"but that shouldn't be the only, or even the default (i.e. built into the OS), way of getting music tracks off a disc."
And in this case it's not. You could always make a disc image of the CD. I don't know if there's a program automatically installed in the OS distribution that allows for this but the libraries to do so are installed by default. The process in question here is the addition of DRM to the audio file as part of the incorrectly named CD rip. As of the current version of Windows, that is most certainly not an OS issue.
I'm not a regular Windows user these days (thank god), so maybe you can answer a question for me.
When you insert an audio CD on a fresh-from-the-store Windows box, what happens? Does it just mount the disc and wait for you to do something with it, or does it automatically launch (or ask if you want to launch) WMP? If the latter - which I would expect from MS's history - then I'd say that this is an OS issue, since the OS is integrating with an application to make that application automatically perform some action. In effect, if Windows by default presumes WMP to be there and offloads functionality to it, then WMP issues are Windows issues.
Yes it is. Ripping a CD, in it's purest form, is just disk I/O, which is most definitely an OS function, and it should be as simple as "Open mounted CD. Copy tracks to wherever you want them."
Transcoding those to MP3 or your format of choice is not an OS issue, and shouldn't necessarily be done in the same step as ripping the raw data off the disk. Not that I'm philosophically opposed to the creation or use of programs that do this in one step... but that shouldn't be the only, or even the default (i.e. built into the OS), way of getting music tracks off a disc.
Since you're AC you probably won't see this but what the heck...
A scientific "law" is just a theory that is so well-tested that it is taken for granted. A "law" is still a theory, and it is not even a "proven" theory, because something which is proven is, by definition, beyond a doubt and without possibility of falsehood. You use the example of "the law" of thermodynamics (there's actually three in classical thermodynamics). Lets look at one of those for an example of this.
The second "law" of thermodynamics states, roughly, that entropy will always increase, and a system will always tend toward a state of thermal equilibrium. This theory (very well tested and thus considered a "law") makes the prediction that for any closed system, with no energy input or output, you will always observe a net increase in entropy and NEVER observe a net decrease in entropy.
However, since we now understand thermodynamics as the interaction of huge numbers of molecules, we understand that the observed increase in entropy is a statistical effect, and not an inviolable law. It is merely INCREDIBLY MORE LIKELY that any change in a system will increase it's entropy, but it's entirely possible that a system - even a closed system with no outside input - could accidentally wind up momentarily in a low-entropy state. All the molecules in a box full of gas could, by some extraordinary coincidence, wind up against one wall of the box for an instant. It wouldn't last that way very long, since from there it's much more likely to fall back into a high-entropy state than to remain that way. And beyond that, it's vanishingly unlikely that you will ever see that happen in the first place. But we now know that it is possible, and so we know for a fact that the second "law" of thermodynamics has an exception.
What this means is that the theory which is called the second law of thermodynamics has actually been *disproven*. It is not an entirely accurate theory; we know that that is not really the way that things work, the universe being governed by a separate law that dictates the perpetual increase in entropy, but rather that those effects are the cumulative results of many applications of more fundamental laws, which could (but are very unlikely to) result in different effects at times. But like Newton's theory of gravity, the second law of thermodynamics is still a very accurate and useful shorthand approximation, even though we know it's not perfect.
Which brings us back to gravity.
The facts of gravity (as relevant to us here on Earth) are that most things that we drop fall toward the surface of the Earth. It may be a fact that all things anyone ever drops will fall toward the surface of the Earth, but we don't know that fact because we don't know the future. (And now we actually know that that is NOT factual, since things fall in directions other than toward the surface of the Earth; things less dense than air, things sufficiently far from the Earth, etc).
One theory behind this was old Aristotle's. He imagined a universe with a fixed axis of up and down, and every object with it's natural resting place which was either up or down, and laterally at rest; and without an external force acting upon these things, they would tend to move up or down and come to a stop when they reached their resting places. No "force" was involved here; that's just what things tended to do in absence of a force acting upon them, according to Aristotle.
Later on, Newton came along, with his knowledge of a round Earth and a heliocentric solar system, and planets with other moons and such and with all these new observations showing that Aristotle's theory was clearly wrong, he proposed a new type of physics, whereby an object will remain in whatever straight line of motion it was last undertaking unless acted upon by an external force; and ALL objects exert a force upon each other which attracts them to each other. This is the first occurrence of a Theory of Gravity - a theory that there is some sort of "spooky" force a
I KNOW people want to believe this. That's fine. It's a belief, great. So is Catholicism. And, like Catholicism, that doesn't mean it's fact. Global warming, right now is a theory with lots of supporting evidence, but no proof. If it had proof, it wouldn't be a theory.
"Gravity" is just a theory. That things denser than air fall toward the surface of the Earth is a fact, as are other facts that relate to gravity. The theory of gravity (pick one... Newton's, Einstein's...) attempts to explain those facts and predict further facts from such an explanation. No amount of watching things fall will EVER "prove" the theory of gravity correct, at least in such a way to change it from a "theory" to a "fact".
