...especially as Islam really seems to me to be the universalised, more contagious, form of Judaism. (We neither want you to become a Jew if you aren't, nor believe that you will move into a cellar and burn* if you don't.) Not to say that there isn't a strong we're-best strain in it, but that's damned-near universal, and much less obnoxious than insisting that you join or deserve torture forever...though the latter is a much better marketing strategy..
*Back when the National Lampoon was funny---that is, before it died, and before P.J. O'Rourke got his fratcentric hands all over it, there was a very good little piece purporting to be the diary of an adventurous Inca who journeyed to Spain in (say) 1450, in a giant urn well-stocked with guinea pigs. He said that the majority of the country were Christ-me, who believe that 'after they die will turn into birds'; the others, the Jew-men and Moor-men, will 'go into a cellar and burn'.
Breath animated Adam; the word for the human-level spirit 'ruakh' (as opposed to the animal and divine spirits) is related to breath, air, or wind, like the Sanskrit 'atman', cognate to the Greek 'atmos'. Basically, you become an human being when you first draw breath.
And it used to be a lot easier to tell when someone had stopped breathing than when their heart had stopped beating, especially in a body-taboo--rich, culture.
Cutting into a living body is permissible (some would say 'required') for the preservation of live. Cutting into a dead body _should_ be so, for the preservation of another's life, but here it comes into conflict with customs of leaving the dead as undisturbed as possible that probably pre-date (let's call it) 'theological Judaism'. That is to say, as a Jew who is respectful of his people's body of law (because it worked decently for a long time in the absence of direct physical power to enforce it, because though I don't believe in majuscule H majuscule N 'Human Nature' but think that some things about people don't change very much, making old observations of them interesting, and because it is an interesting formal system) but not religious, I see this part of the law as being a ratification of custom...by contrast, see all the ways we found not to enforce the customs demanding death, as in the declaration that no son was or ever will be disobedient enough to merit lapidary punishment.
Ours isn't even the most extreme version of what is (in my arrogant opinion) far too much respect for the dead. See the Navajo concept of 'chindi', at least as presented/{possibly distorted} by Tony Hillerman. In general, and real anthropologists (as opposed to survival anthropologists from Mars) please correct this if I'm wrong, funerary customs seem to be especially persistent---perhaps because the uh 'item' at the middle of them can't object, and those closest to it are generally in no mood to do. Few Japanese are devout Buddhists or any kind of Christian, yet almost all funerals are Buddhist whilst weddings have changed to the movie-style 'Christian' sort.
A similar religious obligation, that of not letting a corpse be alone, is kind of sweet, and is reminiscent of how elephants mourn.
Sure, people have been claiming that we're close to the precipice for sheer ages, but that doesn't mean that big changes have arrived. I think the transition from hand-made books to printed books is orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sudden profusion of realistic images of things real and unreal. The most the former required was getting it into your gut that not every book was deemed a Very Important Book; the latter means that the apparent evidence of our senses no longer can be trusted, even as the scepticism needed to distrust is dampened by the profusion.
Yes, people can tell movies and television from real life, but repeated exposure really seems to have an effect. (Example: people think violent crime, and murder in particular, is much more common than in all but the poorest and least {cared-about-by-the-powerful} areas; why? ---because they've seen it, night after night, year after year, and the skill to avoid being influenced by this false evidence was not needed in the Serengeti.) It is certainly possible to over-influence people with words alone, but I can't shake the feeling that the reptile brain is privileged by The Image.
On the other hand, maybe people will be less influence by television and radio once they've gained the experience of making their own.
I basically agree that science fiction can help forearm us for making reasonable decisions, but think there's a danger of people swallowing authors' interpretations of what the effects of different developments might entail whole. Roy Blount reports that a man was once asked if he '...believed in infant babtism', and he responded 'Believe it? I've seen it done!' Though we can tell reality from fantasy (and science fiction...incorporating the worlds of if), some works can make impressions to the point that people treat them as if they were evidence.
