On seeing the headline, I knew there'd be all sorts of opinions flying around in the comments. And there are. As someone who's dealt with AD/HD all my life (but only recently diagnosed), I think it's important to bring up the International Consensus opinion. Because I work hard enough dealing with myself, to have to also deal with the cloud of aspersions and rumors and misinformed crap that follows it around.
The thing is, alternatives do exist, and for exactly that reason. Perhaps their tone is off, but I wouldn't fault them too strongly. Protecting the Red Cross, Red Crescent (and now Red Crystal) symbols has been something of a Sisyphean task for a long time, kind of like fighting those stupid "pissing Calvin" car stickers.
It's interesting to read the discussion here. I've always had difficulty with names, not just people's, but all the dynamic small bits of memories like technical terms and schedules. One time it became exaggeratedly bad: I was running a 10 k road race and unknowingly got very dehydrated. I finished the race, but started going into shock. While the medics were treating me I couldn't speak at all. I could make sounds, and think without words, but there were no words in my mind at all. Although I could understand when they spoke to me without any problem. After time, I could concentrate hard for a few seconds and spit out a complete sentence. But I wasn't aware of what I was concentrating on, or where the sentence came from. After one got out, I'd have to re-concentrate to build up the next sentence. As I recovered, the time it took became progressively less until I returned to normal.
But a recent experience has been enlightening. For this and other issues, I was diagnosed a couple years ago with ADD. About a month ago I started taking Straterra, and as it's developed in my system I've felt my "dynamic" memory get better. By which I mean at the time I'm making the memory I can feel it's being stored better, and I'll be able to recall it more reliably. I had no idea a person could even sense such a thing. I don't really know what's going on in the noggin with experiences like these, but it's kind of fun nevertheless to witness some of the specific weirdnesses of the mind first-hand.
I'm assuming the article's "loosely packed" refers to things like rubble pile asteroids. A collection of rocks ranging in size from near-asteroid-themselves to dust grain, held together only by mutual gravity, full of void spaces. They tend to absorb impactors' momentum like crumple zones, severely reducing their effectiveness. Some back-of-the-envelope guessing leads to an estimate of 80 tons of impactor mass to deflect a 200 meter rubble pile.
They tend to pose challenges for most deflection strategies, whether projectile, nuclear, mass driver/rocket, or solar thermal. This sort of gravity "kid glove" handling seems the most elegant approach.
I wonder if you're missing the point. Science, to be sure, is about fitting theories and observations together (not to mention producing lots of both.) But turning theories into action requires standing with one foot in science and the other in politics.
Justice and morality aren't about consensus (arguably.) Yet we rely on a 12/12 consensus when deciding criminal guilt. If there's one thing the internet has to teach, it's that there's no idea so crazy someone doesn't believe it.
For every single scientific question that matters in any way to some political issue, people will be lining up on their chosen sides, and calling costuming to dig out the lab coats. Just as a trial by press is a travesty of justice, science by press is a irresolvable tarbaby of blather.
So the appeal to consensus is not saying "this is correct because it's popular", it's saying "here's what the experts think". Because the alternative is politicians fishing through the thousands of marginal theories always floating around, until they find the one whopper they can show off as "the *real* science".
In the beginning, all the whales were going to die,
Then we made it illegal to hunt them and now they aren't.
then we were all going to die of polluted water (remember "acid rain" kids?), then the air was going to become to polluted to breathe (smog - still a problem but under control),
Related problem, related solutions: clear air act and clean water act, plus et cetera. With continued industrial and population growth we find ourselves having to keep moving to stay in place, however. Hence "under control".
then the ozone layer was going to disappear because of CFC's.
And in fact started to, whereupon we broadly restricted them, and it's growing back.
Your profound skepticism is so simplistic and uninformed it smacks not so much of a world-wise rationalism as of deliberately obtuse orthodoxy. Global cooling was widely reported in magazines, newspapers, and at least one sensational book. Notably absent from that list are scientific publications, understandable since climatologists had nothing to do with it. In fact the idea that fossil fuel-based industrialization could cause global climate change is over a century old. Global warming isn't thought to be caused by CO2 alone, but with methane, nitrous oxide, and both CFCs and ozone as well. Oh, and it took me ten seconds with Google to find out how much Richard Lindzen has been paid by various interest groups (and I don't mean the Sierra Club.) As well as a quote of my own (from Ross Gelbspan, writing about Lindzen and others):
By keeping the discussion focused on whether there is a problem in the first place, they have effectively silenced the debate over what to do about it.
