I went online looking to debunk this, but frankly its essentially true.
Some further sad facts: In all of history there have been 12 human beings to set foot on another planet. The youngest of them is now 77. Most of them are still alive (probably thanks to the extreme physical fitness required of astronauts), but the day is not too far off when they start dying, and we will be left with no living people who have visited another planet. Most US citizens were not born yet when this was going on.
Space exploration is not something we are actively doing, but part of our history, joining its place alongside the Civil War and Lewis and Clark as "things to bore kids with in US History". If we tried doing it again, we've lost so much capability that it would probably take longer to accomplish, and cost more. We might as well post the poem Ozymandias next to our old Apollo artifacts in the museums:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Most people today don't realise what things were like back then. Movie reviews tended to be written in the same manner, and by the same types of people, as art criticim. We're talking about highbrow patrician types who looked upon their own work as its own kind of "art". (Gene Siskel being practically the prototype). This of course means that they tended to like highbrow art flics and dislike "common" entertainment. That made movie reviews nearly useless to your average Joe Schmoe.
Quite correct. You have to realise that they were the head film critics for the two competing daily newspapers in what was at the time the second largest city in the USA. To make matters worse, Gene Siskel grew up in elite boarding schools and graduated from Yale, while Roger Ebert was the son of an electrician who graduated from Illinois. They were set up to hate each other from the get-go, and at first they did.
A large part of what made the early shows entertaining and informative was the arguments they had over the movies they saw. It was almost like they wanted to fight. So if they both agreed on something, it was almost reluctantly, and meant they couldn't find anything to fight over. Thus a "two thumbs up" became a really big deal. If a movie got that, a promoters job was pretty much done. Rather than burying you under positive review verbiage full of suspicious elipses, they'd just say "Two thumbs up!" - Siskel and Ebert, in the promotional material, and go cash their checks.
Over the run of their partnership we got to watch them acquire grudging respect for each other, and slowly that transformed into something more. When Gene Siskel died, it was almost like watching a death in a long-running marriage. Now that Ebert is gone too, we all have to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing is really and truly gone. Its hard.
I came across one "RIP Ebert" tweet yesterday from an ethnic palestinian living in UAE. Most of his followers are Muslims from that part of the world, and he didn't bother to try to explain who the guy was, just reported it.
Yes, I think that qualifies as "world famous". Your own ignorance is your personal problem.
Jesus said that if someone hits you on the right cheek (the one they'd hit if they backhanded you like an inferior), you should present the other one (the one they'd hit if they punched you with their dominant hand, like one does with someone of their own social station).
If you think the "right" part isn't significant, then perhaps this is advocating extreme nonviolence. But many people see this as actually a call to insist on being treated as an equal, even in the context of being assaulted.
Being constantly harrassed like that must be hell. I'm sure Aaron Swart's family and friends have nothing but sympathy for those poor harried prosecutors.
They still aren't really comperable. Even with this sweeheart loan deal, you are going to be out 85 grand in an "investment" that will depreciate down to nearly $0 in 10-15 years. In the mean time you get transportation that you could have had with a couple of $5-10K used cars. That's a whole lot of money down the toilet.
For the student loan, you get an education, which cannot be taken from you by a bankrupcy court either, and is a ticket to the upper 60% of the job market, culminating in 1.6 to 3 times the expected lifetime earnings (depending on how much education you get).
If you have to pick only one, take the student loan.
Actually, a sense of "smell" in an Andrioid device is the one missing hardware feature that prevents us from implementing a Trek tricorder on one. In the original series, they were always using it to do some kind of chemical analysis. You could even do some medical analysis that way, without the primitive animal assistance that currently requires..
I don't know enough to speak for Islam, but many (if not most) Christians don't base their entire belief system on every word in the Bible being literally true as a historical record. What we've found in the realms of Physics, Biology, Geology, and Archeology have already given ample proof against that.
Most "mainline" Christian demoninations are just fine with reading the three (yes three) different creation stories in The Bible as alegorical stories. The rest (who you seem to incorrectly believe are everybody, rather than the loud galling minority they are) have landed on contorted logcial arguments to explain away any pesky evidence, and I do not see how any further evidence of any kind will magically defeat them.
