Like any economic comparison, the cost of the Iraq war should also factor in the the value of the next best alternative. Supposing that's energy development, we have to consider that energy infrastructure is durable, while a war is not. In absolute fact, developing durable energy infrastructure will, in the long run, even provide benefits to Iraq (the ostensible value generated by the war.) Oil is one destabilizing factor in the region. Although it provides monetary benefits, it also leads to political upheaval. The value of energy infrastructure could be a net gain by the people of the middle east.
Perhaps you've drawn excessively from the parent poem in your parody, but I liked this a lot. A fine fusion of literature and geekery. You've earned my admiration (and I've marked you as a friend.)
I also have two of my own grocery bags. One is a canvas tote that I actually bought from the grocery store where I shop. The other is an ordinary backpack. I live close enough to the grocery store that as long as I don't need the canvas tote, I can bike to the store, load up my backpack, and bike home. I get exercise and the only petroleum I use is the few microns of rubber worn off of my tires by the trip.
My experience is mostly similar. I've tried various flavours of Ubuntu and they were modestly easy to set up and very easy to maintain. The real rub, for me, was that when something DIDN'T automagically work or when I accidentally broke something, I could kiss that installation goodbye. My best hope was a Google search for the error that I was experiencing and hope that copying the listed instructions verbatim would solve the problem. If it didn't, it usually left the computer in worse shape than when I began. One might argue that I shouldn't be giving my computer instructions that I don't understand, but the alternative is reinstalling anyway. At this point, I've decided to give up on Linux for another couple of years. It's easier this year than when I tried it two years ago, which was easier than the two years before that. I'll put Windows 2000 back on my laptop and give Linux another shot in 2010.
How old is your daughter? If she's relatively young -- say middle school or maybe even early high school, that seems like a sound mindset. I was astonished, though, as a senior in high school, that so many of my female peers wanted to become marine biologists for reasons that amounted to "I like dolphins." I certainly don't blame the Discovery channel for this. I think it's marvelous that they spark interest in scientific education. I think it's unfortunate, however, that our secondary education institutions are unable, for whatever reason, to provide real direction to college-bound students.
I chose to be an engineer because science and mathematics were always strong subjects for me. Beyond that, though, I didn't have much focus, either. It took me four semesters to settle on chemical engineering, which put me behind on my university's chemical engineering track. Sure, you might argue that I should have done more research before college, but I don't even think I was provided with enough basis to recognize that more research was necessary or that picking a major early is really important.
MoxFulder could also be very selective. His criteria could be so strict that he responded in full to a very small number of people. Hundreds of people may have sent him email, but if only two matched all of his criteria and he responded to both of those people, then his percentage would be 100%
Of course, this leads to a way to game the system. If your criteria are loose except for one criterion that has two characteristics (low probability of somebody meeting it AND low deterrence to somebody who doesn't meet it) then you'll still get lots of emails from people who technically don't meet ALL of your criteria. Your response rate will still reflect a high response rate to individuals who meet all of your criteria even though you're getting emails from many mostly-qualified people and not responding to many of them.
I consider myself an above-average multitasker. I think that a large component of my success is that I DON'T overtax my brain when switching between tasks. I keep a detailed notebook of the tasks on which I am working. When it is necessary to stop working on something, I can clear that task completely from my brain because the pertinent details are in my notebook and on my computer. If you were to come up to me and ask me about the old task, I'd have to open up my notes to provide you with anything except the most cursory information. I let my notes handle the stuff that unnecessarily preoccupies my brain. It leaves me alert and able to handle each new task with fresh mental capacity.
Automobile usage is a fairly inelastic behaviour. You can cut back on some of the trips that you take, but for most people, there remains a minimal amount of driving that is not drastically lower than their average. You might argue that anybody who really wanted to could bicycle or walk more often. Maybe, but I think that there are several factors that contribute to people not choosing "person-powered" transportation methods.
1. Yes, people are lazy. I won't try to pretend this isn't the case. 2. People don't have enough time. Maybe you could try to make time, but there are pitfalls there too. I happen to think that as a society we'd benefit a lot from being less rushed, but that really only works if everybody agrees to it. I happen to be single with lots of spare time, so biking to the grocery store isn't any great hardship. People with families, though, don't want to waste their leisure time in transit. (Make no mistake, the difference would come out of leisure time. Your boss isn't going to sympathize and agree to let you work 20 minutes less every day just because you've decided to bike to work.) 3. People don't feel that walking places is safe. We more frequently see situations nowadays in which parents are afraid to let their children out of their sight. Timmy might be capable of biking to soccer practice, but his mom will feel much more secure if she drives him there and back.
