What, you mean like balancing the budget? Keeping the GST at the quite sensible level that that outrageous liberal Brian Mulroney set it at? Or retaining the brutal simplicity of Mulroney's tax policies?
The Cretien Liberals and the Mulroney PCs were not that far apart on many policies, and the Liberals gave us balanced budgets for over a decade by maintaining the key reforms that the Mulroney government introduced: income tax reform, free trade, and the GST.
The current lot of fiscally irresponsible Big Government Conservatives aren't either "Liberal" or "Conservative" in anything like their traditional Canadian forms.
This is a curious belief. I presume you've not been around embedded technology enough to have ever heard the term "unbrick", which is what people who actually understand the term "brick" used to describe the process of recovering from a bricked state.
According to your incorrect belief such a term could not possibly exist. And yet it does. So either the world is full of embedded engineers who don't know what they are talking about, or you are simply announcing to the world your own ignorance. Which is kind of useful: everyone here claiming that the Tesla is not "really" bricked by being left uncharged for a few months--as might easily happen to a vehicle in storage, being shipped somewhere, or simply parked near an airport during an extended vacation--is identifying themselves as having nothing useful or interesting to contribute to the conversation.
Likewise, people claiming that "this can't happen because power management" are declaring their ignorance of electrochemistry, which goes on regardless of external circuitry. Electrochemical cells that are not being actively charged can and do continue to discharge all by themselves regardless of anything any external circuit does. Some types of cell can and do get themselves into an unchargable state after sufficiently deep and prolonged discharge, regardless whether the discharge is passive or active.
So this "refutation" of the claims against Tesla is nothing but hand-waving anti-scientific bullshit: it is saying, "What has actually happened cannot possibly have happened according to my understanding, and my understanding cannot be wrong so the facts must be wrong." This is no different from the people who claimed that Galileo couldn't have seen the moons of Jupiter because just as there were seven seas and seven openings in the human skull so there could be only seven wandering stars.
There is a lot of this kind of anti-scientific reasoning about. I recently saw a claim that the Heartland Institute's campaign against second hand smoke laws was based on the "reasoning" that second hand smoke wouldn't be breathed deeply into the lungs and so couldn't cause lung cancer, regardless of the actual empirical data that shows second hand smoke causes lung cancer. This is not "reasoning" in any Bayesian sense: it is gibberish masquerading as thought.
The same kind of gibberish seems to be all that defenders of Tesla can come up with here. If anyone really believes they can't brick their Tesla by fulling discharging the battery they should drive it to the point of full discharge and let it sit for a while. That would give us new facts to account for, and actually contribute to the resolution of this question.
Divorces can be ugly. I've seen friends destroy each others sanity and inflict long-term damage on their souls in order to "win" and "be right"
Behaving honourably is being right. I tell my kids, "Make sure you marry someone you think you could live through a divorce with." I married a good and decent woman, and it didn't work out (these things happen) and we've been happily divorced now for almost as long as we were married. Our kids have had two loving and happy homes instead of one unhappy one.
Even if you never want to see your ex again, remember it was your mistake in marrying them in the first place, and accept the consequences of that. It can take more love to get through a divorce unscathed (or at least less scathed) than through a marriage.
So yeah, focus on "winning" and "being right": behaving with honour, generosity and what love you can muster up. My lawyer hated me for being so non-combative, but that gave my ex nothing to fight over even if she had been so inclined.
Yeah, I got no disagreement on how dirty the Mediterranean is or on the human impact on littoral ecosystems.
My point is that there's a huge amount of FUD around AGW/ACC that's really irrelevant to the questions a) Is dumping megatonnes of toxic shit into the air and water a good idea? and b) Is being dependent on fuels with an open carbon cycle a good idea?
It seems to me the answer to both those questions is transparently: NO, but both sides of the purely political debate around AGW seem to buy into the premise that if AGW isn't happening then it's somehow OK to keep on poisoning our world in other ways and to keep on subsidizing a family of fuels that are going to get very expensive in the present century (the hockey-stick I worry about is the price curve of fossil fuels, which is being held low by various policies that will eventually run out of steam and result in a step-function price change.)
Hmm.. So you favour killing a human for no fault of theirs (abortion) but oppose killing as just punishment for an unjustified murder (say the murderer of a child... or a baby)?
Absolutely.
You aren't actually making any argument, which is a little weird, so I'm going to have to guess what your premises would be if you were making an argument.
My first guess is that you believe it's only OK to kill a human if you feel good about it. By "feel good about it" I mean whatever it is when people say that someone "deserves" to die. As near as I can tell the entire meaning of "deserves to die" is "I would feel morally satisfied if this person died". Since moral satisfaction is a good feeling, this amounts to believing it is OK to kill a person if and only if you feel good about it.
I make this guess because you seem to think that "fault" is somehow the sole arbiter of moral killing, and I've noticed that people with primitive, punishment-based social responses tend to regulate their behaviour according to the "fault" they perceive in others, so they feel good about hurting or killing someone who is "at fault" and badly about killing or hurting someone who is not "at fault".