Likewise, that the average surface temperature of the Earth is increasing is a fact ("global warming"). There are theories that attempt to explain this. Some of these theories are well-supported by the facts. Others may not be. But none of them will even be "proven" and elevated to anything beyond a theory.
Theories aren't proven. They don't become facts, no matter how much support they receive or how well they hold up. Theories are always theories and being "just a theory" doesn't make an idea any less sound.
if she is making italian food, it's genuine whether or not she is italian
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend in Michigan once. (I'm in California).
He was complaining that since having moved up there from down here, he's damn hard pressed to find any kind of real Mexican food, made by real Mexicans, not the crappy-ass stuff at his local (Michigan) Taco Bell, made by pasty-faced white kids .
I replied to him that if all I can find in any southern California McDonalds is "Mexican food" (by his definition - made by real Mexicans), then he can damn well enjoy authentic American food made by pasty-faced Americans at his local Taco Bell in Michigan.
Karl's really the repudiation of this semi-myth; he learned it from the Democrats, who learned it from the English professors, who got it from philosophers.
As a philosopher, I hope you're not meaning this as a slam against philosophers. A lot of philosophical quibbling about language comes about from the realization in a debate about the analysis of some concept that there is not actually common agreement on what, precisely, is meant by a word. Analysis of a concept is really just the "unpacking" of it's constituent concepts, or contemplating what that concept really means - which is the same thing as how that term is defined. When you're trying to write or speak about ethics, for example, and two random people are arguing about what sort of moral or ethical system would, if followed, result in the most "good", you'll often quickly realize that much of your disagreement comes from the fact that "good" itself is not well-defined. Sometimes it's merely a difference in meaning or definition between the two people, but sometimes one or both parties isn't really clear on what exactly they mean by the term in the first place. They could list off some examples of things which are "good" and "bad", but will often by hard pressed to define precisely what it is that those things have in common which makes them "good" or "bad", and thus some way by which to tell if any random new (person/action/circumstance) is good or bad.
An anecdotal example: the other day I was conversing with a friend who is a moral relativist, and I realized that his position (with which I completely disagree) does logically follow from his definition of "moral". To him, "moral" simply means "what society says you ought to do" - from which is clearly follows that morals are relative, as different societies clearly think that people ought to do different things. But that's not really a very clear definition, because "ought" itself is a normative concept that implies goodness or morality. It's akin to saying "'morality' is whatever society says is moral". That sentence is a useless definition - if I didn't already have some notion of what 'moral' meant, it wouldn't tell me what "moral" means.
My response to him was that I think it's possible to define "moral" and "good" in non-normative terms that refer to concepts other than "morality", "goodness", "ought", etc, in a way which still tracks the normal usage of such words. And once you have such a definition, then you can look objectively at any (person/action/circumstane) and see whether or not it meets that definition, and thus tell whether it's good or not. And if you have that sort of (meaningful, non-circular) definition of "morality", then his position of moral relativism is clearly false.
So a lot of philosophical questions like "is such-and-such X?" (e.g. "is lying always wrong"?) can be rightly answered "that depends on what you mean by 'X'", because a lot of values of "X" in philosophy are abstract concepts that we take for granted, and could possibly name many examples of, but haven't really clearly defined for ourselves. So answering such questions necessitates coming up with a clear, explicit definitions for the concepts involved, which still track the normal usage of the language. Which is where all the quibbling over definitions comes from: someone proposes that 'X' by defined as so, and then someone else counters that if X were defined as so, then this thing that we would normally say is not X would be considered X. But since we (the common users of the language) don't really have a clear definition of the concept to begin with, some things we normally say are X might contradict with the definition of 'X' that seems to underlay most other instances of something being X.
Thus the philosophers' job is to come up with a definition that most users of the language would agree with, knowing the full consequences of that definition. For example, many people might like Kant definitions of "right" and "wrong" at first, but then later disagree with it when they re
I've often pondered how odd it is that one must have excellent oral skills in order to be a master debater, and yet one can be a cunning linguist and perform all of one's work entirely by hand.
i only seem to get phone calls from the police department asking for money. now that's scary...
I've been getting these at work lately as well. I'm an administrative assistant for a business that operates out of my employers' home, so they get personal calls there sometimes as well (remarkably though, most of the calls coming into the house are actual business). The inappropriately high pushiness of these people just astounds me. The typical call will go something like this:
Me: "Castellino Training and BEBA, this is Forrest, can I help you?" Guy: "Raymond?" (one of my bosses) Me: "No, this is Forrest. Is there something I can help you with?" Guy: "I'm collecting donations for $RANDOM_POLICE_CHARITY. Is Raymond available?" Me: "Not at the moment, sorry." (stock response, they don't like solicitation calls) Guy: "Is.... Sandra there?" (other boss, Ray's wife) Me: "No, she's not here either." (most often this and my previous comment are actually true) Guy: "Well, I'm collecting donations for $RANDOM_POLICE_CHARITY. How much can I put you down for?" Me: "Uh, this is a business, I just work here. Sorry." Guy: "Oh it's no problem. We take donation amounts of $100, $50, $20, $10..." Me: "Sir, I'm just an administrative assistant here." Guy: "I'll just put you down for our minimum contribution of..." Me: "Sorry, I can't afford it." (not exactly true, I've got a few thou saved up, but that's very hard earned savings). Guy: "But it's only..." Me: "Sir I'm just a student working here part time, I really can't afford it." (I don't like cops anyway) Guy: "Oh come on..." Me: *click*
I could understand them *maybe* pushing my employers if they had gotten them on the phone, but hassling an employee at work to make a donation to some charity, much less the very concept of a "minimum contribution" (what, if I don't contribute they're gonna arrest me?)... and then continuing to hassle a poor college student working part-time (I'm not exactly poor, but I come from a poor family and everything I have I earned myself by being very frugal, and I am going to need it to fund the last bit of my education)... I've never seen such aggressive solicitation outside of a used car lot. I guess being police, they're used to telling someone "do this" and having them comply, but fuck 'em. This has happened more than once and it's just not appropriate.