Ultimately, while people may choose a few activities that they are willing to sacrifice to save on gas, they're not going to quit going to work and they're not going to quit doing everything that takes them away from home.
I had an argument regarding "simple solutions" with a friend of mine once. I was considering modifying a couple of Nerf Mavericks so that I could cock them using just one hand. The plan was to attach a ring to the back of the cocking mechanism and a hook to a glove on my other hand. Catch the ring on the hook and cock the gun without ever releasing my grip on the gun in my other hand. He started talking about how easy it would be to make a semiautomatic Nerf gun using compressed CO2. It took us ten minutes to explain to him that while his idea was much cooler than mine, it completely failed a simplicity test.
You raise a great point. I don't travel much, so transcontinental flights never even crossed my mind. You're absolutely right that the engineering challenges associated with a trans-Atlantic train are rather absurd. If we don't figure out SOME way to keep planes flying, we'll have to switch back to ships.
One of the BIG problems I always imagine when I think about the entire economy becoming electric is that of aircraft. I have a hard time conceiving of an airplane that operates on an electric motor. One possible solution is to phase out aircraft in favour of fast, electric trains. This technology, if it works as claimed, could provide another solution. Even if the amount of infrastructure necessary to satisfy all of our energy needs with reclaimed CO2 would be too cumbersome, it might be feasible to use this technology to satisfy the energy needs of those process that really are best served by hydrocarbon fuels.
Agreed. I seem to recall that at one time, Firefox was spun off of the larger Mozilla project to preserve the small, feature-light, responsive browser. Now, it seems like another spin-off is necessary to get back to that dream.
It's sort of funny that you should say that. I work for a company that manufactures some battery-powered instruments. We actually have to ship the batteries separately from the instruments because they classify as a more hazardous material than the rest of the shipment.
That's why my "campaign" during the coming year will be "A vote for a third party is a vote for choices that matter." I'd like to oust the schmucks in power and force somebody to pay more than lip service to the good of the public (and not just what the richest 1% of the public SAYS is good for the public.)
Golly, it's only 2:20 in the morning and I have already learned something today. All the way through high school, I was taught that encyclopedias were appropriate reference sources for papers. In fact, I don't think that any of my teachers even pointed out that the encyclopedia cites primary sources. By the time I was writing papers where it was necessary to consult primary sources, encyclopedias were hardly even worth looking at in the first place. That's a good piece of knowledge to have. When I have kids and they're struggling as much with their papers as I did, I'll direct their attention to the references at the bottom of their encyclopedia article and they'll have LOADS more about which to write.
You say this as a joke, but if somebody opened up "Arthur's Sandwiches" on 42nd Street in Portland, I'd plan a vacation around it. I'm already planning a vacation to Philadelphia sometime to eat a $100 cheese steak sandwich. As a sandwich enthusiast AND a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that would make a great vacation!
Anecdotally, re-installing Linux is exactly what I had to do a couple of months ago. I had installed KUbuntu "edgy" from CD and the automatic package manager was encouraging me to upgrade to "feisty." Why not? I figured everything else just worked, so the upgrade would go fine. To this day, I couldn't say exactly what had gone wrong, but it would hang on bootup with an arcane kernel panic error message. I searched the Ubuntu forums, Googled error messages, and tinkered with configuration files for hours before I decided I could just save myself time and frustration by burning a new feisty CD and reinstalling.
That simply isn't true. The top two priorities only need to take up only marginally more than 3.5% each. Just because they have a top-10 list doesn't mean that priorities 11-99 aren't taking up a significant fraction of manpower, even though no single priority claims more than 3.4%.
I'd watch that. I'd even buy popcorn and a soda. I'd buy a ticket for somebody I didn't know, who couldn't afford one. That would be the most amazing parody ever.
I am still hard pressed to put it into either category. Morality is as God [i]does[/i]. Supposing that God is, as Christians believe, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then his behaviour will always be perfectly moral. Thus, morality is as God demonstrates because there could be no greater authority on the subject. If I were to have a sudden revelation that led me to believe that God wanted me to slaughter children, you would be right in questioning the validity of my claim. We are, after all, conscious and willful -- we are capable of making moral judgments. Although God is the highest authority, his instructions are not always crystal clear. If my interpretation differs significantly from that of a representative sample of conscious deciders, then there is a high probability that my interpretation is incorrect. (This is different from moral relativism or moral democracy. The majority does not get to decide what is or is not absolutely moral. It is merely logical that the majority is more likely to hit upon an accurate interpretation of absolute morality.)