This emotional, unreasoning, non-rational, hormone-driven moral calculus is responsible for a vast amount of evil in the world, from war to hitting your kids, and I am imputing it to you, so please feel free to clarify if I am incorrect in this regard.
Since I reject that emotional, unreasoning, non-rational, hormone-driven moral calculus, I am open to reasons for killing people (or not) that have nothing to do with "fault", and am free to adopt a position that is simply orthogonal to your emotional, hormone-driven categorizations regarding whose death would make you feel good (who "deserves" to die.)
All human societies have some means of killing unwanted children, and I am in favour of giving pregnant women the choice of avoiding bringing unwanted children into the world only to be destroyed in other ways, either through lack of love (they are, after all, unwanted) or more mundane material wants. You are apparently in favour of such unwanted children being born, which seems to me a hideous, anti-human belief, a desire to maximize human misery and pain. Giving mothers the choice to kill their children in the early stages of pregnancy minimizes the human cost of our poor choices, and that's what any humane, rational moralist should be seeking with regard to this question, I think.
Since the child's mother has both the most information about the child's life and prospects and the greatest interest in the child's well-being she should make the decision in this matter, and I think anyone who believes they know more about the reality of the mother and child's situation or claims they are more interested in the child's welfare than its mother is a dangerous moral degenerate.
Since you appear to be not very intelligent I'll mention some obvious consequences of these beliefs: since giving mothers the choice to kill their children late in pregnancy or after they are born would not minimize the human cost of our poor choices there is no slippery slope here. Nor is the precise moment of minimization particularly at issue: any time before 12 weeks is certainly OK, and arguably up to 24 weeks. There is simply no interesting "where do you draw the line" question.
With regard to killing people who have been convicted of some crimes, this is known to increase human misery relative to lifetime incarceration, so I am against it. The wrong people get killed, and all possibility of redemption and rehabilitation is lost even in the cases when the person killed actually committed the act they were accused of.
Likewise, mass organized killing ("war", which I assume you oppose absolutely since most of the people killed are not at fault in any way) is something I oppose because it is the least efficient, least effective means of solving any human problem. It creates vast misery for less than zero gain in the general case. There are always more efficient, more effective, more humane alternatives, so I favour them and oppose war.
Life is autonomous self-reproduction with variations.
And I'm going to argue for an even longer one: "Life is self-reproduction with imperfectly inheritable variations."
The differences may be due to what we take as implied by the short definition. To my mind "autonomous" is redundant with "self-", whereas other people make take "imperfectly inheritable" as folded in with the meaning of "variations".
In physics we often define things in terms of the laws they are described by, so "anything described by this differential equation is an X" is the sort of thing you sometimes hear. Biologists, due to historical accident, do not typically talk in law-like terms, but if they did Darwin's Law (or Darwin's Theorem) would be at the core: "An entity that creates imperfect copies of itself will given sufficient time fill the configuration space made available by resource constraints and the laws of chemistry and physics."
Then: "Life is any entity described by Darwin's Theorem."
This approach has a number of interesting consequences. Since Darwin's Theorem really is a theorem (proof is left as an exercise for the interested student) then the whole non-Darwinian corpus is swept away. All arguments about evolution vs anything else come down to a simple combination of mathematics and the physical properties of DNA, which observably makes imperfect copies of itself. Once you grant that and the laws of probability you are committed to evolution happening, and any claim that divine intervention is also involved become extraneous, which doesn't prove them wrong but does make them look even sillier than they are today.
The first law of logic is that you must know what you're talking about.
I've got mod points and am incredibly temped to mod this "Funny" because it is. But I'll make fun of you instead.
No logician anywhere has ever posited such a "first law" nor would they, simply because one can't know what one is talking about until one has talked about it. That is, your "first law of logic" entails a rejection of a discourse of imperfect meaning or knowledge, and since those are the only kinds of discourse we can have, you are engaging in discourse to denounce the possibility of discourse.
Like I said: funny.
Of course, no one talks about "logic" any more. We are all Bayesians now (at least anyone who cares about consistency is) and recognize that only Bayesian reasoning is worth considering.
Methinks slashdot and the economist has been duped by this "first time accepted submitter" elloGov
Who cleverly used the well-known ruse of creating a story that relates a biological system to an engineering system, which for some reason despite being one of the most common patterns of engineering inspiration for centuries gets reported as if it was new and interesting every few months on/. and in the rest of the technology press.
It's like seeing stories that say, "The average spreadsheet user tabulates data, so Microsoft was inspired to come up with an improvement to Excel that made it easier to tabulate data by looking at what people who use their software actually do."
Who wouldn't expect software developers to get inspiration from user behaviours? Who wouldn't expect mechanical engineers to get inspiration from nature? I don't know what the answer to the former question is, but the answer to the latter is certainly "Only people who have being paying no attention whatsoever to what engineers have been doing for the last several hundred years." Why there are so many people like that reading technology news today is unclear.