There's plenty of room for economic, legal, political, and emotional arguments about what we can or should do about human-caused climate change, including nothing at all. It'd be grand if, however, the scientific arguments at least could remain professionally apolitical. Sadly, it's too easy for a PR agency to parade proverbial actors in lab coats; salt the press with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt; and forestall any hope of progress.
Can't say I've had to worry about that yet.... I do have a LOT of experience to draw from here.
Heh. Either I'm jaded or you're lucky.:) Some quick comments: I'm not saying any other OS is much better. Macs, of course, but they walk a different path where Obscure Device X doesn't stand a snowball's chance. I don't have much experience with digital cameras and memory cards, except the the brand-new computers in one place I work have interface peripherals with slots for four different kinds of memory card/stick/chip/slab. I don't share your optimism regarding the future of interoperability. With a world full of tremendous hardware and software variety, testing which combinations work together quickly suffers from combinatorial explosion. You've given the solution: a common, standardized interface. It's this area where Microsoft is, quite frankly, the problem to the solution. They have a long and depressing history of tweaking their treatment of those standards, trying to maintain an advantage. They have enough clout that their scoffpostacy successfully derails the standard. (Yes, I made up "scoffpostacy". Like apostacy but not quite as serious as one's immortal soul.) That other companies have done similar things when they can neither excuses Microsoft nor bodes well for the future. As long as people are torn between the official, bureaucratic and unworkable standard; the popular company's horribly broken "standard"; and the five obscure but much better "standard"s, Add/Remove Programs will want to install two drivers five times whenever I plug in that brand-new extension card, and to get it working in Linux I'll have to edit/usr/local/secret/options/hiding/place and recompile X.
Windows users never have to worry if their OS will be supported when it comes to hardware or software.
No, they never have to worry if their brand-new OS/hardware combination will be supported; it will, although it'll cost money and may or may not be helpful. Over the course of a couple years, it's a roll of the dice whether each new/old hardware/software will still/yet be supported for their platform.
The tales (and my experience) of devices, programs, and data too new or too old to work are legion. From what I've seen working with several generations (and flavors) of *nix, Windows, and Macs, Windows has extremely little reason to crow about support.
But not their principle, your misunderstanding of it. Libraries already carry materials that are considered pornographic or otherwise unsuitable for public. They tend to be kept behind the desk or in a similar location. If an adult wants them, they're checked out like any other item, but they aren't set out next to the children's section or anything.
BTW, I've never heard someone "scream" censorship. You may need to turn down your thinking aid.
I think you should reexamine that. Looking at platforms, proposals, policies and all that, the two parties in the U.S. have never been *closer* for as long as they've had these names at least. You wouldn't think it to hear them, or their pundits, or the news "analyists" talk. But of course the more similar they become in substance the more they must differentiate in image, just like any advertised product.
That's not to say they're identical, as long as there are only two parties to go to mainstream partisans and radical extremists will both pull their parties around. But both Perot and Nader demonstrate which end of their respective parties are leaking, and it's not the center.
I have AD/HD. If I try to read a book I'm not into, whether I have to, want to, or both, I'll be lucky to get through a paragraph with my train of thought intact. Or sitting in the same place I was when I started. But if I read a book I'm into, I might take a break to eat something after six hours. If I try to do anything else, I'll be thinking about that.
It's not just reading, of course, but that tends to really emphasize the effect. ADD is poorly named, not an attention deficit but control disorder.
So your litmus test might be vaguely applicable, if you ask: what games did they play? How many? How frequently did they switch? How familiar were they? In each game, how did they play? How persistent were they with frustrating/boring parts? How do all these factors change from time to time over a period of months and years?
Of course, it's no longer a litmus test. But then, no accurate litmus test for AD/HD is known, not that people aren't looking. That "psychological" testing can be very accurate, but can be also not, breeds the sort of skepticism your story connotes, and that causes all sorts of problems for those of us that, believe it or not, really do have it.
That AD/HD is overdiagnosed should not detract from the fact that it is simultaneously underdiagnosed.
Disclaimer: I worked on lakes only similar to Vida and a few years ago, so my knowledge is a bit rusty.