The fact that you ask these questions though make you a good candidate to watch the show. How faith interacts with life with other species (often of other faiths) is *exactly* the kind of question JMS was trying to explore with his coverage of religon on B5. For example, you could view this issue as just another example of interfaith interactions touched off in the Age of Discovery, which ultimately ended up creating Unitarianisim. Sure enough, B5 has one character (the station doctor) who is an adherent of a kind of Unitarianisim created after first contact and the advent of space travel.
Worse than that, it is pointless. How does it help me to know that a document is "infallable", if I (a fallable human) am constantly misinterpreting it, sometimes for years (or even generations)?
As somebody who occasionally gets paid to write doumentation, I have come to the conviction that any passage of a document that misleads a large percentage of its readers is wrong, no matter how right I think it might be technically. Try applying this philosophy to your "infallable" holy book.
Oh, and by the way - a future without religion, as improbable as it may seem today, is something I'd still call more probable than the existence of "souls", a purely religious belief that seems to be part of the coming production just as it ran like a golden thread through B5. No matter whether JMS calls himself atheist or not.
Sigh. See my sibling post on this for a long version. But the short version is that one species in the show believed that. One. The humans mostly did not (although they certianly weren't going to talk that other species out of it, as it was the one thing that stopped them from exterminating humanity). Sure, it came up a lot, but only because that one species was central to the plot arc, and this belief was driving their actions. There was nothing in the show whatsoever that implied their beliefs had to be true.
Try this. The Vorlons and the Shadows were the most advanced (major) species in the series. Show me one instance where they said anything about "souls". One. In fact, one ep strongly implied that the development of most religions from most species (including the soul-believers), were heavily influenced by Vorlon interference.
It seems the problem a lot of people have here is that the writer depicted people of faith without going out of his way to debunk their beliefs. Many people can't seem to get it through their heads that this isn't the same thing as an endorsement of their beliefs. Some people can actually (gasp) coexist with folks who adhere to a different belief system than themselves, without trying to show they are wrong at every opportunity. In fact, if there's one religous "golden thread" to look for in the series, that is it.
I don't mind complaints about the show, but they should at least be accurate complaints. For instance, the psionics certianly did seem inarguably supernatural. That's an old SciFi complaint though, and is hardly confined to B5.
sigh If you're going to start up a 10 year old argument, at least look into what has been said before.
The Mimbari believed in that soul stuff. That doesn't make it true, just true for them. In fact, if you watched the episode Soul Hunter, you would have seen another species that believed very differently than the Mimbari about souls (with the predictable unblinking hatred from the Mimbari, much like you see from many other religons when their practices are incompatible, for example Mormon post-mortem "babptisims" of people who were other faiths in life).
JMS was a atheist, but one who at the time was interested what he could say about religon and intolerance if he made the (not unreasonable) postulation that spacefaring species might retain that part of their cultural heritage. His Narn had a totally different religon, and his human characters all had their own different beliefs, some old (Ivonova was Jewish), some new (Their male doctor was an adherent of some kind of multispecies Universalist church created after space travel), and various characters had their own levels of belief or disbelief in religon. Just like people today. What a concept!
Again, if you prefer Trek's treatment of religon, that's fine. Go watch that. But it doesn't make another author's treatment of it wrong.
Yup. JMS has stated he doesn't believe in God, and the rest of parent post is dead on as well. However, he does acknolwedge that religon exists, and even did some speculation into what that would look like with alien species. That's the kind of thing Sci-Fi is supposed to do. What he didn't do is ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, like was done in Star Trek.
GP was essentially complaining that B5 wasn't Trek. It his perrogative to prefer that narrative I suppose, but it doesn't make other narratives bad. At any rate, this is an argument most of us tired of a decade and a half ago. If you only want to watch Trek universe shows, please just go do that already and leave the rest of us alone.
JMS produced Babylon-5 for 5 years on a shoe-string budget with his own production company for an impoverished basic cable channel. I don't see why he'd have a lot of trouble pulling off the same feat for Netflix.
This is the exact kind of thing I'm talking about. The balance of GP is "yes, there's a rule, here it is", then followed by a completely groundless rationalization for why its still a Good Thing today. Sure you can rebut that, but you shouldn't frigging have to. Then someone like him comes up with some other BS rationalization that someone else has to rebut, and we just chase mythology around in circles for another decade.
