Nothing is more fun than being followed by someone with these very bright, very focused headlamps. As height differences occur between vehicles, you sometimes get treated to something similar to getting the highbeams flashed at you. Hundreds of times. So you end up moving the rearview and side mirrors out of the way.
I do that pretty frequently to avoid the over bright lights behind me. Then I have to move my head to see out of those mirrors when I need to.
I have an uneasy feeling this will be the cause of my death.
You have the whiff of the uneducated fanatic. I don't mean it unkindly, but I think you lack the foundation of critical thinking required to make sense of this subject. I do see where you get your phrasing. The anthropomorphic gist (and it is anthropomorphic) of what you wrote and what appears in those youtube videos conflates the science of evolution with metaphysical claptrap and creationist babble (such as the repeated references to "intelligent design"). The "unfinished business" of Darwin appears to refer to finding the purpose for life. Two things Darwin never did; he didn't try explain the genesis of life, and he didn't claim to understand why life exists. As a scientist, he only observed, theorized, and published his conclusions. Take this quote, from one of the videos:
"mind, wherever it should arise, is the means by which Nature can know itself".
That isn't science, it's new age pseudo philosophy, or worse.
You have every right to these ideas, and they're largely harmless, but anyone who references this stuff for public policy is going to cause some damage, and that's not acceptable.
You want to educate yourself, read Darwin's "Origin of Species" - it's literally breathtaking. And for the wider perspective, any layman's book by Brian Greene, the physicist.
but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW.
Yes, that was very wise of you.
Okay, here's an example - remember when Sen. James Inhofe (R - Oklahoma) whored his own grandchildren for a photo op by getting them to build a snow fort in D.C. when it snowed a few years ago, and put a sign on it reading, "Al Gore's New Home"?
And I don't think that Nature is an organism either......Nature, to me, is justifiably the most intelligent thing/process that exists. And it's much more important to stay in tune with It's needs...
Well to be fair, you gave a great example (Clean Air Act of 1970), and I'm sure that there's more, but they'll all be along the same lines; "human countering their own actions". No other part of Nature, that I've ever heard of, has ever damaged it's own environment that it depends on. I guess when a crocodile (that's existed quite in tune with Nature for over 200 million years) builds a factory that pollutes the environment to such an extent that it begins to link that pollution with it's own sicknesses, then I'll be more equipped to provide an example. But as it stands, no other species has polluted the environment. Which only supports my claim that no other species is foolish like mankind.
You're still doing it, anthropomorphizing Nature. Nature is not "intelligent". Nature does not have "needs".
Non-human populations crash all the time due to overbreeding and using up the available food supply. That's the same as "damaging it's (sic) own environment".
You also said, "when species try to play god, they self-destruct", so you're contradicting yourself there, with that extraordinarily fuzzy idea - please tell me how a river otter can "try to play god". And you said, "Nature has some intelligent design to it, that sort of self-repairs when things get out of whack", and "I don't think that Nature is an organism either", so I can't imagine how you can reconcile those two thoughts.
The bottom line, is that with your anthropomorphizing "Nature", claiming it's intelligent, that non-humans don't damage their environments, and that humans are somehow not part of the natural world, you're not only not correct, you're not even wrong. Nothing you have expressed makes any sense or correlates to a scientific understanding of the world.
Blaming every weather event on AGW is what makes people doubt AGW.
Well, I think in many cases the doubt for AGW rises from financial interest, whether it's direct payments from the oil foundations or that vague fear in a recession that fixing the problem could cost average people their jobs, but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW. You know, the way deniers cite every cold snap and snowfall as evidence to the contrary.
...No other part of nature has ever sensed that it has inflicted damage to the natural environment, and just carried on, multiplying the same efforts...
"parts of nature" don't "sense that (they have) inflicted damage to the natural environment..." This makes no sense at all, because you are anthropomorphizing "nature" which is not an organism at all, and does not sense or reason, or make decisions. Perhaps you are referring to individual species? Please, give an example of a species "sensing" the damage it's inflicting on the environment, and what steps it took to rectify the problem.
I mean, aside from Man. I direct your attention to the Clean Air Act of 1970, http://www.epa.gov/air/caa/, a very successful "sensing" by humans of the damage they inflicted on the environment, and steps taken to reverse the damage.