The headline is wrong; this isn't a closed ecosystem. Sand and gravel from the surrounding valley, laced with microbes, nematodes, and even a species of insect is constantly blown onto the surface where it melts into the ice by solar heating in the summer. Some of that sediment makes its way into the lake itself. Under that much ice the sunlight is quite weak, but still capable of driving photosynthesis, albeit slowly. Every summer a small amout of fresh water from glacial melt fills the lake, replacing water that was lost by sublimation and wind erosion from the ice cap (the ice cap itself is replenished by new ice freezing on the bottom.) In addition most other lakes of its kind form a "moat" of meltwater around the shallow perimeter of the lake during summer; I don't recall if Vida does but it's likely.
Preservation is a significant concern among the people performing this type of research. Like many things in life it's a balance of how much to defer; too little and the lake could be seriously damaged, too much and we don't learn what we could. In general the sorts of techniques used don't contaminate things to a noticable level; sampling holes are shielded from excessive light, water samples once taken from the lake are never returned, that sort of thing.
The significance of this research on Martian or Europan life is not so much treating them as direct analogues as it is characterizing what strategies life might use under those conditions, to understand where and how we might look elsewhere. The dry valleys of Antarctica (home of lake Vida) were once warmer and wetter, just as Mars was. If there was life on Mars some of its last remnants likely survived in melt-fed, ice-capped hypersaline lakes. It's certainly imperfect knowledge, but whatever we can learn is helpful.
Boy, really? I missed out. For a couple hours on saturday I had the TV on and muted, flipping between news channels, waiting for the run itself (And doing other things, hence the mute.) CNN would periodically mention that the flight was upcoming, showing animations and stuff, whereas Fox didn't mention a thing. Unfortunately I had to leave before the action started.
So from what I know I don't think your characterization is completely fair. I'm guessing CNN was preparing for it and when it came time for the flight had something else going on they decided to cover instead, whereas Fox News didn't mention much about it before covering the flight itself.
As for comparing the networks' quality, I can see CNN falling behind Fox News when Fox switches to their upcoming split-screen format: all Iraq on the top, all celebrity trials on the bottom.
I've often wondered about that. I've seen the name Ng in text several times but have no clue how to pronounce it. Is it like "rang" without "ray"? Just the ng, or is there something in there that would be interpreted by American ears as an implied semivowel? Whenever I'm reading something and come across that surname my mental voice skips a bit -- unsure just what to think.
So many people have made that mistake of interpretation, and it's a shame. For that matter, it was said quite a bit about 2001 as well. Would it surprise you to learn the third act has as much Kubrick influence as the other two? It *does* have problems, IMHO, too much narration a large part of that. But it's unfortunate that the shift in style has led people to think of the ending as tacked-on, with Kubrick stopping and Spielberg picking up the pen to finish things off.
I hope with some investigation you can confirm this for yourself, and reexamine the third act's messages in light of Kubrick's similar statements in A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket.
I'm not sure anger, politics, and violence are as common to religions as you think. Your perceptions, like mine for that matter, are probably colored by living in a place dominated by Christianity's history, or possibly Islam. Many other religions are much more amenable to reinterpretation, recombination, &c. Even disparaged "organized religion"s can be somewhat supportive of the process, cf east Asia's treatment of Taoism and Buddhism. In addition, while some variants of Christianity are more strict about apostasy, they make such a deal about it precisely because so many individual adherents are fond of customizing their beliefs.
In short, I think viewing a religion as the One True Path is not universally common, but a localized phenomenon that has unusual influence precisely because of its exclusivity.
Shouldn't you have been bitching when minivans became the family wagon?
Just because I'm ranting about some externalities doesn't mean I ignore others. But minivans are less damaging to the public and more broadly justifiable than SUVs, hence, less of an issue.
To me, a 4-cylinder SUV (Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV) is a more fuel-efficient alternative to a 6-cylinder minivan.
To you those vehicles may be an alternative, but with less towing capability, cargo capacity, passenger capacity, maneuverability, safety or reliability they are to the majority of drivers apples and oranges.
You're missing the point that, although other people have the right to live their own lives, they don't have the right to live mine. An SUV on the road does disproportionate harm to the air we *all* share, and gives its driver better road visibility at the expensive of that of everyone around them. If they have good reasons to use an SUV that offset those public harms, then we might as well live with it. But as long as those private SUVs are driven on public roads and harm other people, well, we have the right to worry about our own lives by telling other people what they should be doing (to us).
About the same time existing jets and travel radii do, I'd imagine. That is to say, now.