Interesting to see in the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" link from the summary...
As a matter of interest do you find what the Republicans say about the Democrats or vice versa interesting too? If so, why?
I don't get why a political organization like BAS that has no interest in anything except their own monotonic political agenda is interesting to anyone. They have no facts and no arguments, only conclusions that they they then try to justify by various manipulations. This is epistemically vacuous at best. It's like listening to Greenpeace on the environment or the Pope on the existence of god: nothing they say can possibly be interesting to anyone rational, because they make absolutely no attempt to ever do anything except promote particular conclusions (Greenpeace for example must be amazingly insightful because every bit of research they do just happens to support exactly the political policies they advocate for unrelated reasons.)
The only truly questionable event was delaying the decommissioning of the plant
If you include the seriously wrong decision to over-load the cooling pools and spent fuel storage on site then I agree, but consider that to be a separate issue from decommissioning the plant, and it isn't a "questionable" decision, it is a flat-out incorrect one.
I can well imagine how such a decision could be made by increments: the storage facilities could be outside the containment because they couldn't ever go critical due to limits on what could be stored in them, then those limits were incrementally relaxed after the fact until there was a real risk of re-criticality.
Since the distinction where one organism ends and the next begins is a made up human one, you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it all out.
So exactly the same as every other distinction, then?
All edges are imposed on the world by human attention, and nothing else. Consider the distinction between "land" and "water". In some contexts we simply treat the edge between them as ideal. In other contexts we introduce other concepts: beach, littoral, intertidal zone, and so on. But when you get close to it you notice that the edge is both constantly fluctuating and "soft": the "land" is always a bit wet. Where land ends and water begins is a made up human distinction. This is generally true, with the exception of quantum phenomena where there are genuinely forbidden "gaps" between states (which is one of the things that makes quantum phenomena weird: we are not free to make up distinctions in a way that is most useful to us in a given context.)
"In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland icepack warmed by around 8 C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[2] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 C change over 30-40 years is more common."
Please stop spreading nonsense. There are plenty of legitimate concerns regarding human impacts on the environment (and AGW is amongst them, although much over-rated in my view.) But false and hysterical claims do no one any favours. What humans are doing to the current environment doesn't have to be the Worst Thing Ever to be really quite bad enough to do something about it by changing your own lifestyle to be more sustainable.
it is, in fact, the rate of change in environmental conditions, not merely that it's occurring.
Which would be weird, given the rate of current change is rather modest compared to the Dansgaard–Oeschger events and other natural climate fluxuations over the past 200K years, particularly in the Mediterranean basin.
Don't get me wrong: I'm (mildly) skeptical about AGW (I'm a computational physicist and a great deal of climate modelling is done by climatologists who are decidedly not computational physicists) but this running about in panic in response to the issue du jour is just sad. Not everything is caused by or related to the global climate change, and it really does cheapen the debate and coarsen the public's response to events when Every Single Thing is immediately related to (and blamed on) climate change.
I'd think it far more likely that any trouble this species is in is due to the profound ecological changes in the Mediterranean in the past century due to pollution and over-harvesting of fish and whatnot, but where's the sexy big-issue "society is to blame" in that?
Interesting. The Windup Girl doesn't quite work (for me) as a narrative, but I will agree the ideas presented were quite thought provoking
And yet none of the proponents of the book in this thread have been able to articulate a single "interesting idea". The location is tired: a near-future dystopian novel in the Far East! I wonder if it opens with a description of the sky like a television tuned to an empty channel?
The technology is inconsistent: as another poster pointed out, a society with the biological chops to engineer human hybrids wouldn't be worried about power. They'd have engineered algae and god knows what else.
The characters are unformed, inconsistent and nasty, and apparently a central feature of the action is a particularly unpleasant sexual assault.
So near as I can tell from reading the comments here this is a typical piece of overhyped shock-fiction that has succeeded on the basis of heavy marketing and naive readers who have somehow managed not to encounter any of these "interesting ideas" a dozen or so times previously in the novels of the past hundred years.
If you want a car analogy, it's like claiming your car is made from glass (since it has glass in the windows)
Sure, but this kind of bullshit is routine in what passes for the "science and technology" press.
We have "quantum teleportation" in which nothing more ontologically robust than the quantum state is "teleported".
We have "downloading 3D objects" in which nothing but a perfectly ordinary binary file is downloaded.
We have "controlling a with just your mind" in which "your mind" apparently includes a few hundred thousand dollars worth of extremely complex gear.
And so on.
Apparently "science" journalists are too stupid to realize how stupid this kind of thing makes them look. Unfortunately most of their audience seems not to care, but would rather repeat cool-sounding but meaningless words than learn anything about actual science and technology.