This is stupid, and it needs to stop now. The rule should be rescinded, and any problem that arises from that should attacked with a new rule that addresses the actual problem (eg: loose objects, distracting noises, RF interference, etc.)
The real reason for the ban on portable electronic devices (the cell phone ban dates back to an FCC reg on the adverse effect of having an old-school cell phone at altitude where it could see many towers) is not to protect against interference, it is to protect lives in case of evacuation.
Are you sure about that? I mean honestly knowledgeably sure?
I ask this because this topic seems to come up here on Slashdot every couple of years. Slashdot being what it is, there's always an expert RF engineer, FAA worker, pilot, navigator, Aerospace engineer, or air-traffic controller piping up, and invariably what I see is:
Excuse X is bunk. The real reason they are banned is Excuse Y.
Where Excuse X is something the speaker is an expert on, while Excuse Y is something in one of those other domains.
Frankly, after 10 years of this (reference my uid length), I'm sick of hearing it. Its clear to me that nobody knows why this restriction is in place. it is meerly an demi-religous practice that people feel compelled to make up justifications for. We might as well send old guys in robes down the aisles swinging incence thuribles before takeoff to chase away the demons.
Why should the airlines care about minor billing issues with a completely unrelated cell phone company? We won't get to the truth here (which should be the goal) by wasting time arguing over silly conspiracy theories.
Given that now 18 states have now outlawed the Death Penalty entirely, up from 13 in 2007, I suspect a deep look crime issues may show that the general public really no longer has much of a "thirst for ever harsher prison sentences". These days I'm even hearing a lot of (generally younger) Republicans complaining about the excessive expense of it all.
Last I read, it didn't even have to be particularly "robust". I could ROT13 the text, and prosecute under the DMCA anyone who doesn't use my special "reader" software to ROT13 it again for circumventing my copy protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I always figured it was the writers' way of showing how flawed Sheldon's judgement is in matters of taste, but YMMV. :-)
Actually, not a bad question. JMS used to have some really good stories about tit-for-tat writing duels he's had with writers for other shows.
Didn't you know? That's part of the Garmin Market Protection Act of 2011.
I went online looking to debunk this, but frankly its essentially true.
Some further sad facts: In all of history there have been 12 human beings to set foot on another planet. The youngest of them is now 77. Most of them are still alive (probably thanks to the extreme physical fitness required of astronauts), but the day is not too far off when they start dying, and we will be left with no living people who have visited another planet. Most US citizens were not born yet when this was going on.
Space exploration is not something we are actively doing, but part of our history, joining its place alongside the Civil War and Lewis and Clark as "things to bore kids with in US History". If we tried doing it again, we've lost so much capability that it would probably take longer to accomplish, and cost more. We might as well post the poem Ozymandias next to our old Apollo artifacts in the museums:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away
That was in fact his big contribution.
Most people today don't realise what things were like back then. Movie reviews tended to be written in the same manner, and by the same types of people, as art criticim. We're talking about highbrow patrician types who looked upon their own work as its own kind of "art". (Gene Siskel being practically the prototype). This of course means that they tended to like highbrow art flics and dislike "common" entertainment. That made movie reviews nearly useless to your average Joe Schmoe.
Quite correct. You have to realise that they were the head film critics for the two competing daily newspapers in what was at the time the second largest city in the USA. To make matters worse, Gene Siskel grew up in elite boarding schools and graduated from Yale, while Roger Ebert was the son of an electrician who graduated from Illinois. They were set up to hate each other from the get-go, and at first they did.
A large part of what made the early shows entertaining and informative was the arguments they had over the movies they saw. It was almost like they wanted to fight. So if they both agreed on something, it was almost reluctantly, and meant they couldn't find anything to fight over. Thus a "two thumbs up" became a really big deal. If a movie got that, a promoters job was pretty much done. Rather than burying you under positive review verbiage full of suspicious elipses, they'd just say "Two thumbs up!" - Siskel and Ebert, in the promotional material, and go cash their checks.
Over the run of their partnership we got to watch them acquire grudging respect for each other, and slowly that transformed into something more. When Gene Siskel died, it was almost like watching a death in a long-running marriage. Now that Ebert is gone too, we all have to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing is really and truly gone. Its hard.
I came across one "RIP Ebert" tweet yesterday from an ethnic palestinian living in UAE. Most of his followers are Muslims from that part of the world, and he didn't bother to try to explain who the guy was, just reported it.