This can range from a shrill 'Any altruist or collectivist government action will lead to disaster---I saw that happen in Atlas Shrugged!' to a smug 'All giant corporations are evil---I saw that in every sci-fi movie from 1970 onward,' to an arse-hurt 'Charles Stross is wrong when he says that space colonisation is probably impractical---I've seen it happen in 99% of the books I've read since the age of 8.' Again, the problem is that within a book the author has control not only of what arguments are presented, but of who presents them (either the estimable Wesley Mouch or that obnoxious and long-winded Galt/Ananconda/Swaggart crowd) and what happens when one idea or another is put into practice (think of a notional authors' fictional contention that a Marxist revolution---a Marxist one, mind you---would be followed massive State Capitalism, suppression of workers' rights, and the like).
I think this is a particular danger in a society where 1.) so many religious fanatics insist that their children be taught that one particular book's premises, observations, and conclusions must be treated as infallible, and also 2.) many science fiction fans think, 'I'm so much more clever than those religious fanatics, I'd never be that gullible,' which is one of the stigmata of a mark. Newt Gingrich, Cory Doctorow, and that woman in the Dorsai merc outfit at that Westercon who apparently jills-off to the thought of our getting Starship Trooper's political system all come to mind.
...can be cast as 'innovation' (and a good one---it makes life easier for someone, and presumably even better if that someone has a lot of capital) which should not be stifled by a 'central authority' (any authority Google or Verizon doesn't like).
Male primates seem more interested in territory than females, very generally speaking (we're talking about two, highly-overlapping, Gaussians, with peaks more than a but less than two away, not two spikes three away).
Believing you're smart, and acting on it, can be considered as a claim to an higher amount of psychic territory. Social forces are such that women have been less likely to use intelligence as a basis for this for this, but I think that's changing...but I wonder how a sample of "Mad Men"-era housewives would have treated assessing their own 'prettiness' or 'perkiness' compared with their husbands' self-assessments.
It can also be a tactic for feeling better about your own place in the actual hierarchy, even as it breeds resentment (it doesn't work for me, but I see people seemingly sustained by the 'knowledge' that they're smarter than everyone else).
Women can also be extremely concerned about hierarchy, but again there seem to be differences in how they get their places in it, less 'Look at me, I can make an intensely loud threat-display!' than 'Girls, you all know how much I've groomed all of you....'
Back then, with the Great Chain of Being still lurking in the background, and the influence of 'as above, so below' mysticism (which, admittedly, had a good influence on Newton and everyone else deciding that universal 'laws' [no inverted commas for them, though] guided the universe), it is quite possible that they believed that understanding the nature of base metal and the process whereby base it could be changed to gold would be the very image of understanding that whereby the soul could reach an higher level of being.
I don't hold with that---whenever a guru, however called, starts to invoke q.m. to justify her latest outrage against sense I reach for my notional Browning---but (as indicated parenthetically super) it does seem to be a phase in getting toward a less particularist point-of-view: maybe we _have_ to go through a 'life is like the stars are like chymistry' phase before we can advance (yes, I still believe that some things are better than others) to 'there is no intrinsic difference between the motion of the stars and planets and those down here on Earth' to '...between organic and inorganic chemistry' to 'it's all basically physics'.
If it were just anagrams, that shouldn't have stymied people trying to crack it as a cipher---symbol-frequencies aren't screwed-up by changing the ordering....
What they're talking about is that the probability of any path in functional space for the universal wave function that includes an observed Higgs is zero. Nothing 'causes' something in the past to happen differently than it could, no signal is sent back to 'prevent' something.
Observed classical physics corresponds to the highest-probability paths for the wave functions of the particles under consideration; these correspond to the extremal values for an integral of a particular function (related to the classical action) along the path---assuming that extremum is a minimum, it means that all other paths give a result for that path-integral that's higher than that. Paths with higher values are _less_ likely, though not impossible if those values are finite.