the problem with tribalism though is that you get tribal wars and less than humane tribal customs sometimes. Then again it's not like you don't get wars and inhumanity anyway.
This is what I meant when I said it's not about returning to a "primitive" form of life. It's not about changing our customs or culture, any more than it's about changing our technology. It's just about changing the political structure away from big, impersonal nation-states - where most people feel they can't make a difference, and those at the top don't feel like most people matter anyway - and instead moving toward smaller political units, and small groups of those small units, and small groups of THOSE groups.
You might still get these small "tribes" warring against each other, if some area becomes so full of strife that diplomacy breaks down; but no more than you'd get nations warring against each other. And those small wars would be far less devastating. And you wouldn't have inhumane "tribal customs" any more than you do in modern society - people would keep their cultural traditions as they do now.
It's not about culture or tradition, only political organization.
That's unfortunate, but UPS Driver was just one position I happened to anecdotally know was available without experience required. There are others.
Unless the restaurant turns me down for being overqualified, as several people have warned me. Or are my fears unjustified?
I'm not sure, I've never been turned down for over-qualification, but then I've never worked at a restaurant either. I was lucky enough to get a job as someone's administrative assistant pretty early on and that's lasted me the past four years. Before that I was a sales guy (register jockey basically) at a small retail computer store. So I don't know how the restaurant business goes, but I do know there are plenty of other opportunities. If all else fails, there's a big call center in the area where you answer incoming phone calls and input people's sales data into the computer - I hear that lots of the college students here may decent money off of that.
Are you actually in the Santa Barbara area? Or just wondering about the area? Or just pondering life and work in general and their many trials and tribulations?
That depends, how fast do you ride? Around here the routes are mostly flat, a few small hills on the foothill routes (duh), but nothing like San Francisco. I can't bike worth crap so it'd probably take me forever (and exhaust me) just to bike one way, but I'm not exactly a model of fitness. YMMV (literally).
And are there always jobs for people who haven't been employed since graduating from college? Most job postings that I've responded to seem to turn me down for lack of paid experience.
Depends on what kind of work you're looking for. My girlfriend is looking for work right now and recently saw a job posting for UPS truck drivers paying $20/hr, no experience necessary, all you need is a licence. I hear that garbage men make about the same thing around here, I don't imagine that requires a lot of experience. Both of those are more than what I'm making - I mostly stick with this job because it's easy, steady, and extremely flexible, which is useful while I'm in college. Then again, what I really want to do for a living is graphic arts work, and I've not had much luck finding a job in that field... but I haven't looked extremely hard either since I'm not looking for full-time career work yet. But entry-level jobs aren't hard to find. What little unemployment rate we have seems to be the homeless people who come here because it's nice weather and there's a lot of rich people with spare change shopping downtown. People even commute to here from other cities to work, cause the pay is good but living elsewhere is cheaper.
That's the downside... it's a wonderful, beautiful, safe little place to live, with enough to do for work and for play, but all that comes at a price - I pay $500/mo for a room in a 4bed/2bath house here, and that's an unbelievable bargain by normal prices (I'm on a very old long-term lease with three of my friends, from back when housing was cheaper). A cheap studio apt runs at least $800/900 here. Houses are easily close to a million. Though I'm to understand that living downtown in a big city like SanFran will run you even more... my aunt who lives up there quoted me an average of $1500 for one of the yardless filing-cabinet apartments we were walking past at the time. All in all I feel I get a nice bang for my buck living here. If I wasn't planning to support a family eventually I'd be quite comfortable living on the level I am right now, and I'm not even out of college yet.
There are some interesting theories about extended childhoods I've read as well. Namely, that young people now (myself included) aren't *EVER* reaching what we would traditionally think of as "adulthood."
The author of the paper claimed that in the past, peoples thought processes and opinions and personalities would become fixed. The author went on to claim that as a byproduct of the rate of change of the world, this fixing process is not occuring in younger people.
I'd argue that in many ways this is a good thing. There are many good qualities that children have that the "real world" beats out of them as they become adults. There are also many good qualities that people learn as they become adults that children don't tend to have. If people can grow up in the good ways (learning to be responsible and considerate) without losing their "innocence" (the positive childlike qualities - curiosity, adaptability, seeing wonder and beauty in the world), then we'll have a much better crop of people.