In addition it bears mentioning that a more effective military should itself benefit freedom and peace. If you have a problem with how the military is used (something I can sympathize with), deal with it on that level. If you have a problem with killing people in general, you're too good for this world, unfortunately.
(1) It's not highly debated among scientists. It's hotly debated amoung ideologues. Those who know climatology are pretty clear on what is and is not understood, and the implications thereof.
(2) On if we make lots of legislation, but on assumptions that prove to be wrong, we're wasting our time: I'd better go cancel my health insurance policy then. Something horribly terrible, with a low probability of occurring, can still be worth avoiding even if it turns out not to happen.
Well, in this case the sin of omission is that although energy use and standard of living *do* correlate for the many countries of the world, it's a loose correlation. In particular, the economic efficiency (measured in units like GDP per BTU consumed) can vary tremendously. In fact, high levels of energy consumption but low efficiency is a characteristic of developing countries like Kuwait, Argentina, India, or (tellingly) the USA. Increased efficiency producing higher GDPs from lower energy consumption characterizes mature industrial economies like the UK, Germany, and Japan.
Your cutting sarcasm is on target for those small number of actual enviromentalists who have drunk the Kool-Aid, and the large number of fictitious ones living in their opponent's imaginations. Not to say there isn't a bit of ideology in the cause, but then Linux zealotry doesn't change the technical merit of the OS.
Efficiency is one such reason. Robot probes are cheaper in magnitude, but especially for Mars where communication lag is such a problem, having muscles and brains on-site can be tremendously helpful. Spirit and Opportunity are being used very cautiously, taking days to stand up, cut umbilicals, drive off, park for days during a debugging session hampered by narrow communication windows and store-and-forward data transfer. In constrast, astronauts on the Lunar landers were out the door and setting up instruments, taking samples, et cetera comparatively right away. In the end, although it costs more in dollars and risk to put people up there, they can get more and better data faster and more reliably.
Just in case some unsuspecting reader is inclined to accept WorldNetDaily's credibility, it should be pointed out Mr. McCleary's thesis examines the relationship between male homosexuality and spirituality, a topic that hadn't been much examined from a scholarly perspective at the time he wrote it. It makes no claim about the sexuality of Jesus, nor does it cite astrology to that end. The money he was paid was a standard Ph.D. scholarship at that university.
And since feeling justifiable outrage has been found to activate one's pleasure center, I wonder if such articles should be filed under "conservative masturbation material".
No, there are two standard-issue jackets for people going to Antarctica on U.S., Australian, New Zealand, and several other government projects: Carhart or this kind. You get your choice, although by default scientists get the red parkas and support crews get the Carharts. Neither option is really the best for people who need to be out in harsh weather, like the search and rescue teams, who typically bring custom gear.
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On seeing the headline, I knew there'd be all sorts of opinions flying around in the comments. And there are. As someone who's dealt with AD/HD all my life (but only recently diagnosed), I think it's important to bring up the International Consensus opinion. Because I work hard enough dealing with myself, to have to also deal with the cloud of aspersions and rumors and misinformed crap that follows it around.
The thing is, alternatives do exist, and for exactly that reason. Perhaps their tone is off, but I wouldn't fault them too strongly. Protecting the Red Cross, Red Crescent (and now Red Crystal) symbols has been something of a Sisyphean task for a long time, kind of like fighting those stupid "pissing Calvin" car stickers.
It's interesting to read the discussion here. I've always had difficulty with names, not just people's, but all the dynamic small bits of memories like technical terms and schedules. One time it became exaggeratedly bad: I was running a 10 k road race and unknowingly got very dehydrated. I finished the race, but started going into shock. While the medics were treating me I couldn't speak at all. I could make sounds, and think without words, but there were no words in my mind at all. Although I could understand when they spoke to me without any problem. After time, I could concentrate hard for a few seconds and spit out a complete sentence. But I wasn't aware of what I was concentrating on, or where the sentence came from. After one got out, I'd have to re-concentrate to build up the next sentence. As I recovered, the time it took became progressively less until I returned to normal.
But a recent experience has been enlightening. For this and other issues, I was diagnosed a couple years ago with ADD. About a month ago I started taking Straterra, and as it's developed in my system I've felt my "dynamic" memory get better. By which I mean at the time I'm making the memory I can feel it's being stored better, and I'll be able to recall it more reliably. I had no idea a person could even sense such a thing. I don't really know what's going on in the noggin with experiences like these, but it's kind of fun nevertheless to witness some of the specific weirdnesses of the mind first-hand.