Reason being that those were formed by lava flows on the surface, and you can imagine that if there's molten rock inside, it would be pulled (as expected) towards a big nearby gravity well - Earth in this case.
The difference in surface character on the two faces of the Moon are still a matter of considerable debate, and this particular just-so story--like so much that "just makes sense"--is completely false. References can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_mare
There was recent work published suggesting the difference in hemispheres could be due to a late, large, low-velocity impact event that happened shortly after the lunar formation impact on Earth.
The biggest single lesson from the past 300 years of scientific discovery is that if something "just makes sense" to brains whose evolution has been driven primarily by the social processes of mate competition and mate selection then it is probably wrong. An educated person when presented with an explanation that has intuitive appeal will treat it with well-deserved suspicion until they have seen it publicly tested by systematic observation or controlled experiment (that is, scientifically validated) and not glibly repeat it as if it were knowledge rather than speculation.
I don't like Romney at all, but I'm still profoundly unsettled by this desperate meta-campaign to convince people he can't win. Are news outlets delusional? Are they trying to shape public policy by falsely prophesying some inevitable result? It just plain creeps me out.
I think its a matter of selling eyeballs to advertisers. No one is going to read or comment on a story that is true, which would appear under a headline: "Romney's Campaign Prepared to Spend Its Way to Victory".
Money is the big determiner of primary outcomes, and Romney has the most by a long shot. Ergo, he's going to win. But pundits don't get paid to point out obvious facts. They get paid to stir up controversy, especially where no reasonable level of uncertainty exists. Ergo, all this bullshit in a "race" whose outcome is 96% certain.
Their tax policies are the same? Obama's on record proposing to increase them, and Romney proposes to cut them. Does this not matter?
Not in the least, and it's a very sad commentary on the state of American politics that anyone thinks it does. We've known since at least the '80's that the complexity of the tax code matters far more than the rate, and yet Americans continue to be distracted by relatively unimportant arguments about rates while the elephant of complexity continues to rumble around the room smashing everything in sight, destroying jobs and crushing small businesses.
The deposition that Clinton lied about having sex with Monica Lewinski
He did not lie under oath about having sex with Monica Lewinski. Under the definitions he was given she had sex with him but he did not have sex with her because the brief defined "having sex" as "contact between genitals" or "contact between YOUR mouth and your partner's genitals", and getting your dick sucked does not count as "having sex" under that definition.
I've used this example on occasion to help people understand non-commutative algebras, and think there really ought to be one for sex, with the "!" or "bang" as the operator, of course. So B!M =/= M!B. There are some open questions regarding transitivity that can only be answered by a series of carefully controlled threesomes...
If Romney can manage to be a huge asshole for the next 46 states, he should have no problem taking the nomination.
You've got +5 funny but for the wrong reason.
It's funny that anyone thinks anything other than the ability to outspend matters. All this talk about character and personality and policies is irrelevant. 96% of the time the candidate with the most money wins. Romney has raised more money for this primary race than the next two or three contenders combined. He's going to win, and talking about the race in any terms other than money is doing helping perpetuate the myth that anything other than money matters.
By the same token, as things stand today Obama is going to win a second term because he's raised a lot more money than any of the Republican contenders, although that may change once the primary is over.
But it costs money (no idea how much) to train that sniper, and if they are injured you've lost their value.
Neither snipers nor any other killers have any value, at least in the strict economic sense. Economically, killers and the machines they use to kill are called "dead weight loss": potentially valuable resources that are taken out of the productive economy and in the very best case are never used. In the worst case, they kill people and destroy things, sometimes being killed themselves in the process, none of which ever creates any economic value.
So if by "value" you mean anything to do with economics, you're wrong: the moment you've taken a person out of the productive economy you've lost all their value, and they have become a negative value in most cases.
Wasting productive resources on more effective ways to kill is a waste. And after the number of people who have been killed in the past hundred years anyone who believes that if we only had better ways to kill we'd have fewer problems has to be in the grip of some profound delusion.
You get far more additional radiation from flying in the airplane than you do from the scanner.
What is the skin dose from the "additional radiation" you get from flying on a plane and how does it compared to the skin dose from the scanners?
There has been just one study done on these scanners and it had a completely inappropriate experimental design to measure the actual risk. It was a bulk dosimetry study that to first order took the skin dose (which is what these machines actually produce) and divided it by the whole body mass, producing a number that was completely meaningless (but very, very low).
My critique of that study from the point of view of a radiation transport physicist can be found here: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=114
The U.S. and its attendant NGOs would be screaming from the rooftops about "child soldiers"...
Yes it would, which is pretty ironic given the US has been illegally holding Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr beyond the rule of law or access to your courts in Guantanamo Bay for almost a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
i.e. acting more like liberals
What, you mean like balancing the budget? Keeping the GST at the quite sensible level that that outrageous liberal Brian Mulroney set it at? Or retaining the brutal simplicity of Mulroney's tax policies?