The soul is a precondition of morality not because it implies that God is good, but because rote behaviour is neither good nor evil. It simply is. Thus, my previous statement about amorality.
Please note that I have already acknowledged the circular nature of my argument. I believe that if we did not have souls, we would not be beings capable of arguing about whether or not we have souls. I agree that it is somewhat nonsensical to state that our behaviour is rote and that consciousness is an illusion. I believe, therefore, that the alternate is true: that we possess souls and that consciousness and will are real.
What is probably the most controversial component of my train of thought is that I don't believe that consciousness would emerge in the absence of the underlying mind/soul. If, in fact, there were no mind/soul, my present state of belief is that what we perceive as consciousness, to the point of proclaiming self-awareness and philosophizing about it, is rote behaviour cultivated to protect the valuable adaptation of believing oneself and one's species to be a higher animal.
I acknowledge that this argument is somewhat circular. After all, because I DO believe in the underlying mind/soul, all philosophy pertaining to its absence from the human animal is mere speculation to me. Were it not to exist, I do not believe that humans would be what they are now. Given that humans ARE what they are now, I believe either that consciousness and will are originally from God or that neither consciousness nor will actually exist, no matter what philosophy has to say about the matter. What neurology perceives as consciousness and will, on the other hand, would, in my opinion, be rote behaviour, as noted above.
The abstract idea of a soul that I propose, however, is not an observable phenomenon. It is only perceived as a result of its expression via the brain. You say that my notion does not match what neurology tells us and perhaps the extended reading that you have suggested would help me to understand, but consider the following:
This underlying property is the motive force behind identify and personality. Identify and personality, however, are filtered through the brain. Different brains would present different manifestations of the same mind/soul. In the absence of a functional brain, the mind/soul is undetectable because it lacks a means of manifesting. I would even go so far as to acknowledge that the mind/soul is inextricable from the brain; I am pretty sure that even the scriptures deny the soul-in-a-body idea. The soul and the body are described being parts of the same whole. What I would deny, however, is that the soul is a property detectable on a PET scan.
I understand, mind you, that treating the mind/soul as an emergent property of the brain is functionally simpler. Nonetheless, I believe that the soul exists, so I must reconcile its operation and relation to its physical manifestation.
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Like any economic comparison, the cost of the Iraq war should also factor in the the value of the next best alternative. Supposing that's energy development, we have to consider that energy infrastructure is durable, while a war is not. In absolute fact, developing durable energy infrastructure will, in the long run, even provide benefits to Iraq (the ostensible value generated by the war.) Oil is one destabilizing factor in the region. Although it provides monetary benefits, it also leads to political upheaval. The value of energy infrastructure could be a net gain by the people of the middle east.
Perhaps you've drawn excessively from the parent poem in your parody, but I liked this a lot. A fine fusion of literature and geekery. You've earned my admiration (and I've marked you as a friend.)
I also have two of my own grocery bags. One is a canvas tote that I actually bought from the grocery store where I shop. The other is an ordinary backpack. I live close enough to the grocery store that as long as I don't need the canvas tote, I can bike to the store, load up my backpack, and bike home. I get exercise and the only petroleum I use is the few microns of rubber worn off of my tires by the trip.
My experience is mostly similar. I've tried various flavours of Ubuntu and they were modestly easy to set up and very easy to maintain. The real rub, for me, was that when something DIDN'T automagically work or when I accidentally broke something, I could kiss that installation goodbye. My best hope was a Google search for the error that I was experiencing and hope that copying the listed instructions verbatim would solve the problem. If it didn't, it usually left the computer in worse shape than when I began. One might argue that I shouldn't be giving my computer instructions that I don't understand, but the alternative is reinstalling anyway. At this point, I've decided to give up on Linux for another couple of years. It's easier this year than when I tried it two years ago, which was easier than the two years before that. I'll put Windows 2000 back on my laptop and give Linux another shot in 2010.
How old is your daughter? If she's relatively young -- say middle school or maybe even early high school, that seems like a sound mindset. I was astonished, though, as a senior in high school, that so many of my female peers wanted to become marine biologists for reasons that amounted to "I like dolphins." I certainly don't blame the Discovery channel for this. I think it's marvelous that they spark interest in scientific education. I think it's unfortunate, however, that our secondary education institutions are unable, for whatever reason, to provide real direction to college-bound students.
I chose to be an engineer because science and mathematics were always strong subjects for me. Beyond that, though, I didn't have much focus, either. It took me four semesters to settle on chemical engineering, which put me behind on my university's chemical engineering track. Sure, you might argue that I should have done more research before college, but I don't even think I was provided with enough basis to recognize that more research was necessary or that picking a major early is really important.