I'm assuming the article's "loosely packed" refers to things like rubble pile asteroids. A collection of rocks ranging in size from near-asteroid-themselves to dust grain, held together only by mutual gravity, full of void spaces. They tend to absorb impactors' momentum like crumple zones, severely reducing their effectiveness. Some back-of-the-envelope guessing leads to an estimate of 80 tons of impactor mass to deflect a 200 meter rubble pile.
They tend to pose challenges for most deflection strategies, whether projectile, nuclear, mass driver/rocket, or solar thermal. This sort of gravity "kid glove" handling seems the most elegant approach.
I wonder if you're missing the point. Science, to be sure, is about fitting theories and observations together (not to mention producing lots of both.) But turning theories into action requires standing with one foot in science and the other in politics.
Justice and morality aren't about consensus (arguably.) Yet we rely on a 12/12 consensus when deciding criminal guilt. If there's one thing the internet has to teach, it's that there's no idea so crazy someone doesn't believe it.
For every single scientific question that matters in any way to some political issue, people will be lining up on their chosen sides, and calling costuming to dig out the lab coats. Just as a trial by press is a travesty of justice, science by press is a irresolvable tarbaby of blather.
So the appeal to consensus is not saying "this is correct because it's popular", it's saying "here's what the experts think". Because the alternative is politicians fishing through the thousands of marginal theories always floating around, until they find the one whopper they can show off as "the *real* science".
In the beginning, all the whales were going to die,
Then we made it illegal to hunt them and now they aren't.
then we were all going to die of polluted water (remember "acid rain" kids?), then the air was going to become to polluted to breathe (smog - still a problem but under control),
Related problem, related solutions: clear air act and clean water act, plus et cetera. With continued industrial and population growth we find ourselves having to keep moving to stay in place, however. Hence "under control".
then the ozone layer was going to disappear because of CFC's.
And in fact started to, whereupon we broadly restricted them, and it's growing back.
Your profound skepticism is so simplistic and uninformed it smacks not so much of a world-wise rationalism as of deliberately obtuse orthodoxy. Global cooling was widely reported in magazines, newspapers, and at least one sensational book. Notably absent from that list are scientific publications, understandable since climatologists had nothing to do with it. In fact the idea that fossil fuel-based industrialization could cause global climate change is over a century old. Global warming isn't thought to be caused by CO2 alone, but with methane, nitrous oxide, and both CFCs and ozone as well. Oh, and it took me ten seconds with Google to find out how much Richard Lindzen has been paid by various interest groups (and I don't mean the Sierra Club.) As well as a quote of my own (from Ross Gelbspan, writing about Lindzen and others):
By keeping the discussion focused on whether there is a problem in the first place, they have effectively silenced the debate over what to do about it.
There's plenty of room for economic, legal, political, and emotional arguments about what we can or should do about human-caused climate change, including nothing at all. It'd be grand if, however, the scientific arguments at least could remain professionally apolitical. Sadly, it's too easy for a PR agency to parade proverbial actors in lab coats; salt the press with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt; and forestall any hope of progress.
Heh. Either I'm jaded or you're lucky.
Windows users never have to worry if their OS will be supported when it comes to hardware or software.
No, they never have to worry if their brand-new OS/hardware combination will be supported; it will, although it'll cost money and may or may not be helpful. Over the course of a couple years, it's a roll of the dice whether each new/old hardware/software will still/yet be supported for their platform.
The tales (and my experience) of devices, programs, and data too new or too old to work are legion. From what I've seen working with several generations (and flavors) of *nix, Windows, and Macs, Windows has extremely little reason to crow about support.
But not their principle, your misunderstanding of it. Libraries already carry materials that are considered pornographic or otherwise unsuitable for public. They tend to be kept behind the desk or in a similar location. If an adult wants them, they're checked out like any other item, but they aren't set out next to the children's section or anything.
BTW, I've never heard someone "scream" censorship. You may need to turn down your thinking aid.
I think you should reexamine that. Looking at platforms, proposals, policies and all that, the two parties in the U.S. have never been *closer* for as long as they've had these names at least. You wouldn't think it to hear them, or their pundits, or the news "analyists" talk. But of course the more similar they become in substance the more they must differentiate in image, just like any advertised product.
