend a lot of time on the phone might find this very useful to their battery life. Someone who uses their phone a lot, on the other hand, would probably use up their battery in very close to the same amount of time.
Sorry, I must have missed the part where the parent poster was the hulk. For a better example, look at the big fuss recently about all the "stolen" moon rocks. It's exactly the kind of security show he's talking about. 30 years after the fact, a bunch of moon samples that were essentially given away or loaned out indefinitely by people who had de facto or outright official authority to do so, are now being treated as if they were stolen by the people who have them now. Basically, they left the barn door wide open in the past, now they've locked it up tight, but they want to act as if the horses that got out went through the locked door rather than the open one.
Ultimately it looks like we're arguing a matter of perspective. I certainly don't consider any particular form of evolution in any way moral or immoral (leaving eugenics out of the debate since ethical considerations clearly apply there). I think part of the problem with our disconnect is that I am thinking of traits that arise from a mutation and spread to a subset of the population to be, at that point, evolved. In other words, if it hasn't been selected against, then it has essentially made it. It may die off out of the population again before it gets a chance to convey an advantage to its carriers, or some environmental change or migration to a new niche might occur and give it a chance to shine. The way you seem to be looking at it, you don't consider it evolution until something happens that causes outright speciation with the old population gone or at least geographically or otherwise environmentally isolated.
So, it looked to me like you were saying that, when whatever environmental change occurs, evolution occurs only when individual x exists who happens to have had a beneficial mutation. Rather, it seems what you're saying is that trait X exists among a subset of the population which stems from an individual who had a mutation that wasn't beneficial at the time, but wasn't harmful enough to prevent it spreading to numerous descendants. All we really seem to be disagreeing on is how sharp or fuzzy the line of natural selection is and where exactly it falls. Whether or not a moment of natural selection from existing phenotypic variation is also the moment you call evolution.
For example, if we have population A, with subset Ax, who have mutation-derived genetic trait X that's been passed down for generations and whose members can still freely interbreed with the rest of A (the mutation doesn't make offspring infertile, nor does it make members of Ax undesirable enough that breeding is unlikely), I would argue that Ax has already been naturally selected for. In other words, from my point of view we're past the bright line where trait X can be considered to have evolved. However, A clearly has not yet been naturally selected against and Ax is clearly not a new species yet, so the trait has evolved, but no speciating natural selection event has yet occurred. Then a big enviromental change may happen that kills off all local members of A and leaves Ax. At that point, I think we can both agree that evolution has taken place, and possibly speciation. The problem there is that speciation has only occurred if all members of A are either dead, or if the other members are now isolated from Ax again. If all members of A are dead, then Ax is a new species or is inevitably on its way to becoming one. If they're just isolated, then A and Ax might get back together and be one species again. It will probably take many more mutations before they're a completely separate species. Then there's the whole problem of where you draw the line. There are species like lions and tigers and donkeys and horses that are still close enough that interbreeding still works and the hybrids are sometimes even fertile. There are other species that are fully genetically compatible but that simply don't mate because they're natural enemies or because they're not physically compatible or because they consider members of the other species too wierd (completely alien mating dance, for example) or ugly to mate with.
Anyway, the more I think about this, the more I get overwhelmed by the possibilities. The whole thing is gigantic and chaotic. We understand the general process. We can look at the genetics of all kinds of things and get a pretty good idea of what went down, but we can't really be 100% sure about many of the specifics. We're probably both wrong and both right to a degree. I suppose we should just thank our lucky stars we're not creationists or Lamarckians or something like that.
I was thinking more along the lines of themselves and people like them. You know, people who already use Unix, computer geeks, etc. I'm not sure ducks are even in the set of what you would call users in this context. I'm pretty sure that most computer using ducks are using kiosk-type systems where the underlying OS is completely irrelevant. In any case, I'm pretty sure they never get to choose their OS.
Maybe the creators of Linux (and naturally the various flavours of Unix it comes from) also thought about users, but simply had a different subset of users in mind?
Believe me, I have no fantasies about evolution being a kind process or having an end goal. I have a major problem with your notion that the traits to adapt to new conditions always exist within the population already. Maybe one reason I have such a problem with this is that it's an argument heavily used by creationists. They use it to explain away examples of adaptation, essentially claiming that mutation never produces useful new traits but that all useful traits are already extant in the population.
In any case, if conditions change extremely suddenly and in such an extreme fashion that all members of a population that don't have the right adaptive trait die off right away, then the situation you posit is the only way evolution can occur. The changes that drive evolution, however, usually aren't quite that sudden or absolute. It is very hard to make an absolute statement about what actually happens more in nature, however. It does seem likely that most environmental changes driving evolution are going to happen over such a time period that numerous generations are going to occur.