The next time you see or hear of anything except for mankind knowingly ruining the entire planet for it's own personal and very temporary gain, hit me up and I'll buy you a drink.
I didn't have to go very far, either. This is an elegant summary of what humans have discovered (in only a few hundred years) about the development and likely future of the observable universe. It is based on millions of person hours of effort directed at discovering how things work. It is elegant and beautiful. The human impulse to learn that produces things like this also produces the inventions that have extended human lifespans, reduced the misery of existence, and will give us the chance to escape this rock and give humanity an indefinite future.
You seem overly smitten by the "natural" world, and every species except for Man. I really like my Boston Terriers, but their favorite occupations (aside from being with us) seem to be licking their private parts. There's not much comparison.
sure we will, because somebody will figure out how to clone a human, then the super-wealthy will decide they don't need the rest of us when heading out into space, and rely on cloning instead.
So the Lawyers and Coiffeurs are going to go into space ?
Hey that's a great news, we should help any way we can.
and the genome is cleaned up to eliminate stupidity, ugliness, weak critical thinking skills and greed, why would there be any?
And what do they call it when you clean up a genome? I sincerely doubt humanity has the brain power or ethical strength to create Iain M Banks "Culture".
Possibly the machines we make could, but then who controls that? We are just as likely to end up living in the Matrix as cruising around in GSV and partying with drones.
Have you read many of the Culture novels? (I've read them all, dammit, and since Banks left us so suddenly last year there won't be any more.) The AI's *do* control just about everything. They only seem to consult with humans because... because... I don't know why. The just seem to like humans (see "Meat Fucker").
No, we need to draw some lines. Klingon should not be recognized as a real language, and every municipality should be able to refuse to do any sort of business in it and to deny any accommodation to people who speak it. There is no comparison with Spanish in the U.S., and it's insulting to claim one.
It is a fake language - the first cases of it were isolated words made up for a Star Trek movie (by James Doohan!), and it later was extended, but it's a fabricated language, no one depends on it as their first language, and we should take this mild step in order to protect legitimate languages.
I'm pretty confident in stating that the U.S. would be better off if the amount of effort spent on Klingon were directed to improving English proficiency for native U.S. residents whose first language is English!
The science and technology are amazingly accurate, the social and cultural changes are not even close; and really the social and cultural issues are far more important. A guaranteed income, mass joblessness, and and strict population controls would all have much, much larger effects on the world we live in than video conferencing and drones on Mars.
It figures. In his writing, the scientific concepts were pretty mind-blowing, but the characters were flat as pancakes and the dialog was abysmal. He struck me as a writer who understands technology a lot better than its effects on people, and he didn't seem to be in tune with how people interact.
You're right, he was clueless about people. As part of his security entourage at a couple of Star Trek cons in NY (don't ask), I spent plenty of time talking with him and observing. Very nice guy (he wrote me a personalized limerick about having two penises!), but not very perceptive about people.
China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.
Precisely. *One* country has a problem with overpopulation. And their solution is NOT strict population controls, but economic disincentives for families that have more than one child (so it costs more, but rich families can afford it).
So if kidnapping women and injecting them with chemicals to kill their unborn fetus isn't "strict", I'd hate to see how bedtime is enforced in your house.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but you correctly spelled "misspelled", which puts you in the 1%.
If people adopts it, would be pretty great because I could know who not to kiss among the female gender :p. hahaha.
To quote Bill Shatner, "You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?"
Awesome, you used a very lame pun (Biden to Bidet, really?) to take a completely irrelevant swipe at the Vice President.
He's smarter and more accomplished than you by at least a couple of orders of magnitude, you putz.
And still you have contributed nothing. (Golf clap) Well played, sir, bravo.
Imagine over-frying the nipples in the fryolator and having to throw out the batch, while a nipple-less wolf stares accusingly at you.
Maybe he nudges the legless frog in the wheel next to him and rolls his eyes.
Nothing is more fun than being followed by someone with these very bright, very focused headlamps. As height differences occur between vehicles, you sometimes get treated to something similar to getting the highbeams flashed at you. Hundreds of times. So you end up moving the rearview and side mirrors out of the way.
I do that pretty frequently to avoid the over bright lights behind me. Then I have to move my head to see out of those mirrors when I need to.
I have an uneasy feeling this will be the cause of my death.