That's not to say they're identical, as long as there are only two parties to go to mainstream partisans and radical extremists will both pull their parties around. But both Perot and Nader demonstrate which end of their respective parties are leaking, and it's not the center.
Now you'll hear from a better source:
I have AD/HD. If I try to read a book I'm not into, whether I have to, want to, or both, I'll be lucky to get through a paragraph with my train of thought intact. Or sitting in the same place I was when I started. But if I read a book I'm into, I might take a break to eat something after six hours. If I try to do anything else, I'll be thinking about that.
It's not just reading, of course, but that tends to really emphasize the effect. ADD is poorly named, not an attention deficit but control disorder.
So your litmus test might be vaguely applicable, if you ask: what games did they play? How many? How frequently did they switch? How familiar were they? In each game, how did they play? How persistent were they with frustrating/boring parts? How do all these factors change from time to time over a period of months and years?
Of course, it's no longer a litmus test. But then, no accurate litmus test for AD/HD is known, not that people aren't looking. That "psychological" testing can be very accurate, but can be also not, breeds the sort of skepticism your story connotes, and that causes all sorts of problems for those of us that, believe it or not, really do have it.
That AD/HD is overdiagnosed should not detract from the fact that it is simultaneously underdiagnosed.
Disclaimer: I worked on lakes only similar to Vida and a few years ago, so my knowledge is a bit rusty.
The headline is wrong; this isn't a closed ecosystem. Sand and gravel from the surrounding valley, laced with microbes, nematodes, and even a species of insect is constantly blown onto the surface where it melts into the ice by solar heating in the summer. Some of that sediment makes its way into the lake itself. Under that much ice the sunlight is quite weak, but still capable of driving photosynthesis, albeit slowly. Every summer a small amout of fresh water from glacial melt fills the lake, replacing water that was lost by sublimation and wind erosion from the ice cap (the ice cap itself is replenished by new ice freezing on the bottom.) In addition most other lakes of its kind form a "moat" of meltwater around the shallow perimeter of the lake during summer; I don't recall if Vida does but it's likely.
Preservation is a significant concern among the people performing this type of research. Like many things in life it's a balance of how much to defer; too little and the lake could be seriously damaged, too much and we don't learn what we could. In general the sorts of techniques used don't contaminate things to a noticable level; sampling holes are shielded from excessive light, water samples once taken from the lake are never returned, that sort of thing.
The significance of this research on Martian or Europan life is not so much treating them as direct analogues as it is characterizing what strategies life might use under those conditions, to understand where and how we might look elsewhere. The dry valleys of Antarctica (home of lake Vida) were once warmer and wetter, just as Mars was. If there was life on Mars some of its last remnants likely survived in melt-fed, ice-capped hypersaline lakes. It's certainly imperfect knowledge, but whatever we can learn is helpful.
Boy, really? I missed out. For a couple hours on saturday I had the TV on and muted, flipping between news channels, waiting for the run itself (And doing other things, hence the mute.) CNN would periodically mention that the flight was upcoming, showing animations and stuff, whereas Fox didn't mention a thing. Unfortunately I had to leave before the action started.
So from what I know I don't think your characterization is completely fair. I'm guessing CNN was preparing for it and when it came time for the flight had something else going on they decided to cover instead, whereas Fox News didn't mention much about it before covering the flight itself.
As for comparing the networks' quality, I can see CNN falling behind Fox News when Fox switches to their upcoming split-screen format: all Iraq on the top, all celebrity trials on the bottom.
I've often wondered about that. I've seen the name Ng in text several times but have no clue how to pronounce it. Is it like "rang" without "ray"? Just the ng, or is there something in there that would be interpreted by American ears as an implied semivowel? Whenever I'm reading something and come across that surname my mental voice skips a bit -- unsure just what to think.
P.S. If I get +5 Informative for this, it's a sign of the coming apocalypse.
So, uh...
should I start stocking up on canned goods?
So many people have made that mistake of interpretation, and it's a shame. For that matter, it was said quite a bit about 2001 as well. Would it surprise you to learn the third act has as much Kubrick influence as the other two? It *does* have problems, IMHO, too much narration a large part of that. But it's unfortunate that the shift in style has led people to think of the ending as tacked-on, with Kubrick stopping and Spielberg picking up the pen to finish things off.
I hope with some investigation you can confirm this for yourself, and reexamine the third act's messages in light of Kubrick's similar statements in A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket.