Unfortunately it looks like we're losing a lot of the good adult qualities too, but then, people throughout history have always been irresponsible and inconsiderate when they could get away with it, so maybe the only difference now is that people can get away with it. I still hold out hope that it's at least theoretically possible to raise a child to retain the good qualities of childhood while also learning the important lessons of adulthood.
There's also an interesting parallel here to something I recall reading once, about humans being a neotenous species of ape - basically, humans are like chips who never "grow up" in many ways, even as we do grow larger and developmentally mature in other ways. Perhaps we've still been sociologically forced to grow up, life's hardships giving us psychological scars which mar the childlike innocence we're capable of, but maybe that necessity is lightening up now, and we might one day see a generation of people who can see the world through children's eyes for their entire lives.
Yes, it's a difficult issue -- do you move to the suburbs so your kids can play outside more freely, but you commute for two hours wasting gas (and time you can spend with your kids), contributing to exurban spawl and living somewhere that should be arable cropland or open space?
City-dwellers always seem to be mentally trapped in this false dichotomy of either "live in the big city" or "live in the suburbs and commute to the big city", with an offhand notion in the back of their heads of "unless you want to live out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no running water much less broadband internet".
What is excluded here, that makes this a false dichotomy, is the people who live in small towns and medium-sized cities which are NOT huge urban jungles, nor are they satellite sprawls around them. Rather they are self-sufficient towns and cities big enough that you can live and work around the same place (a 10-20 minute drive), but not so incredibly dense that you can't let your children run free in the front yard or even, heaven forbid, your neighbor's yards, where their friends live.
For reference and to give you an idea what I'm talking about, I grew up in Ojai, CA (small town, maybe a little too small but good for raising a family), and now live in Santa Barbara, CA (a medium-sized city with an abundance of colleges), though I hope to move back to Ojai when I'm done with school. Most of the cities in California that I've seen seem to be in that range, besides the obvious huge ones (Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc), and there's an hour or two (by freeway) of open countryside and farmland dotted by smaller towns between each of the medium-sized ones. Maybe it's different elsewhere, but out here we're not limited to just "big city" or "suburbs".
The model of the web was broken the instant people started using it as a front-end for remote applications.
The World Wide Web is (ostensibly) a network of hyperlinked documents. Dynamically-generated pages pulled as requests from a database is a bit of a stretch but still basically within that model, as a database record is not so different from a traditional stand-alone document: it's still just data.
But cramming fancy interactive applications (games, etc) into this model is already a bastardization of it, with or without requiring external plugins. The notion of remote applications is fine, and I make great use of a number of "applications" on the web, but they really shouldn't be outputting their interface to what is essentially a document markup language. Imagine using an application whose interface was a read-only Word file that it updated and force-refreshed every time something changed. Sound ridiculous? Web applications aren't much different.
I know it's off-topic, but I just had to share the image that came to mind when I first read this:
Once upon a time, I was chairing an out-of-town meeting with a roomful of engineers...
Picture, if you will, a meeting room filled with terrified engineers, all cowering behind one end of the table and desperately trying to shield their heads from ballistic chairs, being hurled by a Donkey-Kong like Steve Ballmer, who in turn is jumping up and down upon the far end of the table...
I know the Steve Ballmer jokes are old and off-topic (and I don't mean to compare you to him) but the image of "chairing" a meeting full of engineers was just to hilarious not to share.:-)
Personally I am a proponent of Daniel Quinn's "New Tribal Revolution" which is not the best name for most people, but an accurate one when one understands what Quinn means by it - probably the most controversial word is 'Tribal' - but it is used in the sense that the most successful basic human social unit has always been the tribe - it's why they worked so well for our species for 200,000 years, and the reference has nothing to do with religious belief or physical prosperity.
The short answer to "Where do you GO?" is.. nowhere. You change the world very close to you, your neighborhood, or your town if it's very small. Some people are trying to buy up existing wild land and create small communities of like-minded people to try to build new ways of life (please keep in mind these are NOT communes as they are not ideologically based and not led by a single god-like leader; also, they are not Luddite in any way - most of them have all the modern amenities, just without the monstrous amount of waste that we tend to create), but these are as yet somewhat unstable, and very young communities and it remains to be seen whether they will be stable enough to really provide an example to the rest of the world.
If I had mode points I'd mod you up, since I don't really have that much to add other than what amounts to a simple "me too".
I've long been a fan of organizing the world into tribes of tribes. Basically the notion you're talking about: keep all the modern amenities, run the governments more or less like we do today (in terms of constitutional democracy, mixed economies, etc)... but have the size of each unit of government much smaller, "tribal" sized, on a manageable scale, with as little bureaucracy as possible at each level; but many levels. A many-layered federal system.