The path-integral along a given path is exactly that: it is characteristic of the path as a whole. I believe that they are saying that all paths which include a universal state corresponding to any Higgs boson's being observed produce an effectively infinite path integral; my guess (not having read them yet) is that they claim that such a state makes the canonically real action acquire an imaginary component.
To make a rough analogy: even though there are very many possible air routes from Paris to New York, probably chosen to maximise total profit (say) by minimising fuel usage, or maximising the number of passengers by picking up some in London. So some likely paths are a single arc, Paris to New York, another includes London---a third includes a stop in Iceland to pick up the eccentric billionaire who'll pay $10^6 for the lulz....but none of them include Proxima Centauri. No signal is being sent back in time from New York telling the pilot not to go to Centauri, there is just no world in which she even tries to go there---an 'air route' must have air. (This also conveniently leaves more bandwidth for the Illuminati to send their usual backwards-in-time instructions from New York.)-
(The preceding does not represent an endorsement of the validity of their conclusion, I just don't want to see what is being contended mischaracterised.)
Critical thinking undermines all forms of arbitrary authority, and most authority in our world is to some extent arbitrary. This means that many people with a lot of power have an interest in its not being propagated.
Two things in our favour, though:
Systems lower in critical thinking tend to become more and more removed from reality, putting them eventually at a disadvantage to potenitial rivals (which might be equally or more lacking in it, but earlier-on in the life-cycle, viz. Bolshevist State Capitalism vs Tsarism, but which really shines in a contest against a better-thinking system), and
'To some extent' is a weasel-phrase, blurring the lines between (to take a purely random example) Obama, Bush, Bush, and Hitler* authorities with less investment and greater intelligence will try to use at-least-tamed modes of critical thinking.
Like anything useful, critical thinking is best considered as a form of technology, and as such it will have benefits and detriments, usually not the same to a large, mixed, group of people. I like it because it's consonant with my values and because I believe that it improves our spiritual and material well-being, but I know that this might not apply to everyone.
Oh, and great point about humility: I've often said that graduate study's best contribution to my education was schooling me in being very ready to be wrong.
*...which is, coincidentally, the name of my retained law firm
I've often thought that, but expecially just now, when I couldn't figure out from the title whether
Chinese {Censor-Beating} Software...
or
{Chinese Censor}-Beating...
were meant. Though one should take no joy in anyone's being beaten, I found myself somewhat warming to the concept of code that beat censors....
I never tire of seeing how market fundamentalists simultaneously hold their belovèd to be insanely efficient and robust and prone to be destroyed by any kind of public competition.
Admittedly, government could be fixing the game to make sure their own team would win, but 0.) in this case, there is no evidence that they are so doing, and 1.) this assumes that Evil Gummint is one huge monolith made up of drones who consider themselves one team, when in reality different parts of the government routinely act at cross-purposes.
Academic information should be free. Scarcity is bad; we won't get to post-scarcity (which only the very mean, in the literal sense, shouldn't want) if we continue to allow for artificial, weapons-enforced, scarcity. Neither should the Academy become like the Market---societies work better when there are multiple power centres, multiple ways of gaining status.... One whose only allegiance is to what's so (as opposed to whatever the State or the Market would value) is a great reality-check for the others.
I think this is a great argument against the more extreme anti-abortion people, the ones who consider a zygote or gastrocyst to be an human being.
They typically do so on the basis of such being living, of human origin, and of potentially growing into a baby...but if such is true of any random clump of skin cells....
Don't forget the human need to see ourselves (as a race, as a class, or as individuals) as being 'better' than everyone else; this leads directly to the late 19th Century believe amongst Anglo-Saxon rich people that rich, Anglo-Saxons were the 'most evolved' beings around, and so 'deserving' of being on top. (Don't blame those pathetic dweebs---they had been itching to give up the 'God made us to be on top' explanation for awhile.)