The Cretien Liberals and the Mulroney PCs were not that far apart on many policies, and the Liberals gave us balanced budgets for over a decade by maintaining the key reforms that the Mulroney government introduced: income tax reform, free trade, and the GST.
The current lot of fiscally irresponsible Big Government Conservatives aren't either "Liberal" or "Conservative" in anything like their traditional Canadian forms.
Remember: Bricked = Failed and unrepairable.
This is a curious belief. I presume you've not been around embedded technology enough to have ever heard the term "unbrick", which is what people who actually understand the term "brick" used to describe the process of recovering from a bricked state.
According to your incorrect belief such a term could not possibly exist. And yet it does. So either the world is full of embedded engineers who don't know what they are talking about, or you are simply announcing to the world your own ignorance. Which is kind of useful: everyone here claiming that the Tesla is not "really" bricked by being left uncharged for a few months--as might easily happen to a vehicle in storage, being shipped somewhere, or simply parked near an airport during an extended vacation--is identifying themselves as having nothing useful or interesting to contribute to the conversation.
Likewise, people claiming that "this can't happen because power management" are declaring their ignorance of electrochemistry, which goes on regardless of external circuitry. Electrochemical cells that are not being actively charged can and do continue to discharge all by themselves regardless of anything any external circuit does. Some types of cell can and do get themselves into an unchargable state after sufficiently deep and prolonged discharge, regardless whether the discharge is passive or active.
So this "refutation" of the claims against Tesla is nothing but hand-waving anti-scientific bullshit: it is saying, "What has actually happened cannot possibly have happened according to my understanding, and my understanding cannot be wrong so the facts must be wrong." This is no different from the people who claimed that Galileo couldn't have seen the moons of Jupiter because just as there were seven seas and seven openings in the human skull so there could be only seven wandering stars.
There is a lot of this kind of anti-scientific reasoning about. I recently saw a claim that the Heartland Institute's campaign against second hand smoke laws was based on the "reasoning" that second hand smoke wouldn't be breathed deeply into the lungs and so couldn't cause lung cancer, regardless of the actual empirical data that shows second hand smoke causes lung cancer. This is not "reasoning" in any Bayesian sense: it is gibberish masquerading as thought.
The same kind of gibberish seems to be all that defenders of Tesla can come up with here. If anyone really believes they can't brick their Tesla by fulling discharging the battery they should drive it to the point of full discharge and let it sit for a while. That would give us new facts to account for, and actually contribute to the resolution of this question.
Divorces can be ugly. I've seen friends destroy each others sanity and inflict long-term damage on their souls in order to "win" and "be right"
Behaving honourably is being right. I tell my kids, "Make sure you marry someone you think you could live through a divorce with." I married a good and decent woman, and it didn't work out (these things happen) and we've been happily divorced now for almost as long as we were married. Our kids have had two loving and happy homes instead of one unhappy one.
Even if you never want to see your ex again, remember it was your mistake in marrying them in the first place, and accept the consequences of that. It can take more love to get through a divorce unscathed (or at least less scathed) than through a marriage.
So yeah, focus on "winning" and "being right": behaving with honour, generosity and what love you can muster up. My lawyer hated me for being so non-combative, but that gave my ex nothing to fight over even if she had been so inclined.
Yeah, I got no disagreement on how dirty the Mediterranean is or on the human impact on littoral ecosystems.
My point is that there's a huge amount of FUD around AGW/ACC that's really irrelevant to the questions a) Is dumping megatonnes of toxic shit into the air and water a good idea? and b) Is being dependent on fuels with an open carbon cycle a good idea?
It seems to me the answer to both those questions is transparently: NO, but both sides of the purely political debate around AGW seem to buy into the premise that if AGW isn't happening then it's somehow OK to keep on poisoning our world in other ways and to keep on subsidizing a family of fuels that are going to get very expensive in the present century (the hockey-stick I worry about is the price curve of fossil fuels, which is being held low by various policies that will eventually run out of steam and result in a step-function price change.)
Hmm.. So you favour killing a human for no fault of theirs (abortion) but oppose killing as just punishment for an unjustified murder (say the murderer of a child... or a baby)?
Absolutely.
You aren't actually making any argument, which is a little weird, so I'm going to have to guess what your premises would be if you were making an argument.
My first guess is that you believe it's only OK to kill a human if you feel good about it. By "feel good about it" I mean whatever it is when people say that someone "deserves" to die. As near as I can tell the entire meaning of "deserves to die" is "I would feel morally satisfied if this person died". Since moral satisfaction is a good feeling, this amounts to believing it is OK to kill a person if and only if you feel good about it.
I make this guess because you seem to think that "fault" is somehow the sole arbiter of moral killing, and I've noticed that people with primitive, punishment-based social responses tend to regulate their behaviour according to the "fault" they perceive in others, so they feel good about hurting or killing someone who is "at fault" and badly about killing or hurting someone who is not "at fault".