Individuals form households. Households form neighborhoods; a leader from each household representing their household's interests in the neighborhood council. The same rules for interpersonal relations applying as the rules for inter-household relations. Neighborhoods then form boroughs or districts, again with a leader from each neighborhood representing them at the district level, so you never have more than a manageably small number of people in one council. These groups would be self-selecting (i.e. secession is always allowable), so "manageable size" is a variable number; when it gets too big to manage the internal conflicts amicably, they can split along whatever lines. (This is basically so that you've never got a group bigger than someone's "monkeysphere"; and everyone in one of the higher-level groups represents the consensus of another small group of sub-monkeysphere size, and so on down the line). Districts then group into cities, cities into counties, counties into provinces, provinces into subcontinental-scale groups, and those in turn into the kind of vast continental-scale governments that the United States (almost) is today. Global-scale relations would naturally be handled the same way.
It's at the same time a "one world government", and a vast decentralization of power. A similar concept I've heard referred to as "panarchy", and I'm becoming rather fond of that term myself. I'm also fond of drawing parallels between the psychological concept of the "inner child", with the notion of an "inner tribe". The same way that pop psych would have people "get in touch with" their "inner child" - thinking and behaving from a more simple and innocent place, without all the complex psychological bullshit layers we've built up as adults - I think that societies could do well to get back in touch with their "inner tribe". Which isn't to say that we should eschew technology and go live in caves, but rather that we should do our best to see through and work around the layers of bureaucratic and political bullshit that we as a society have built up, and deal with each other in a straightforward interpersonal manner whenever possible.
That logic is reversible. All other competitive factors being equal, if two species are equally adaptable, but one of them is also best fit in their current environment, the odds are in favor of the more adapted. So your preference for opportunism is a perception bias, not a logical postulate.
I'm not saying that a species that is a "jack of all trades, ace of none" is superior. Just that a good way of measuring the fitness of a species would be not to look at it in the isolation of the environment it's currently thriving in - in which case all species are perfectly fit, cause they're surviving - but rather to imagine that species being placed in all possible environments (along with other species already adapted to those environments), or imagine the environment changing to different extremes over a long period of time (pausing between changes to allow other species to adapt to those new environments), and see how well it holds up. Species which need to change the least in order to thrive in all those different environments were more fit to begin with.
And yes, this means that bacteria are presently some of the most fit species on the planet. Multicellular life has some advantages it offers, but the bacteria will outlive us all until some sort of multicellular life comes up with an advantage equal to those that the microorganisms have. I think the human brain is a good start, as it allows for rapid adaptation to new and different environmental conditions (and competitors), but even then, it's yet to be proven to be as advantageous as everything the microbes have.
Can you cite one single environment in which you could survive and reproduce while bacteria couldnt't ?
People keep thinking that I'm making some assumption that things which are typically considered "higher" organisms are superior or more fit. Look at the list that I gave... rats, cockroaches, fungi and bacteria... in increasing order of fitness (roughly, based on what I know about those species). Yes, I'd say that some of the best (by evolutionary fitness standards) species around are usually microorganisms. This isn't some kind of human-centric "we're better" thing.
Unfortunately, according to your criterion, the "best" group is precisely the first one which ever appeared ! At the very least, it appeared three *billion* years before the first multicellular animals, to which it is so clearly "superior" (again, according to your own criteria). How's that for a "progression" ?
Which would make sense, since the measure of fitness is "ability to survive the longest". Obviously, those species which have been around the longest are likely going to be some of the most fit around. (I say only "likely" because a newer species *could* be more fit and just not have had the time to let history prove that yet). But it's important not to group all bacteria in as one species. Yes, some sort of bacterium could survive in pretty much any niche, but then, there's some sort of multicellular organism to be found in most niches. But is there *one* bacterial species that can survive (even against competition) in all (or most) of them? If so, then *that* would be a very fit species. And it most likely wasn't the first bacteria around, but rather evolved that way through the fierce, rapid-breeding competition that bacteria face.
Multicellular organisms are capable of some useful things that microorganism aren't, such as more versatile forms of locomotion (I'm curious, and honestly don't know - did bacteria colonize the land before multicellular organisms crawled up out of the sea, or did they follow up there with the plants and/or insects?). But complex multicellular organisms take much longer to evolve, since they grow and breed so much slower than microorganisms. It's no surprise then that multicellular life hasn't yet evolved such versatile forms as the bacteria have.
But the big feature that that sets humans apart (again, not claiming that humans are superior in every way - just that we have a nifty new feature) is the moving of much of our programming from hardware (genes) to software - that is, the development of a mind capable of reason. This in a big way offsets the slow evolution of multicellular life, and combined with our ability to manipulate our environment precisely (opposable thumbs and all) has allowed humans to "adapt" to a comparatively huge variety of environments beyond the one that we evolved for, without actually having to evolve our genes much at all to make that adaptation. Instead, we develop behaviors that modify ourselves and our environments, things like clothing and housing, which allow us to live in places that, without such ingenuity, we could never survive. Our digestive tract is also versatile enough that, given our adaptable behavioral abilities, we're able to figure out new food sources for all these different environments as well, and more effective and efficient ways of collecting that food - without having to genetically evolve such changes at all.
The evolution of the brain has allowed us to modify our behaviors and capabilities far faster than evolution could, and as such, maybe multicellular life form (humans at least) are finally starting to catch up with the versatility and adaptability of bacteria - and bringing the advantages of multicellular structures with them.
There may be an increase in organismal complexity over time, but this increase can be easily explained by a randomwalk phenomenon, without invoking "progress". It's time people get over it.