Just to be clear, I'm not rejecting it, but I am arguing against making it mandatory. History is full of examples of the poor being subjected to all kinds of things "for their own good" in order to receive public aid. The Great Famine, in Ireland started because of potato blight, but the true horrors of the famine mostly came from politics. Some people had a thinly veiled extermination agenda (in some cases not veiled at all) and others genuinely wanted to help and thought that the way to do that was to drill a work ethic into those lazy good for nothing Irish in workhouses. The end results approached genocide.
Now, I'm not suggesting that's what you have in mind. I'm just saying that history should teach us that broad brush approaches to social problems can be disastrous, or at least a waste. For that matter, treating things as social problems when they may be more a case of people falling into the wrong part of the prosperity statistical curve may be a problem in and of itself.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life. Sounds great. Try to teach a man who lives far from any bodies of water to fish while assuring him it will "correct" his poor lifestyle and you're just being insufferable and wasting your time and his.
Of course, if this is true, then it may well mean that this debate is transitional. 100 years ago, we couldn't maintain people like that and 100 years from now we may be able to do it so well that we're not just maintaining them, but effectively restoring them.
The problem as I see it is that your fundamental position is that you believe strongly in self-determination. You seem to be coming from a position where you believe that the world naturally gives people what they deserve based on the effort they put in and any form of social welfare is artificial intervention in that process. The real world is more complicated than that. As amazing as it may seem to you, people, even those with an impeccable work ethic, can end up in hopeless situations that they can't get out of without help.
No.
The reason being that environmental conditions in fact often do change slowly enough that numerous generations exist during the transition. Now, the conditions that drive evolution often are harsh and involve massive die offs, but it's a long way from universally true that beneficial mutations always pre-exist the event that drives change. Sometimes there isn't even an event that drives change. Sometimes a subspecies branches off from another species not because conditions changed, but because the mutation allowed the subspecies to move into an adjacent environmental niche it previously couldn't survive in.
Still, it's probably stretching for me to say that your scenario is in the minority. The fact is that we understand the basic method of evolution, but the exact circumstances are going to be broad and varied and no-one really can say what circumstances dominate.
But the results are always inferences. Every observation is, ultimately an inference. You cut them as finely as you can but millions of years ago (why are you fixated on that?) or picoseconds ago, you always have to infer what happened whether you're looking at the measurements your instruments have taken or you're interpreting the photons that have struck your retinas.
As I responded to you in another response (more or less): huh? Where are you getting the extrapolation to thousands or millions of years? We were talking about 150 years of recorded history.
I didn't say anything about extrapolating data from the 1800s to thousands and millions of years ago. I think you jumped a track somewhere there. This about looking at the last 150 years of records of the Atacama desert and seeing if there's been any waist deep snowfall in the region during that time period. And what does the fact that many of the people (not all of them since we're talking about a time period extending up to this year) those records came from are dead have to do with anything? Do they need to be alive so we can interrogate and torture them to see if they were lying?
As for inferences versus facts, they're not really absolutely different things. They're more a continuum. Ultimately, you have no way of truly knowing that you can trust the input of your senses. You don't know that any facts are really facts. You don't know that you can trust your sensory organs. You don't know that you even have sensory organs and that you're not just a brain in a jar. You don't even know if you have a brain or that there's such a thing as brains or jars for that matter. You don't even know that reading what I've written isn't an implanted memory. Sure you have a sense that it's happing as you read it, but, after you've read it, wait ten seconds, then try to prove to yourself that the entire universe wasn't just created at that moment with an implanted memory of having read this created along with it.
Some people would say that you have to take certain things on faith. I say faith isn't really necessary, but you do have to behave as if some things are real. At some point, you have to decide that you'll treat some things as facts until future evidence either disproves them or adds additional support to their validity, but you can never know anything 100%.
Just because it's Peru doesn't mean that it's the stone age. Even during times of civil war, they had priests, they had librarians, they had university researchers, they had newspapers, they had regular people writing things down in diaries and sending correspondence. Remember that we're not talking about a minute daily record of exact, hour by hour weather conditions, we're talking about an extraordinary event: a nearly three foot snowfall in a desert that gets virtually no precipitation ever. This is the sort of thing that people take note of. No program to keep records of weather reports necessary. The idea that no record would exist of that kind of event is preposterous.
Just so you know, virtually all knowledge, by the definition you give here, belongs in the opinions column rather than the facts column. You seem to be struggling with the basic foundations of all knowledge.
You're hopelessly stuck in the present aren't you? You wrote: "If a mining company is interested to know whether it was snowing in that desert or not 150 years ago and they are willing to fund the soil analysis, then it is their business". You do understand that people have been mining there for a long time, right? Activity and scientific analysis have been going on in the area, and in areas of interest all over the world, probably for that entire 150 year period if not longer. As for it being your right to challenge the project if tax money is being used to fund environmental geology and meteorology... Well, aside from this being in Chile and Peru and a lot of the money coming from private sources you might have a point. Except of course, that it's still stupid. Meteorology and geology are absolutely things government should spend tax money on for the public good. At the very least for the whole protecting people from fire/flood/earthquakes/tsunamis/mudslides/volcanos/poisoned food and water/constructing buildings that fall down or sink into the ground/constructing cities in places that won't have water in a few decades/etc. Climate change is a long way from being the only reason to study this stuff. I mentioned 100 year flood levels, for example. Climate change can affect those, but other human activity, like all that well drained construction we're fond of, affects them even more. When those change, lots of people can die and billions of dollars of damage can occur. A little study beforehand then is wise, even if it spends a few of your precious tax dollars.