This emotional, unreasoning, non-rational, hormone-driven moral calculus is responsible for a vast amount of evil in the world, from war to hitting your kids, and I am imputing it to you, so please feel free to clarify if I am incorrect in this regard.
Since I reject that emotional, unreasoning, non-rational, hormone-driven moral calculus, I am open to reasons for killing people (or not) that have nothing to do with "fault", and am free to adopt a position that is simply orthogonal to your emotional, hormone-driven categorizations regarding whose death would make you feel good (who "deserves" to die.)
All human societies have some means of killing unwanted children, and I am in favour of giving pregnant women the choice of avoiding bringing unwanted children into the world only to be destroyed in other ways, either through lack of love (they are, after all, unwanted) or more mundane material wants. You are apparently in favour of such unwanted children being born, which seems to me a hideous, anti-human belief, a desire to maximize human misery and pain. Giving mothers the choice to kill their children in the early stages of pregnancy minimizes the human cost of our poor choices, and that's what any humane, rational moralist should be seeking with regard to this question, I think.
Since the child's mother has both the most information about the child's life and prospects and the greatest interest in the child's well-being she should make the decision in this matter, and I think anyone who believes they know more about the reality of the mother and child's situation or claims they are more interested in the child's welfare than its mother is a dangerous moral degenerate.
Since you appear to be not very intelligent I'll mention some obvious consequences of these beliefs: since giving mothers the choice to kill their children late in pregnancy or after they are born would not minimize the human cost of our poor choices there is no slippery slope here. Nor is the precise moment of minimization particularly at issue: any time before 12 weeks is certainly OK, and arguably up to 24 weeks. There is simply no interesting "where do you draw the line" question.
With regard to killing people who have been convicted of some crimes, this is known to increase human misery relative to lifetime incarceration, so I am against it. The wrong people get killed, and all possibility of redemption and rehabilitation is lost even in the cases when the person killed actually committed the act they were accused of.
Likewise, mass organized killing ("war", which I assume you oppose absolutely since most of the people killed are not at fault in any way) is something I oppose because it is the least efficient, least effective means of solving any human problem. It creates vast misery for less than zero gain in the general case. There are always more efficient, more effective, more humane alternatives, so I favour them and oppose war.
Life is autonomous self-reproduction with variations.
And I'm going to argue for an even longer one: "Life is self-reproduction with imperfectly inheritable variations."
The differences may be due to what we take as implied by the short definition. To my mind "autonomous" is redundant with "self-", whereas other people make take "imperfectly inheritable" as folded in with the meaning of "variations".
In physics we often define things in terms of the laws they are described by, so "anything described by this differential equation is an X" is the sort of thing you sometimes hear. Biologists, due to historical accident, do not typically talk in law-like terms, but if they did Darwin's Law (or Darwin's Theorem) would be at the core: "An entity that creates imperfect copies of itself will given sufficient time fill the configuration space made available by resource constraints and the laws of chemistry and physics."
Then: "Life is any entity described by Darwin's Theorem."
This approach has a number of interesting consequences. Since Darwin's Theorem really is a theorem (proof is left as an exercise for the interested student) then the whole non-Darwinian corpus is swept away. All arguments about evolution vs anything else come down to a simple combination of mathematics and the physical properties of DNA, which observably makes imperfect copies of itself. Once you grant that and the laws of probability you are committed to evolution happening, and any claim that divine intervention is also involved become extraneous, which doesn't prove them wrong but does make them look even sillier than they are today.
The first law of logic is that you must know what you're talking about.
I've got mod points and am incredibly temped to mod this "Funny" because it is. But I'll make fun of you instead.
No logician anywhere has ever posited such a "first law" nor would they, simply because one can't know what one is talking about until one has talked about it. That is, your "first law of logic" entails a rejection of a discourse of imperfect meaning or knowledge, and since those are the only kinds of discourse we can have, you are engaging in discourse to denounce the possibility of discourse.
Like I said: funny.
Of course, no one talks about "logic" any more. We are all Bayesians now (at least anyone who cares about consistency is) and recognize that only Bayesian reasoning is worth considering.
Methinks slashdot and the economist has been duped by this "first time accepted submitter" elloGov
Who cleverly used the well-known ruse of creating a story that relates a biological system to an engineering system, which for some reason despite being one of the most common patterns of engineering inspiration for centuries gets reported as if it was new and interesting every few months on /. and in the rest of the technology press.
It's like seeing stories that say, "The average spreadsheet user tabulates data, so Microsoft was inspired to come up with an improvement to Excel that made it easier to tabulate data by looking at what people who use their software actually do."
Who wouldn't expect software developers to get inspiration from user behaviours? Who wouldn't expect mechanical engineers to get inspiration from nature? I don't know what the answer to the former question is, but the answer to the latter is certainly "Only people who have being paying no attention whatsoever to what engineers have been doing for the last several hundred years." Why there are so many people like that reading technology news today is unclear.
Interesting to see in the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" link from the summary...