First off - I'm not saying complexity is progress. See above.
Second - please explain "randomwalk", I've not heard this term before.
Not necessarily. You can be the best at adapting to a new environment, and then being eaten by a highly specialiced predator (that can only live at that environment, but it doesn't matter after you're dead).
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Being good at adapting (also called oportunistic) is just a survival strategy among others, but it's only superior when it makes you survive better than a specialist - i.e. when the environment goes through steep changing.
The only point I was making was that being opportunistic - adaptable - is in itself an advantage. Thus, all other competitive factors being equal, the adaptable one will tend to win. If two species are equally fit in a certain environment, but one of them is also fit to survive in another environment, the odds are in favor of the more versatile, adaptable, opportunistic one.
What makes you think that we are dominant? Certainly there are other species with more presence in the planet than us, either in number of individuals or in total living mass. Plankton comes to mind, and several insects. By your criteria of ability to propagate, these species are much more successful!
Note my qualifier "dominant large animal". Amongst large animals, humans are a dominant species.
Also, note that the criteria of "ability to propagate" (which isn't my personal criteria, but rather the definition of evolutionary fitness) doesn't mean "the most populous", but rather "the most longevous". A species which breeds very little, but which can adapt to many different environments and deal with all variety of competitors, would be a very successful species by my criteria, even if they never have more than say, a thousand of them alive at once. Having such low numbers is certainly a disadvantage toward longevity, because high numbers helps to make a species more adaptable and able to recover from injury to the population, but if sufficiently counterbalanced by other strong advantages, a low-population species could be extremely successful. If there were only a single individual of some strange species that was nearly immortal and invulnerable but only able to have one child, asexually, every ten thousand years - but its other advantages let it easily survive that long - then that would be a fairly successful species, even if there's only ever two or three of them alive at a time. The low numbers and asexuality are disadvantages, but nigh-immortality and nigh-invulnerability are strong enough advantages to counteract them.
I think we are indeed superior (though I might be a bit biased), but I don't think it's because our numbers, but because of our reasoning capabilities. This would be true even if our presence in the planet was smaller and limited to just certain environments.
I agree that our reasoning abilities are our great advantage as a species, but it is because of the adaptability that such mental prowess gives us that it is an advantage. If we were all observational super-geniuses who could each individually discern the laws of physics as we know them today within less than a lifetime's observations, but weren't clever enough to realize how to take practical advantage of such knowledge to our advantage, then our intellect would be of no use to us.
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"but that shouldn't be the only, or even the default (i.e. built into the OS), way of getting music tracks off a disc."
And in this case it's not. You could always make a disc image of the CD. I don't know if there's a program automatically installed in the OS distribution that allows for this but the libraries to do so are installed by default. The process in question here is the addition of DRM to the audio file as part of the incorrectly named CD rip. As of the current version of Windows, that is most certainly not an OS issue.
I'm not a regular Windows user these days (thank god), so maybe you can answer a question for me.
When you insert an audio CD on a fresh-from-the-store Windows box, what happens? Does it just mount the disc and wait for you to do something with it, or does it automatically launch (or ask if you want to launch) WMP? If the latter - which I would expect from MS's history - then I'd say that this is an OS issue, since the OS is integrating with an application to make that application automatically perform some action. In effect, if Windows by default presumes WMP to be there and offloads functionality to it, then WMP issues are Windows issues.
Ripping CDs is not an OS issue.
Yes it is. Ripping a CD, in it's purest form, is just disk I/O, which is most definitely an OS function, and it should be as simple as "Open mounted CD. Copy tracks to wherever you want them."
Transcoding those to MP3 or your format of choice is not an OS issue, and shouldn't necessarily be done in the same step as ripping the raw data off the disk. Not that I'm philosophically opposed to the creation or use of programs that do this in one step... but that shouldn't be the only, or even the default (i.e. built into the OS), way of getting music tracks off a disc.
Gotta be better than the sheep dealing with it now.
It's worse than that... we've got wolves guarding this henhouse...
Since you're AC you probably won't see this but what the heck...
A scientific "law" is just a theory that is so well-tested that it is taken for granted. A "law" is still a theory, and it is not even a "proven" theory, because something which is proven is, by definition, beyond a doubt and without possibility of falsehood. You use the example of "the law" of thermodynamics (there's actually three in classical thermodynamics). Lets look at one of those for an example of this.
The second "law" of thermodynamics states, roughly, that entropy will always increase, and a system will always tend toward a state of thermal equilibrium. This theory (very well tested and thus considered a "law") makes the prediction that for any closed system, with no energy input or output, you will always observe a net increase in entropy and NEVER observe a net decrease in entropy.
However, since we now understand thermodynamics as the interaction of huge numbers of molecules, we understand that the observed increase in entropy is a statistical effect, and not an inviolable law. It is merely INCREDIBLY MORE LIKELY that any change in a system will increase it's entropy, but it's entirely possible that a system - even a closed system with no outside input - could accidentally wind up momentarily in a low-entropy state. All the molecules in a box full of gas could, by some extraordinary coincidence, wind up against one wall of the box for an instant. It wouldn't last that way very long, since from there it's much more likely to fall back into a high-entropy state than to remain that way. And beyond that, it's vanishingly unlikely that you will ever see that happen in the first place. But we now know that it is possible, and so we know for a fact that the second "law" of thermodynamics has an exception.