The question of whether hierarchy is as fixed a mechanism in our heads as is pattern-recognition is an open one; we seem hard-wired to seem _some_ of it about, but how seriously we take it seems to be dependent on other factors, e.g. how afraid we are.
Though any of the steps can go wrong, the likelihood of each going wrong also matters. I don't know the record of failed separations and parachute deployments well enough to really say, but both technologies pre-date manned space flight, and have been continuously necessary, so they might be down pat. If there's a very low rate for either or both, it might be safer than a system with fewer stages but more inherent danger for the crew. Depending on the odds, I might prefer five low-risk threats to three moderate-risk threats.
And, asking from near-complete ignorance: would the failure of the fairing to separate be fatal to the crew? It will be hot, but it seems to me that if it weren't well thermally-isolated from the capsule, they'd be in trouble to begin-with...but maybe it's only insulated well enough to keep them safer from it until expected separation, and much longer than that would be pushing it....
Slashdot Mirror
See "The Jennifer Morgue" for details.
*Back when the National Lampoon was funny---that is, before it died, and before P.J. O'Rourke got his fratcentric hands all over it, there was a very good little piece purporting to be the diary of an adventurous Inca who journeyed to Spain in (say) 1450, in a giant urn well-stocked with guinea pigs. He said that the majority of the country were Christ-me, who believe that 'after they die will turn into birds'; the others, the Jew-men and Moor-men, will 'go into a cellar and burn'.
Breath animated Adam; the word for the human-level spirit 'ruakh' (as opposed to the animal and divine spirits) is related to breath, air, or wind, like the Sanskrit 'atman', cognate to the Greek 'atmos'. Basically, you become an human being when you first draw breath. And it used to be a lot easier to tell when someone had stopped breathing than when their heart had stopped beating, especially in a body-taboo--rich, culture.
Ours isn't even the most extreme version of what is (in my arrogant opinion) far too much respect for the dead. See the Navajo concept of 'chindi', at least as presented/{possibly distorted} by Tony Hillerman. In general, and real anthropologists (as opposed to survival anthropologists from Mars) please correct this if I'm wrong, funerary customs seem to be especially persistent---perhaps because the uh 'item' at the middle of them can't object, and those closest to it are generally in no mood to do. Few Japanese are devout Buddhists or any kind of Christian, yet almost all funerals are Buddhist whilst weddings have changed to the movie-style 'Christian' sort.
A similar religious obligation, that of not letting a corpse be alone, is kind of sweet, and is reminiscent of how elephants mourn.
Yes, people can tell movies and television from real life, but repeated exposure really seems to have an effect. (Example: people think violent crime, and murder in particular, is much more common than in all but the poorest and least {cared-about-by-the-powerful} areas; why? ---because they've seen it, night after night, year after year, and the skill to avoid being influenced by this false evidence was not needed in the Serengeti.) It is certainly possible to over-influence people with words alone, but I can't shake the feeling that the reptile brain is privileged by The Image.
On the other hand, maybe people will be less influence by television and radio once they've gained the experience of making their own.
I basically agree that science fiction can help forearm us for making reasonable decisions, but think there's a danger of people swallowing authors' interpretations of what the effects of different developments might entail whole. Roy Blount reports that a man was once asked if he '...believed in infant babtism', and he responded 'Believe it? I've seen it done!' Though we can tell reality from fantasy (and science fiction...incorporating the worlds of if), some works can make impressions to the point that people treat them as if they were evidence.
This can range from a shrill 'Any altruist or collectivist government action will lead to disaster---I saw that happen in Atlas Shrugged!' to a smug 'All giant corporations are evil---I saw that in every sci-fi movie from 1970 onward,' to an arse-hurt 'Charles Stross is wrong when he says that space colonisation is probably impractical---I've seen it happen in 99% of the books I've read since the age of 8.' Again, the problem is that within a book the author has control not only of what arguments are presented, but of who presents them (either the estimable Wesley Mouch or that obnoxious and long-winded Galt/Ananconda/Swaggart crowd) and what happens when one idea or another is put into practice (think of a notional authors' fictional contention that a Marxist revolution---a Marxist one, mind you---would be followed massive State Capitalism, suppression of workers' rights, and the like).