As a matter of interest do you find what the Republicans say about the Democrats or vice versa interesting too? If so, why?
I don't get why a political organization like BAS that has no interest in anything except their own monotonic political agenda is interesting to anyone. They have no facts and no arguments, only conclusions that they they then try to justify by various manipulations. This is epistemically vacuous at best. It's like listening to Greenpeace on the environment or the Pope on the existence of god: nothing they say can possibly be interesting to anyone rational, because they make absolutely no attempt to ever do anything except promote particular conclusions (Greenpeace for example must be amazingly insightful because every bit of research they do just happens to support exactly the political policies they advocate for unrelated reasons.)
The only truly questionable event was delaying the decommissioning of the plant
If you include the seriously wrong decision to over-load the cooling pools and spent fuel storage on site then I agree, but consider that to be a separate issue from decommissioning the plant, and it isn't a "questionable" decision, it is a flat-out incorrect one.
I can well imagine how such a decision could be made by increments: the storage facilities could be outside the containment because they couldn't ever go critical due to limits on what could be stored in them, then those limits were incrementally relaxed after the fact until there was a real risk of re-criticality.
But that doesn't mean it wasn't a bad decision.
Since the distinction where one organism ends and the next begins is a made up human one, you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it all out.
So exactly the same as every other distinction, then?
All edges are imposed on the world by human attention, and nothing else. Consider the distinction between "land" and "water". In some contexts we simply treat the edge between them as ideal. In other contexts we introduce other concepts: beach, littoral, intertidal zone, and so on. But when you get close to it you notice that the edge is both constantly fluctuating and "soft": the "land" is always a bit wet. Where land ends and water begins is a made up human distinction. This is generally true, with the exception of quantum phenomena where there are genuinely forbidden "gaps" between states (which is one of the things that makes quantum phenomena weird: we are not free to make up distinctions in a way that is most useful to us in a given context.)
Yes, but previous changes took centuries and millenia, not decades
Really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
"In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland icepack warmed by around 8 C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[2] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 C change over 30-40 years is more common."
Please stop spreading nonsense. There are plenty of legitimate concerns regarding human impacts on the environment (and AGW is amongst them, although much over-rated in my view.) But false and hysterical claims do no one any favours. What humans are doing to the current environment doesn't have to be the Worst Thing Ever to be really quite bad enough to do something about it by changing your own lifestyle to be more sustainable.
it is, in fact, the rate of change in environmental conditions, not merely that it's occurring.
Which would be weird, given the rate of current change is rather modest compared to the Dansgaard–Oeschger events and other natural climate fluxuations over the past 200K years, particularly in the Mediterranean basin.
Don't get me wrong: I'm (mildly) skeptical about AGW (I'm a computational physicist and a great deal of climate modelling is done by climatologists who are decidedly not computational physicists) but this running about in panic in response to the issue du jour is just sad. Not everything is caused by or related to the global climate change, and it really does cheapen the debate and coarsen the public's response to events when Every Single Thing is immediately related to (and blamed on) climate change.
I'd think it far more likely that any trouble this species is in is due to the profound ecological changes in the Mediterranean in the past century due to pollution and over-harvesting of fish and whatnot, but where's the sexy big-issue "society is to blame" in that?
Interesting. The Windup Girl doesn't quite work (for me) as a narrative, but I will agree the ideas presented were quite thought provoking
And yet none of the proponents of the book in this thread have been able to articulate a single "interesting idea". The location is tired: a near-future dystopian novel in the Far East! I wonder if it opens with a description of the sky like a television tuned to an empty channel?
The technology is inconsistent: as another poster pointed out, a society with the biological chops to engineer human hybrids wouldn't be worried about power. They'd have engineered algae and god knows what else.
The characters are unformed, inconsistent and nasty, and apparently a central feature of the action is a particularly unpleasant sexual assault.
So near as I can tell from reading the comments here this is a typical piece of overhyped shock-fiction that has succeeded on the basis of heavy marketing and naive readers who have somehow managed not to encounter any of these "interesting ideas" a dozen or so times previously in the novels of the past hundred years.
If you want a car analogy, it's like claiming your car is made from glass (since it has glass in the windows)
Sure, but this kind of bullshit is routine in what passes for the "science and technology" press.
We have "quantum teleportation" in which nothing more ontologically robust than the quantum state is "teleported".
We have "downloading 3D objects" in which nothing but a perfectly ordinary binary file is downloaded.
We have "controlling a with just your mind" in which "your mind" apparently includes a few hundred thousand dollars worth of extremely complex gear.
And so on.
Apparently "science" journalists are too stupid to realize how stupid this kind of thing makes them look. Unfortunately most of their audience seems not to care, but would rather repeat cool-sounding but meaningless words than learn anything about actual science and technology.
WRONG!!! Try 9% under regular sunlight, and ~15% under LED lighting.
The GP is correct for the typical case of real plants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
The typical case is pretty low efficiency, the best case (sugarcane) is lower than your 9% number.