Yes, I think that qualifies as "world famous". Your own ignorance is your personal problem.
Jesus said that if someone hits you on the right cheek (the one they'd hit if they backhanded you like an inferior), you should present the other one (the one they'd hit if they punched you with their dominant hand, like one does with someone of their own social station).
If you think the "right" part isn't significant, then perhaps this is advocating extreme nonviolence. But many people see this as actually a call to insist on being treated as an equal, even in the context of being assaulted.
Being constantly harrassed like that must be hell. I'm sure Aaron Swart's family and friends have nothing but sympathy for those poor harried prosecutors.
They still aren't really comperable. Even with this sweeheart loan deal, you are going to be out 85 grand in an "investment" that will depreciate down to nearly $0 in 10-15 years. In the mean time you get transportation that you could have had with a couple of $5-10K used cars. That's a whole lot of money down the toilet.
For the student loan, you get an education, which cannot be taken from you by a bankrupcy court either, and is a ticket to the upper 60% of the job market, culminating in 1.6 to 3 times the expected lifetime earnings (depending on how much education you get).
If you have to pick only one, take the student loan.
So you AC's don't like getting repeatedly trolled by Slashdot?
The irony in this is so delicous, I don't even need the popcorn. Please, rage on AC's.
Quite. The half that have Aspergers, and thus don't appreciate humor.
A normal website would only have 1-10% of readers like that, but on Slashdot I could easily believe that it's up near half.
Actually, a sense of "smell" in an Andrioid device is the one missing hardware feature that prevents us from implementing a Trek tricorder on one. In the original series, they were always using it to do some kind of chemical analysis. You could even do some medical analysis that way, without the primitive animal assistance that currently requires..
I can't wait for the apps!
I don't know enough to speak for Islam, but many (if not most) Christians don't base their entire belief system on every word in the Bible being literally true as a historical record. What we've found in the realms of Physics, Biology, Geology, and Archeology have already given ample proof against that.
Most "mainline" Christian demoninations are just fine with reading the three (yes three) different creation stories in The Bible as alegorical stories. The rest (who you seem to incorrectly believe are everybody, rather than the loud galling minority they are) have landed on contorted logcial arguments to explain away any pesky evidence, and I do not see how any further evidence of any kind will magically defeat them.
The fact that you ask these questions though make you a good candidate to watch the show. How faith interacts with life with other species (often of other faiths) is *exactly* the kind of question JMS was trying to explore with his coverage of religon on B5. For example, you could view this issue as just another example of interfaith interactions touched off in the Age of Discovery, which ultimately ended up creating Unitarianisim. Sure enough, B5 has one character (the station doctor) who is an adherent of a kind of Unitarianisim created after first contact and the advent of space travel.
That only works if you ignore the literary style of my English translation of the whole rest of the chapter
FTFY
Worse than that, it is pointless. How does it help me to know that a document is "infallable", if I (a fallable human) am constantly misinterpreting it, sometimes for years (or even generations)?
As somebody who occasionally gets paid to write doumentation, I have come to the conviction that any passage of a document that misleads a large percentage of its readers is wrong, no matter how right I think it might be technically. Try applying this philosophy to your "infallable" holy book.
Oh, and by the way - a future without religion, as improbable as it may seem today, is something I'd still call more probable than the existence of "souls", a purely religious belief that seems to be part of the coming production just as it ran like a golden thread through B5. No matter whether JMS calls himself atheist or not.
Sigh. See my sibling post on this for a long version. But the short version is that one species in the show believed that. One. The humans mostly did not (although they certianly weren't going to talk that other species out of it, as it was the one thing that stopped them from exterminating humanity). Sure, it came up a lot, but only because that one species was central to the plot arc, and this belief was driving their actions. There was nothing in the show whatsoever that implied their beliefs had to be true.
Try this. The Vorlons and the Shadows were the most advanced (major) species in the series. Show me one instance where they said anything about "souls". One. In fact, one ep strongly implied that the development of most religions from most species (including the soul-believers), were heavily influenced by Vorlon interference.