I think this is a particular danger in a society where 1.) so many religious fanatics insist that their children be taught that one particular book's premises, observations, and conclusions must be treated as infallible, and also 2.) many science fiction fans think, 'I'm so much more clever than those religious fanatics, I'd never be that gullible,' which is one of the stigmata of a mark. Newt Gingrich, Cory Doctorow, and that woman in the Dorsai merc outfit at that Westercon who apparently jills-off to the thought of our getting Starship Trooper's political system all come to mind.
...can be cast as 'innovation' (and a good one---it makes life easier for someone, and presumably even better if that someone has a lot of capital) which should not be stifled by a 'central authority' (any authority Google or Verizon doesn't like).
Back in our day, we had to move the electrons around with tweezers.
Believing you're smart, and acting on it, can be considered as a claim to an higher amount of psychic territory. Social forces are such that women have been less likely to use intelligence as a basis for this for this, but I think that's changing...but I wonder how a sample of "Mad Men"-era housewives would have treated assessing their own 'prettiness' or 'perkiness' compared with their husbands' self-assessments.
It can also be a tactic for feeling better about your own place in the actual hierarchy, even as it breeds resentment (it doesn't work for me, but I see people seemingly sustained by the 'knowledge' that they're smarter than everyone else).
Women can also be extremely concerned about hierarchy, but again there seem to be differences in how they get their places in it, less 'Look at me, I can make an intensely loud threat-display!' than 'Girls, you all know how much I've groomed all of you....'
I don't hold with that---whenever a guru, however called, starts to invoke q.m. to justify her latest outrage against sense I reach for my notional Browning---but (as indicated parenthetically super) it does seem to be a phase in getting toward a less particularist point-of-view: maybe we _have_ to go through a 'life is like the stars are like chymistry' phase before we can advance (yes, I still believe that some things are better than others) to 'there is no intrinsic difference between the motion of the stars and planets and those down here on Earth' to '...between organic and inorganic chemistry' to 'it's all basically physics'.
(Did I mention I was a physicist?)
If it were just anagrams, that shouldn't have stymied people trying to crack it as a cipher---symbol-frequencies aren't screwed-up by changing the ordering....
Oh, that was Voynich Manuscript...that's different. Never mind.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=%E8%A5%BF%E8%97%8F%E6%8A%91%E5%88%B6%E9%9F%A9&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=5b7cf21b103219ea ...returns >1.4M results
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%E8%A5%BF%E8%97%8F%E6%8A%91%E5%88%B6%E9%9F%A9&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n ...returns Sweet Fanny Adams
Yes, the Chinese Google site is as bad, but at least a Chinese user can potentially hit an external Google site with one tunnel/proxy or another.
(Note: I'm not a terrible bigot, though I'm probably as bigoted as average: I do not blame all Han Chinese for the oppression of the Tibetan people, and of course there are some Han willing to risk extreme punishment to help them; however, one of the ways Tibetans are being oppressed is by the massive settlement of the country by Han Chinese, and beside I wanted as inflammatory a non-obscene word-set as I could for the experiment.)
Observed classical physics corresponds to the highest-probability paths for the wave functions of the particles under consideration; these correspond to the extremal values for an integral of a particular function (related to the classical action) along the path---assuming that extremum is a minimum, it means that all other paths give a result for that path-integral that's higher than that. Paths with higher values are _less_ likely, though not impossible if those values are finite.
The path-integral along a given path is exactly that: it is characteristic of the path as a whole. I believe that they are saying that all paths which include a universal state corresponding to any Higgs boson's being observed produce an effectively infinite path integral; my guess (not having read them yet) is that they claim that such a state makes the canonically real action acquire an imaginary component.