I'm not sure anger, politics, and violence are as common to religions as you think. Your perceptions, like mine for that matter, are probably colored by living in a place dominated by Christianity's history, or possibly Islam. Many other religions are much more amenable to reinterpretation, recombination, &c. Even disparaged "organized religion"s can be somewhat supportive of the process, cf east Asia's treatment of Taoism and Buddhism. In addition, while some variants of Christianity are more strict about apostasy, they make such a deal about it precisely because so many individual adherents are fond of customizing their beliefs.
In short, I think viewing a religion as the One True Path is not universally common, but a localized phenomenon that has unusual influence precisely because of its exclusivity.
Shouldn't you have been bitching when minivans became the family wagon?
Just because I'm ranting about some externalities doesn't mean I ignore others. But minivans are less damaging to the public and more broadly justifiable than SUVs, hence, less of an issue.
To me, a 4-cylinder SUV (Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV) is a more fuel-efficient alternative to a 6-cylinder minivan.
To you those vehicles may be an alternative, but with less towing capability, cargo capacity, passenger capacity, maneuverability, safety or reliability they are to the majority of drivers apples and oranges.
You're missing the point that, although other people have the right to live their own lives, they don't have the right to live mine. An SUV on the road does disproportionate harm to the air we *all* share, and gives its driver better road visibility at the expensive of that of everyone around them. If they have good reasons to use an SUV that offset those public harms, then we might as well live with it. But as long as those private SUVs are driven on public roads and harm other people, well, we have the right to worry about our own lives by telling other people what they should be doing (to us).
About the same time existing jets and travel radii do, I'd imagine. That is to say, now.
In addition it bears mentioning that a more effective military should itself benefit freedom and peace. If you have a problem with how the military is used (something I can sympathize with), deal with it on that level. If you have a problem with killing people in general, you're too good for this world, unfortunately.
There are errors in your post:
(1) It's not highly debated among scientists. It's hotly debated amoung ideologues. Those who know climatology are pretty clear on what is and is not understood, and the implications thereof.
(2) On if we make lots of legislation, but on assumptions that prove to be wrong, we're wasting our time: I'd better go cancel my health insurance policy then. Something horribly terrible, with a low probability of occurring, can still be worth avoiding even if it turns out not to happen.
Well, in this case the sin of omission is that although energy use and standard of living *do* correlate for the many countries of the world, it's a loose correlation. In particular, the economic efficiency (measured in units like GDP per BTU consumed) can vary tremendously. In fact, high levels of energy consumption but low efficiency is a characteristic of developing countries like Kuwait, Argentina, India, or (tellingly) the USA. Increased efficiency producing higher GDPs from lower energy consumption characterizes mature industrial economies like the UK, Germany, and Japan.
Your cutting sarcasm is on target for those small number of actual enviromentalists who have drunk the Kool-Aid, and the large number of fictitious ones living in their opponent's imaginations. Not to say there isn't a bit of ideology in the cause, but then Linux zealotry doesn't change the technical merit of the OS.
Efficiency is one such reason. Robot probes are cheaper in magnitude, but especially for Mars where communication lag is such a problem, having muscles and brains on-site can be tremendously helpful. Spirit and Opportunity are being used very cautiously, taking days to stand up, cut umbilicals, drive off, park for days during a debugging session hampered by narrow communication windows and store-and-forward data transfer. In constrast, astronauts on the Lunar landers were out the door and setting up instruments, taking samples, et cetera comparatively right away. In the end, although it costs more in dollars and risk to put people up there, they can get more and better data faster and more reliably.
Just in case some unsuspecting reader is inclined to accept WorldNetDaily's credibility, it should be pointed out Mr. McCleary's thesis examines the relationship between male homosexuality and spirituality, a topic that hadn't been much examined from a scholarly perspective at the time he wrote it. It makes no claim about the sexuality of Jesus, nor does it cite astrology to that end. The money he was paid was a standard Ph.D. scholarship at that university.
And since feeling justifiable outrage has been found to activate one's pleasure center, I wonder if such articles should be filed under "conservative masturbation material".
No, there are two standard-issue jackets for people going to Antarctica on U.S., Australian, New Zealand, and several other government projects: Carhart or this kind. You get your choice, although by default scientists get the red parkas and support crews get the Carharts. Neither option is really the best for people who need to be out in harsh weather, like the search and rescue teams, who typically bring custom gear.