It seems the problem a lot of people have here is that the writer depicted people of faith without going out of his way to debunk their beliefs. Many people can't seem to get it through their heads that this isn't the same thing as an endorsement of their beliefs. Some people can actually (gasp) coexist with folks who adhere to a different belief system than themselves, without trying to show they are wrong at every opportunity. In fact, if there's one religous "golden thread" to look for in the series, that is it.
I don't mind complaints about the show, but they should at least be accurate complaints. For instance, the psionics certianly did seem inarguably supernatural. That's an old SciFi complaint though, and is hardly confined to B5.
sigh If you're going to start up a 10 year old argument, at least look into what has been said before.
The Mimbari believed in that soul stuff. That doesn't make it true, just true for them. In fact, if you watched the episode Soul Hunter, you would have seen another species that believed very differently than the Mimbari about souls (with the predictable unblinking hatred from the Mimbari, much like you see from many other religons when their practices are incompatible, for example Mormon post-mortem "babptisims" of people who were other faiths in life).
JMS was a atheist, but one who at the time was interested what he could say about religon and intolerance if he made the (not unreasonable) postulation that spacefaring species might retain that part of their cultural heritage. His Narn had a totally different religon, and his human characters all had their own different beliefs, some old (Ivonova was Jewish), some new (Their male doctor was an adherent of some kind of multispecies Universalist church created after space travel), and various characters had their own levels of belief or disbelief in religon. Just like people today. What a concept!
Again, if you prefer Trek's treatment of religon, that's fine. Go watch that. But it doesn't make another author's treatment of it wrong.
Yup. JMS has stated he doesn't believe in God, and the rest of parent post is dead on as well. However, he does acknolwedge that religon exists, and even did some speculation into what that would look like with alien species. That's the kind of thing Sci-Fi is supposed to do. What he didn't do is ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, like was done in Star Trek.
GP was essentially complaining that B5 wasn't Trek. It his perrogative to prefer that narrative I suppose, but it doesn't make other narratives bad. At any rate, this is an argument most of us tired of a decade and a half ago. If you only want to watch Trek universe shows, please just go do that already and leave the rest of us alone.
JMS produced Babylon-5 for 5 years on a shoe-string budget with his own production company for an impoverished basic cable channel. I don't see why he'd have a lot of trouble pulling off the same feat for Netflix.
This is the exact kind of thing I'm talking about. The balance of GP is "yes, there's a rule, here it is", then followed by a completely groundless rationalization for why its still a Good Thing today. Sure you can rebut that, but you shouldn't frigging have to. Then someone like him comes up with some other BS rationalization that someone else has to rebut, and we just chase mythology around in circles for another decade.
This is stupid, and it needs to stop now. The rule should be rescinded, and any problem that arises from that should attacked with a new rule that addresses the actual problem (eg: loose objects, distracting noises, RF interference, etc.)
The real reason for the ban on portable electronic devices (the cell phone ban dates back to an FCC reg on the adverse effect of having an old-school cell phone at altitude where it could see many towers) is not to protect against interference, it is to protect lives in case of evacuation.
Are you sure about that? I mean honestly knowledgeably sure?
I ask this because this topic seems to come up here on Slashdot every couple of years. Slashdot being what it is, there's always an expert RF engineer, FAA worker, pilot, navigator, Aerospace engineer, or air-traffic controller piping up, and invariably what I see is:
Excuse X is bunk. The real reason they are banned is Excuse Y.
Where Excuse X is something the speaker is an expert on, while Excuse Y is something in one of those other domains.
Frankly, after 10 years of this (reference my uid length), I'm sick of hearing it. Its clear to me that nobody knows why this restriction is in place. it is meerly an demi-religous practice that people feel compelled to make up justifications for. We might as well send old guys in robes down the aisles swinging incence thuribles before takeoff to chase away the demons.
Why should the airlines care about minor billing issues with a completely unrelated cell phone company? We won't get to the truth here (which should be the goal) by wasting time arguing over silly conspiracy theories.
Given that now 18 states have now outlawed the Death Penalty entirely, up from 13 in 2007, I suspect a deep look crime issues may show that the general public really no longer has much of a "thirst for ever harsher prison sentences". These days I'm even hearing a lot of (generally younger) Republicans complaining about the excessive expense of it all.
Last I read, it didn't even have to be particularly "robust". I could ROT13 the text, and prosecute under the DMCA anyone who doesn't use my special "reader" software to ROT13 it again for circumventing my copy protection.