As for what you said about me being "overly sensitive about [my] area of expertise", it's not actually my area of expertise. I'm actually an IT guy myself. I've only taken a few classes in geology. I don't underestimate the value of other disciplines just because I'm not personally up to my elbows in them, however. I also don't underestimate the importance of being able to tell the difference between fact and opinion. For example, on this snowfall in the Atacama desert issue. I'm perfectly capable of believing that it's possible that there has been a heavier snowfall in the past 150 years but, without doing a very extensive study, all available evidence very strongly indicates that it's the case. You seem to doubt it only for the sake of contrariness.
You wrote: "I'm not even sure it would be possible to find records for the last 50 years in that region". See, this is evidence that you're not even living in the same reality as the rest of us. 50 years ago is the early 1960's, not the early Holocene. Your incredulity that records would exist for Chile and Peru in that time period is almost incomprehensible. You seem to be demonstrating the same sort of modern era exceptionalism that sometimes leads small children to wonder if the whole world was colored in black and white before the 1950s. As for "evidence to support [my] claim". It's not my claim. It's just a fairly heavily reported fact that there's very little reason to doubt.
Also, I don't think anyone made any statements with quite as much hyperbole as ""it is the first snowfall there in 150 years". They said it was the largest snowfall there in that time. There's very little reason to believe that there wouldn't be a record of a snowfall that heavy in, for example, one of the local newspapers in the last 150 years. People in Peru do know how to read and write, you know. Even 150 years ago.
Feeling older and older all the time. Seriously though, when I used "we", I was referring to the human race as a whole. I'm currently a member, but I consider the we to apply both before my time and after it. So if I say "I think we'll have flying cars some day", I don't necessarily mean that I'll be alive to see it.
Based on your own evidence, it would seem that this actually a point of contention rather than an absolute, agreed upon rule.
But then wouldn't you consider the money spent on those shopping and cooking classes a waste as well? And would they be able to opt out? Perhaps by taking a test demonstrating that they already understand the material? And how would you ensure that these classes aren't just a patronizing insult to people whose situations leave them unable to take advantage of the shopping and cooking advice (for example people who pretty much just have time for working and sleeping but can't make ends meet).
If you'd taken a minute and read my actual post, you'd have noticed that I mentioned that there are important mining interests there. Hence extensive soil analysis. Engineers, including mining engineers, find it very important to know what kind of rainfall and flooding to expect as well as how the rock and soil will react to such conditions. Not to mention that such considerations are important for the location and construction of towns, roads, etc. You specifically said that you would put such information into your museum of "least optimally spent money". That, from my perspective, is you mocking and dismissing an entire field of study. You can't really escape from that statement. Nor the one where you mocked another poster as a basement-dwelling non-taxpayer for rightfully calling you out on it.
I have to confess that I'm quite curious what discipline _you_ work in where you can look down on fields like geology and meteorology as wastes of money.
Oh, I completely agree with you that there's tons of evidence of miniscule precipitation in the region and that it can be seen in all kinds of places, including mountain ice. I may have overstated things saying that there's no glaciers, but glaciation in the area is known to be very sparse precisely because it gets so little precipitation. This area is extremely dry and is known from many sources to have been very dry for a very long time. Only an idiot would come blustering along ridiculing the idea that it's a dry region in which heavy snowfall is an amazing event and demanding proof from everyone discussing it. And yet...
Good grief. By your standards, clearly nothing would ever count as proof. What does this even have to do with theory vs. practice anyway? You're just being obstinate for no good reason. It's a desert. It was famous as one of the driest places in the world before this freak snowfall happened and before you turned your sceptical eye on it. The records I talked about were normal records for people living in the region to keep. Yet, you don't believe that such records exist. So, do you not believe that anyone lived there? Or do you believe that they were bizarre people who took no note whatsoever of unusual precipitation? Do you believe that the region is so backwards that they've never situated weather stations in this desert?
The simple fact is that there was recently a large snowfall in a normally very, very dry place. I never claimed that it signified anything important, but you've made bizarre claims that it's somehow unlikely or even impossible that we'd have any sort of records or evidence of what precipitation has been like in this region. As it happens, I don't have the evidence you demand right in front of me. I'd probably have to get in touch with some Chilean meteorologists, geologists and historians. Why would I go to all that trouble? There was snowfall this year that was extraordinarily strange for the region and no-one with extensive knowledge of the region seems to be disputing that. Do you have some sort of problem with that statement?