Oh, and did I neglect to mention your .sig is obnoxious? I'm guessing you're an undergrad with a bottle-washing role.
Reason being that those were formed by lava flows on the surface, and you can imagine that if there's molten rock inside, it would be pulled (as expected) towards a big nearby gravity well - Earth in this case.
The difference in surface character on the two faces of the Moon are still a matter of considerable debate, and this particular just-so story--like so much that "just makes sense"--is completely false. References can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_mare
There was recent work published suggesting the difference in hemispheres could be due to a late, large, low-velocity impact event that happened shortly after the lunar formation impact on Earth.
The biggest single lesson from the past 300 years of scientific discovery is that if something "just makes sense" to brains whose evolution has been driven primarily by the social processes of mate competition and mate selection then it is probably wrong. An educated person when presented with an explanation that has intuitive appeal will treat it with well-deserved suspicion until they have seen it publicly tested by systematic observation or controlled experiment (that is, scientifically validated) and not glibly repeat it as if it were knowledge rather than speculation.
I don't like Romney at all, but I'm still profoundly unsettled by this desperate meta-campaign to convince people he can't win. Are news outlets delusional? Are they trying to shape public policy by falsely prophesying some inevitable result? It just plain creeps me out.
I think its a matter of selling eyeballs to advertisers. No one is going to read or comment on a story that is true, which would appear under a headline: "Romney's Campaign Prepared to Spend Its Way to Victory".
Money is the big determiner of primary outcomes, and Romney has the most by a long shot. Ergo, he's going to win. But pundits don't get paid to point out obvious facts. They get paid to stir up controversy, especially where no reasonable level of uncertainty exists. Ergo, all this bullshit in a "race" whose outcome is 96% certain.
Their tax policies are the same? Obama's on record proposing to increase them, and Romney proposes to cut them. Does this not matter?
Not in the least, and it's a very sad commentary on the state of American politics that anyone thinks it does. We've known since at least the '80's that the complexity of the tax code matters far more than the rate, and yet Americans continue to be distracted by relatively unimportant arguments about rates while the elephant of complexity continues to rumble around the room smashing everything in sight, destroying jobs and crushing small businesses.
The deposition that Clinton lied about having sex with Monica Lewinski
He did not lie under oath about having sex with Monica Lewinski. Under the definitions he was given she had sex with him but he did not have sex with her because the brief defined "having sex" as "contact between genitals" or "contact between YOUR mouth and your partner's genitals", and getting your dick sucked does not count as "having sex" under that definition.
I've used this example on occasion to help people understand non-commutative algebras, and think there really ought to be one for sex, with the "!" or "bang" as the operator, of course. So B!M =/= M!B. There are some open questions regarding transitivity that can only be answered by a series of carefully controlled threesomes...
If Romney can manage to be a huge asshole for the next 46 states, he should have no problem taking the nomination.
You've got +5 funny but for the wrong reason.
It's funny that anyone thinks anything other than the ability to outspend matters. All this talk about character and personality and policies is irrelevant. 96% of the time the candidate with the most money wins. Romney has raised more money for this primary race than the next two or three contenders combined. He's going to win, and talking about the race in any terms other than money is doing helping perpetuate the myth that anything other than money matters.
By the same token, as things stand today Obama is going to win a second term because he's raised a lot more money than any of the Republican contenders, although that may change once the primary is over.
Don't say his name! It's rumored to summon him...
But it costs money (no idea how much) to train that sniper, and if they are injured you've lost their value.
Neither snipers nor any other killers have any value, at least in the strict economic sense. Economically, killers and the machines they use to kill are called "dead weight loss": potentially valuable resources that are taken out of the productive economy and in the very best case are never used. In the worst case, they kill people and destroy things, sometimes being killed themselves in the process, none of which ever creates any economic value.
So if by "value" you mean anything to do with economics, you're wrong: the moment you've taken a person out of the productive economy you've lost all their value, and they have become a negative value in most cases.
Wasting productive resources on more effective ways to kill is a waste. And after the number of people who have been killed in the past hundred years anyone who believes that if we only had better ways to kill we'd have fewer problems has to be in the grip of some profound delusion.
You get far more additional radiation from flying in the airplane than you do from the scanner.
What is the skin dose from the "additional radiation" you get from flying on a plane and how does it compared to the skin dose from the scanners?
There has been just one study done on these scanners and it had a completely inappropriate experimental design to measure the actual risk. It was a bulk dosimetry study that to first order took the skin dose (which is what these machines actually produce) and divided it by the whole body mass, producing a number that was completely meaningless (but very, very low).
My critique of that study from the point of view of a radiation transport physicist can be found here: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=114
The U.S. and its attendant NGOs would be screaming from the rooftops about "child soldiers"...
Yes it would, which is pretty ironic given the US has been illegally holding Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr beyond the rule of law or access to your courts in Guantanamo Bay for almost a decade.