What this means is that the theory which is called the second law of thermodynamics has actually been *disproven*. It is not an entirely accurate theory; we know that that is not really the way that things work, the universe being governed by a separate law that dictates the perpetual increase in entropy, but rather that those effects are the cumulative results of many applications of more fundamental laws, which could (but are very unlikely to) result in different effects at times. But like Newton's theory of gravity, the second law of thermodynamics is still a very accurate and useful shorthand approximation, even though we know it's not perfect.
Which brings us back to gravity.
The facts of gravity (as relevant to us here on Earth) are that most things that we drop fall toward the surface of the Earth. It may be a fact that all things anyone ever drops will fall toward the surface of the Earth, but we don't know that fact because we don't know the future. (And now we actually know that that is NOT factual, since things fall in directions other than toward the surface of the Earth; things less dense than air, things sufficiently far from the Earth, etc).
One theory behind this was old Aristotle's. He imagined a universe with a fixed axis of up and down, and every object with it's natural resting place which was either up or down, and laterally at rest; and without an external force acting upon these things, they would tend to move up or down and come to a stop when they reached their resting places. No "force" was involved here; that's just what things tended to do in absence of a force acting upon them, according to Aristotle.
Later on, Newton came along, with his knowledge of a round Earth and a heliocentric solar system, and planets with other moons and such and with all these new observations showing that Aristotle's theory was clearly wrong, he proposed a new type of physics, whereby an object will remain in whatever straight line of motion it was last undertaking unless acted upon by an external force; and ALL objects exert a force upon each other which attracts them to each other. This is the first occurrence of a Theory of Gravity - a theory that there is some sort of "spooky" force a
Sulfur dioxide is hardly a solution
Of course not, it's a compound!
I KNOW people want to believe this. That's fine. It's a belief, great. So is Catholicism. And, like Catholicism, that doesn't mean it's fact. Global warming, right now is a theory with lots of supporting evidence, but no proof. If it had proof, it wouldn't be a theory.
"Gravity" is just a theory. That things denser than air fall toward the surface of the Earth is a fact, as are other facts that relate to gravity. The theory of gravity (pick one... Newton's, Einstein's...) attempts to explain those facts and predict further facts from such an explanation. No amount of watching things fall will EVER "prove" the theory of gravity correct, at least in such a way to change it from a "theory" to a "fact".
Likewise, that the average surface temperature of the Earth is increasing is a fact ("global warming"). There are theories that attempt to explain this. Some of these theories are well-supported by the facts. Others may not be. But none of them will even be "proven" and elevated to anything beyond a theory.
Theories aren't proven. They don't become facts, no matter how much support they receive or how well they hold up. Theories are always theories and being "just a theory" doesn't make an idea any less sound.
if she is making italian food, it's genuine whether or not she is italian
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend in Michigan once. (I'm in California).
He was complaining that since having moved up there from down here, he's damn hard pressed to find any kind of real Mexican food, made by real Mexicans, not the crappy-ass stuff at his local (Michigan) Taco Bell, made by pasty-faced white kids .
I replied to him that if all I can find in any southern California McDonalds is "Mexican food" (by his definition - made by real Mexicans), then he can damn well enjoy authentic American food made by pasty-faced Americans at his local Taco Bell in Michigan.
If there's a relevant Austin Powers quote for this I'm not aware of it. Care to enlighten me?
My previous post is an old joke I used to tell in high school English class...
Karl's really the repudiation of this semi-myth; he learned it from the Democrats, who learned it from the English professors, who got it from philosophers.
As a philosopher, I hope you're not meaning this as a slam against philosophers. A lot of philosophical quibbling about language comes about from the realization in a debate about the analysis of some concept that there is not actually common agreement on what, precisely, is meant by a word. Analysis of a concept is really just the "unpacking" of it's constituent concepts, or contemplating what that concept really means - which is the same thing as how that term is defined. When you're trying to write or speak about ethics, for example, and two random people are arguing about what sort of moral or ethical system would, if followed, result in the most "good", you'll often quickly realize that much of your disagreement comes from the fact that "good" itself is not well-defined. Sometimes it's merely a difference in meaning or definition between the two people, but sometimes one or both parties isn't really clear on what exactly they mean by the term in the first place. They could list off some examples of things which are "good" and "bad", but will often by hard pressed to define precisely what it is that those things have in common which makes them "good" or "bad", and thus some way by which to tell if any random new (person/action/circumstance) is good or bad.
An anecdotal example: the other day I was conversing with a friend who is a moral relativist, and I realized that his position (with which I completely disagree) does logically follow from his definition of "moral". To him, "moral" simply means "what society says you ought to do" - from which is clearly follows that morals are relative, as different societies clearly think that people ought to do different things. But that's not really a very clear definition, because "ought" itself is a normative concept that implies goodness or morality. It's akin to saying "'morality' is whatever society says is moral". That sentence is a useless definition - if I didn't already have some notion of what 'moral' meant, it wouldn't tell me what "moral" means.