MoxFulder could also be very selective. His criteria could be so strict that he responded in full to a very small number of people. Hundreds of people may have sent him email, but if only two matched all of his criteria and he responded to both of those people, then his percentage would be 100%
Of course, this leads to a way to game the system. If your criteria are loose except for one criterion that has two characteristics (low probability of somebody meeting it AND low deterrence to somebody who doesn't meet it) then you'll still get lots of emails from people who technically don't meet ALL of your criteria. Your response rate will still reflect a high response rate to individuals who meet all of your criteria even though you're getting emails from many mostly-qualified people and not responding to many of them.
I consider myself an above-average multitasker. I think that a large component of my success is that I DON'T overtax my brain when switching between tasks. I keep a detailed notebook of the tasks on which I am working. When it is necessary to stop working on something, I can clear that task completely from my brain because the pertinent details are in my notebook and on my computer. If you were to come up to me and ask me about the old task, I'd have to open up my notes to provide you with anything except the most cursory information. I let my notes handle the stuff that unnecessarily preoccupies my brain. It leaves me alert and able to handle each new task with fresh mental capacity.
Automobile usage is a fairly inelastic behaviour. You can cut back on some of the trips that you take, but for most people, there remains a minimal amount of driving that is not drastically lower than their average. You might argue that anybody who really wanted to could bicycle or walk more often. Maybe, but I think that there are several factors that contribute to people not choosing "person-powered" transportation methods.
1. Yes, people are lazy. I won't try to pretend this isn't the case.
2. People don't have enough time. Maybe you could try to make time, but there are pitfalls there too. I happen to think that as a society we'd benefit a lot from being less rushed, but that really only works if everybody agrees to it. I happen to be single with lots of spare time, so biking to the grocery store isn't any great hardship. People with families, though, don't want to waste their leisure time in transit. (Make no mistake, the difference would come out of leisure time. Your boss isn't going to sympathize and agree to let you work 20 minutes less every day just because you've decided to bike to work.)
3. People don't feel that walking places is safe. We more frequently see situations nowadays in which parents are afraid to let their children out of their sight. Timmy might be capable of biking to soccer practice, but his mom will feel much more secure if she drives him there and back.
Ultimately, while people may choose a few activities that they are willing to sacrifice to save on gas, they're not going to quit going to work and they're not going to quit doing everything that takes them away from home.
I had an argument regarding "simple solutions" with a friend of mine once. I was considering modifying a couple of Nerf Mavericks so that I could cock them using just one hand. The plan was to attach a ring to the back of the cocking mechanism and a hook to a glove on my other hand. Catch the ring on the hook and cock the gun without ever releasing my grip on the gun in my other hand. He started talking about how easy it would be to make a semiautomatic Nerf gun using compressed CO2. It took us ten minutes to explain to him that while his idea was much cooler than mine, it completely failed a simplicity test.
You raise a great point. I don't travel much, so transcontinental flights never even crossed my mind. You're absolutely right that the engineering challenges associated with a trans-Atlantic train are rather absurd. If we don't figure out SOME way to keep planes flying, we'll have to switch back to ships.
One of the BIG problems I always imagine when I think about the entire economy becoming electric is that of aircraft. I have a hard time conceiving of an airplane that operates on an electric motor. One possible solution is to phase out aircraft in favour of fast, electric trains. This technology, if it works as claimed, could provide another solution. Even if the amount of infrastructure necessary to satisfy all of our energy needs with reclaimed CO2 would be too cumbersome, it might be feasible to use this technology to satisfy the energy needs of those process that really are best served by hydrocarbon fuels.
Agreed. I seem to recall that at one time, Firefox was spun off of the larger Mozilla project to preserve the small, feature-light, responsive browser. Now, it seems like another spin-off is necessary to get back to that dream.
It's sort of funny that you should say that. I work for a company that manufactures some battery-powered instruments. We actually have to ship the batteries separately from the instruments because they classify as a more hazardous material than the rest of the shipment.
That's why my "campaign" during the coming year will be "A vote for a third party is a vote for choices that matter." I'd like to oust the schmucks in power and force somebody to pay more than lip service to the good of the public (and not just what the richest 1% of the public SAYS is good for the public.)
Golly, it's only 2:20 in the morning and I have already learned something today. All the way through high school, I was taught that encyclopedias were appropriate reference sources for papers. In fact, I don't think that any of my teachers even pointed out that the encyclopedia cites primary sources. By the time I was writing papers where it was necessary to consult primary sources, encyclopedias were hardly even worth looking at in the first place. That's a good piece of knowledge to have. When I have kids and they're struggling as much with their papers as I did, I'll direct their attention to the references at the bottom of their encyclopedia article and they'll have LOADS more about which to write.