Well, I could keep pinning you down as you wriggle away like a snake under a stick, but it's clear you're not interested in reason.
Enjoy the show - hope you don't have children to deal with the mess that's coming.
Are you really expecting a serious reply from me with such a worthless question?
You have the whiff of the uneducated fanatic. I don't mean it unkindly, but I think you lack the foundation of critical thinking required to make sense of this subject. I do see where you get your phrasing. The anthropomorphic gist (and it is anthropomorphic) of what you wrote and what appears in those youtube videos conflates the science of evolution with metaphysical claptrap and creationist babble (such as the repeated references to "intelligent design"). The "unfinished business" of Darwin appears to refer to finding the purpose for life. Two things Darwin never did; he didn't try explain the genesis of life, and he didn't claim to understand why life exists. As a scientist, he only observed, theorized, and published his conclusions. Take this quote, from one of the videos:
"mind, wherever it should arise, is the means by which Nature can know itself".
That isn't science, it's new age pseudo philosophy, or worse.
You have every right to these ideas, and they're largely harmless, but anyone who references this stuff for public policy is going to cause some damage, and that's not acceptable.
You want to educate yourself, read Darwin's "Origin of Species" - it's literally breathtaking. And for the wider perspective, any layman's book by Brian Greene, the physicist.
No droughts? Okay, here you go.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/30/258263/inhofe-heartland-denier-conference-oklahoma-record-heat-wave-and-drought/
but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW.
Yes, that was very wise of you.
Okay, here's an example - remember when Sen. James Inhofe (R - Oklahoma) whored his own grandchildren for a photo op by getting them to build a snow fort in D.C. when it snowed a few years ago, and put a sign on it reading, "Al Gore's New Home"?
No, I didn't think so.
And I don't think that Nature is an organism either... ...Nature, to me, is justifiably the most intelligent thing/process that exists. And it's much more important to stay in tune with It's needs...
Well to be fair, you gave a great example (Clean Air Act of 1970), and I'm sure that there's more, but they'll all be along the same lines; "human countering their own actions". No other part of Nature, that I've ever heard of, has ever damaged it's own environment that it depends on. I guess when a crocodile (that's existed quite in tune with Nature for over 200 million years) builds a factory that pollutes the environment to such an extent that it begins to link that pollution with it's own sicknesses, then I'll be more equipped to provide an example. But as it stands, no other species has polluted the environment. Which only supports my claim that no other species is foolish like mankind.
You're still doing it, anthropomorphizing Nature. Nature is not "intelligent". Nature does not have "needs".
Non-human populations crash all the time due to overbreeding and using up the available food supply. That's the same as "damaging it's (sic) own environment".
You also said, "when species try to play god, they self-destruct", so you're contradicting yourself there, with that extraordinarily fuzzy idea - please tell me how a river otter can "try to play god".
And you said, "Nature has some intelligent design to it, that sort of self-repairs when things get out of whack", and "I don't think that Nature is an organism either", so I can't imagine how you can reconcile those two thoughts.
The bottom line, is that with your anthropomorphizing "Nature", claiming it's intelligent, that non-humans don't damage their environments, and that humans are somehow not part of the natural world, you're not only not correct, you're not even wrong. Nothing you have expressed makes any sense or correlates to a scientific understanding of the world.
Thanks, you found something that's actually informative on the issue. But look out, you may be called a shill for Big Warming.
Well, keep laughing as the prolonged droughts do start killing people. No reason not to have a good time.
Blaming every weather event on AGW is what makes people doubt AGW.
Well, I think in many cases the doubt for AGW rises from financial interest, whether it's direct payments from the oil foundations or that vague fear in a recession that fixing the problem could cost average people their jobs, but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW. You know, the way deniers cite every cold snap and snowfall as evidence to the contrary.
It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
Tornado activity hits 60-year low 2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years
Yes it will. Or next week. That's kind of the point.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/unseasonable-tornadoes-in-midwest-damage-illinois-towns-killing-6/2013/11/18/36c26332-5064-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html
How's that global warming thing working out for you?
You mean, for us? Not so well. Chaotic weather, not even, gradual warming over the entire globe, is what we can expect for quite a number of years.
Don't say that like you're not in the same boat as the rest of us.
"The 399-foot cutter, the Polar Star, is responding..."