To make a rough analogy: even though there are very many possible air routes from Paris to New York, probably chosen to maximise total profit (say) by minimising fuel usage, or maximising the number of passengers by picking up some in London. So some likely paths are a single arc, Paris to New York, another includes London---a third includes a stop in Iceland to pick up the eccentric billionaire who'll pay $10^6 for the lulz....but none of them include Proxima Centauri. No signal is being sent back in time from New York telling the pilot not to go to Centauri, there is just no world in which she even tries to go there---an 'air route' must have air. (This also conveniently leaves more bandwidth for the Illuminati to send their usual backwards-in-time instructions from New York.)-
(The preceding does not represent an endorsement of the validity of their conclusion, I just don't want to see what is being contended mischaracterised.)
Two things in our favour, though:
Like anything useful, critical thinking is best considered as a form of technology, and as such it will have benefits and detriments, usually not the same to a large, mixed, group of people. I like it because it's consonant with my values and because I believe that it improves our spiritual and material well-being, but I know that this might not apply to everyone. Oh, and great point about humility: I've often said that graduate study's best contribution to my education was schooling me in being very ready to be wrong .
*...which is, coincidentally, the name of my retained law firm
...setting up a bot-net to send 20 phishing e-cards each to everyone _not_ a programmer.
I've often thought that, but expecially just now, when I couldn't figure out from the title whether
Chinese {Censor-Beating} Software...
or
{Chinese Censor}-Beating...
were meant. Though one should take no joy in anyone's being beaten, I found myself somewhat warming to the concept of code that beat censors....
('Mental plan!')
Admittedly, government could be fixing the game to make sure their own team would win, but 0.) in this case, there is no evidence that they are so doing, and 1.) this assumes that Evil Gummint is one huge monolith made up of drones who consider themselves one team, when in reality different parts of the government routinely act at cross-purposes.
Academic information should be free. Scarcity is bad; we won't get to post-scarcity (which only the very mean, in the literal sense, shouldn't want) if we continue to allow for artificial, weapons-enforced, scarcity. Neither should the Academy become like the Market---societies work better when there are multiple power centres, multiple ways of gaining status.... One whose only allegiance is to what's so (as opposed to whatever the State or the Market would value) is a great reality-check for the others.
I can tell by the skin cells, and because I have seen quite a few suss things in my time.
I think this is a great argument against the more extreme anti-abortion people, the ones who consider a zygote or gastrocyst to be an human being.
They typically do so on the basis of such being living, of human origin, and of potentially growing into a baby...but if such is true of any random clump of skin cells....
Recursion
Don't forget the human need to see ourselves (as a race, as a class, or as individuals) as being 'better' than everyone else; this leads directly to the late 19th Century believe amongst Anglo-Saxon rich people that rich, Anglo-Saxons were the 'most evolved' beings around, and so 'deserving' of being on top. (Don't blame those pathetic dweebs---they had been itching to give up the 'God made us to be on top' explanation for awhile.) The question of whether hierarchy is as fixed a mechanism in our heads as is pattern-recognition is an open one; we seem hard-wired to seem _some_ of it about, but how seriously we take it seems to be dependent on other factors, e.g. how afraid we are.
...cheap particle-detector.
Though any of the steps can go wrong, the likelihood of each going wrong also matters. I don't know the record of failed separations and parachute deployments well enough to really say, but both technologies pre-date manned space flight, and have been continuously necessary, so they might be down pat. If there's a very low rate for either or both, it might be safer than a system with fewer stages but more inherent danger for the crew. Depending on the odds, I might prefer five low-risk threats to three moderate-risk threats.
And, asking from near-complete ignorance: would the failure of the fairing to separate be fatal to the crew? It will be hot, but it seems to me that if it weren't well thermally-isolated from the capsule, they'd be in trouble to begin-with...but maybe it's only insulated well enough to keep them safer from it until expected separation, and much longer than that would be pushing it....