You say this as a joke, but if somebody opened up "Arthur's Sandwiches" on 42nd Street in Portland, I'd plan a vacation around it. I'm already planning a vacation to Philadelphia sometime to eat a $100 cheese steak sandwich. As a sandwich enthusiast AND a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that would make a great vacation!
Anecdotally, re-installing Linux is exactly what I had to do a couple of months ago. I had installed KUbuntu "edgy" from CD and the automatic package manager was encouraging me to upgrade to "feisty." Why not? I figured everything else just worked, so the upgrade would go fine. To this day, I couldn't say exactly what had gone wrong, but it would hang on bootup with an arcane kernel panic error message. I searched the Ubuntu forums, Googled error messages, and tinkered with configuration files for hours before I decided I could just save myself time and frustration by burning a new feisty CD and reinstalling.
In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster of our grit-covered Natalie Portman overlords, to whom all your base belong, welcomes you.
That simply isn't true. The top two priorities only need to take up only marginally more than 3.5% each. Just because they have a top-10 list doesn't mean that priorities 11-99 aren't taking up a significant fraction of manpower, even though no single priority claims more than 3.4%.
I bet that my brother dies fording the river on the way to the spaceport and that we lose at least two oxen by the time we get past Alpha Centauri.
I'd watch that. I'd even buy popcorn and a soda. I'd buy a ticket for somebody I didn't know, who couldn't afford one. That would be the most amazing parody ever.
I am still hard pressed to put it into either category. Morality is as God [i]does[/i]. Supposing that God is, as Christians believe, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then his behaviour will always be perfectly moral. Thus, morality is as God demonstrates because there could be no greater authority on the subject. If I were to have a sudden revelation that led me to believe that God wanted me to slaughter children, you would be right in questioning the validity of my claim. We are, after all, conscious and willful -- we are capable of making moral judgments. Although God is the highest authority, his instructions are not always crystal clear. If my interpretation differs significantly from that of a representative sample of conscious deciders, then there is a high probability that my interpretation is incorrect. (This is different from moral relativism or moral democracy. The majority does not get to decide what is or is not absolutely moral. It is merely logical that the majority is more likely to hit upon an accurate interpretation of absolute morality.)
The soul is a precondition of morality not because it implies that God is good, but because rote behaviour is neither good nor evil. It simply is. Thus, my previous statement about amorality.
Please note that I have already acknowledged the circular nature of my argument. I believe that if we did not have souls, we would not be beings capable of arguing about whether or not we have souls. I agree that it is somewhat nonsensical to state that our behaviour is rote and that consciousness is an illusion. I believe, therefore, that the alternate is true: that we possess souls and that consciousness and will are real.
What is probably the most controversial component of my train of thought is that I don't believe that consciousness would emerge in the absence of the underlying mind/soul. If, in fact, there were no mind/soul, my present state of belief is that what we perceive as consciousness, to the point of proclaiming self-awareness and philosophizing about it, is rote behaviour cultivated to protect the valuable adaptation of believing oneself and one's species to be a higher animal.
I acknowledge that this argument is somewhat circular. After all, because I DO believe in the underlying mind/soul, all philosophy pertaining to its absence from the human animal is mere speculation to me. Were it not to exist, I do not believe that humans would be what they are now. Given that humans ARE what they are now, I believe either that consciousness and will are originally from God or that neither consciousness nor will actually exist, no matter what philosophy has to say about the matter. What neurology perceives as consciousness and will, on the other hand, would, in my opinion, be rote behaviour, as noted above.
The abstract idea of a soul that I propose, however, is not an observable phenomenon. It is only perceived as a result of its expression via the brain. You say that my notion does not match what neurology tells us and perhaps the extended reading that you have suggested would help me to understand, but consider the following:
This underlying property is the motive force behind identify and personality. Identify and personality, however, are filtered through the brain. Different brains would present different manifestations of the same mind/soul. In the absence of a functional brain, the mind/soul is undetectable because it lacks a means of manifesting. I would even go so far as to acknowledge that the mind/soul is inextricable from the brain; I am pretty sure that even the scriptures deny the soul-in-a-body idea. The soul and the body are described being parts of the same whole. What I would deny, however, is that the soul is a property detectable on a PET scan.
I understand, mind you, that treating the mind/soul as an emergent property of the brain is functionally simpler. Nonetheless, I believe that the soul exists, so I must reconcile its operation and relation to its physical manifestation.