Hey, that's one of my favorite novels! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Star_(novel)
...No other part of nature has ever sensed that it has inflicted damage to the natural environment, and just carried on, multiplying the same efforts...
"parts of nature" don't "sense that (they have) inflicted damage to the natural environment..." This makes no sense at all, because you are anthropomorphizing "nature" which is not an organism at all, and does not sense or reason, or make decisions. Perhaps you are referring to individual species? Please, give an example of a species "sensing" the damage it's inflicting on the environment, and what steps it took to rectify the problem.
I mean, aside from Man. I direct your attention to the Clean Air Act of 1970, http://www.epa.gov/air/caa/, a very successful "sensing" by humans of the damage they inflicted on the environment, and steps taken to reverse the damage.
The next time you see or hear of anything except for mankind knowingly ruining the entire planet for it's own personal and very temporary gain, hit me up and I'll buy you a drink.
How about this? http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/01/04/2057206/the-far-future-of-our-solar-system
I didn't have to go very far, either. This is an elegant summary of what humans have discovered (in only a few hundred years) about the development and likely future of the observable universe. It is based on millions of person hours of effort directed at discovering how things work. It is elegant and beautiful. The human impulse to learn that produces things like this also produces the inventions that have extended human lifespans, reduced the misery of existence, and will give us the chance to escape this rock and give humanity an indefinite future.
You seem overly smitten by the "natural" world, and every species except for Man. I really like my Boston Terriers, but their favorite occupations (aside from being with us) seem to be licking their private parts. There's not much comparison.
About that drink... I'll take a Balvenie, neat.
sure we will, because somebody will figure out how to clone a human, then the super-wealthy will decide they don't need the rest of us when heading out into space, and rely on cloning instead.
So the Lawyers and Coiffeurs are going to go into space ? Hey that's a great news, we should help any way we can.
Let's hang on to the phone disinfectors, please.
and the genome is cleaned up to eliminate stupidity, ugliness, weak critical thinking skills and greed, why would there be any?
And what do they call it when you clean up a genome? I sincerely doubt humanity has the brain power or ethical strength to create Iain M Banks "Culture". Possibly the machines we make could, but then who controls that? We are just as likely to end up living in the Matrix as cruising around in GSV and partying with drones.
Have you read many of the Culture novels? (I've read them all, dammit, and since Banks left us so suddenly last year there won't be any more.) The AI's *do* control just about everything. They only seem to consult with humans because... because... I don't know why. The just seem to like humans (see "Meat Fucker").
No, we need to draw some lines. Klingon should not be recognized as a real language, and every municipality should be able to refuse to do any sort of business in it and to deny any accommodation to people who speak it. There is no comparison with Spanish in the U.S., and it's insulting to claim one.
It is a fake language - the first cases of it were isolated words made up for a Star Trek movie (by James Doohan!), and it later was extended, but it's a fabricated language, no one depends on it as their first language, and we should take this mild step in order to protect legitimate languages.
I'm pretty confident in stating that the U.S. would be better off if the amount of effort spent on Klingon were directed to improving English proficiency for native U.S. residents whose first language is English!
The science and technology are amazingly accurate, the social and cultural changes are not even close; and really the social and cultural issues are far more important. A guaranteed income, mass joblessness, and and strict population controls would all have much, much larger effects on the world we live in than video conferencing and drones on Mars.
It figures. In his writing, the scientific concepts were pretty mind-blowing, but the characters were flat as pancakes and the dialog was abysmal. He struck me as a writer who understands technology a lot better than its effects on people, and he didn't seem to be in tune with how people interact.
You're right, he was clueless about people. As part of his security entourage at a couple of Star Trek cons in NY (don't ask), I spent plenty of time talking with him and observing. Very nice guy (he wrote me a personalized limerick about having two penises!), but not very perceptive about people.
and strict population controls
China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.
Precisely. *One* country has a problem with overpopulation. And their solution is NOT strict population controls, but economic disincentives for families that have more than one child (so it costs more, but rich families can afford it).
You might want to read up a little more on that. China was forcibly aborting fetuses, and probably still are. I don't call that an "economic disincentive". See? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/story/2012-07-25/China-forced-abortions/56465974/1
So if kidnapping women and injecting them with chemicals to kill their unborn fetus isn't "strict", I'd hate to see how bedtime is enforced in your house.