My response to him was that I think it's possible to define "moral" and "good" in non-normative terms that refer to concepts other than "morality", "goodness", "ought", etc, in a way which still tracks the normal usage of such words. And once you have such a definition, then you can look objectively at any (person/action/circumstane) and see whether or not it meets that definition, and thus tell whether it's good or not. And if you have that sort of (meaningful, non-circular) definition of "morality", then his position of moral relativism is clearly false.
So a lot of philosophical questions like "is such-and-such X?" (e.g. "is lying always wrong"?) can be rightly answered "that depends on what you mean by 'X'", because a lot of values of "X" in philosophy are abstract concepts that we take for granted, and could possibly name many examples of, but haven't really clearly defined for ourselves. So answering such questions necessitates coming up with a clear, explicit definitions for the concepts involved, which still track the normal usage of the language. Which is where all the quibbling over definitions comes from: someone proposes that 'X' by defined as so, and then someone else counters that if X were defined as so, then this thing that we would normally say is not X would be considered X. But since we (the common users of the language) don't really have a clear definition of the concept to begin with, some things we normally say are X might contradict with the definition of 'X' that seems to underlay most other instances of something being X.
Thus the philosophers' job is to come up with a definition that most users of the language would agree with, knowing the full consequences of that definition. For example, many people might like Kant definitions of "right" and "wrong" at first, but then later disagree with it when they re
I've often pondered how odd it is that one must have excellent oral skills in order to be a master debater, and yet one can be a cunning linguist and perform all of one's work entirely by hand.
i only seem to get phone calls from the police department asking for money. now that's scary...
I've been getting these at work lately as well. I'm an administrative assistant for a business that operates out of my employers' home, so they get personal calls there sometimes as well (remarkably though, most of the calls coming into the house are actual business). The inappropriately high pushiness of these people just astounds me. The typical call will go something like this:
Me: "Castellino Training and BEBA, this is Forrest, can I help you?"
Guy: "Raymond?" (one of my bosses)
Me: "No, this is Forrest. Is there something I can help you with?"
Guy: "I'm collecting donations for $RANDOM_POLICE_CHARITY. Is Raymond available?"
Me: "Not at the moment, sorry." (stock response, they don't like solicitation calls)
Guy: "Is.... Sandra there?" (other boss, Ray's wife)
Me: "No, she's not here either." (most often this and my previous comment are actually true)
Guy: "Well, I'm collecting donations for $RANDOM_POLICE_CHARITY. How much can I put you down for?"
Me: "Uh, this is a business, I just work here. Sorry."
Guy: "Oh it's no problem. We take donation amounts of $100, $50, $20, $10..."
Me: "Sir, I'm just an administrative assistant here."
Guy: "I'll just put you down for our minimum contribution of..."
Me: "Sorry, I can't afford it." (not exactly true, I've got a few thou saved up, but that's very hard earned savings).
Guy: "But it's only..."
Me: "Sir I'm just a student working here part time, I really can't afford it." (I don't like cops anyway)
Guy: "Oh come on..."
Me: *click*
I could understand them *maybe* pushing my employers if they had gotten them on the phone, but hassling an employee at work to make a donation to some charity, much less the very concept of a "minimum contribution" (what, if I don't contribute they're gonna arrest me?)... and then continuing to hassle a poor college student working part-time (I'm not exactly poor, but I come from a poor family and everything I have I earned myself by being very frugal, and I am going to need it to fund the last bit of my education)... I've never seen such aggressive solicitation outside of a used car lot. I guess being police, they're used to telling someone "do this" and having them comply, but fuck 'em. This has happened more than once and it's just not appropriate.
the problem with tribalism though is that you get tribal wars and less than humane tribal customs sometimes. Then again it's not like you don't get wars and inhumanity anyway.
This is what I meant when I said it's not about returning to a "primitive" form of life. It's not about changing our customs or culture, any more than it's about changing our technology. It's just about changing the political structure away from big, impersonal nation-states - where most people feel they can't make a difference, and those at the top don't feel like most people matter anyway - and instead moving toward smaller political units, and small groups of those small units, and small groups of THOSE groups.
You might still get these small "tribes" warring against each other, if some area becomes so full of strife that diplomacy breaks down; but no more than you'd get nations warring against each other. And those small wars would be far less devastating. And you wouldn't have inhumane "tribal customs" any more than you do in modern society - people would keep their cultural traditions as they do now.
It's not about culture or tradition, only political organization.
A driver license is the one thing I don't have.
That's unfortunate, but UPS Driver was just one position I happened to anecdotally know was available without experience required. There are others.
Unless the restaurant turns me down for being overqualified, as several people have warned me. Or are my fears unjustified?
I'm not sure, I've never been turned down for over-qualification, but then I've never worked at a restaurant either. I was lucky enough to get a job as someone's administrative assistant pretty early on and that's lasted me the past four years. Before that I was a sales guy (register jockey basically) at a small retail computer store. So I don't know how the restaurant business goes, but I do know there are plenty of other opportunities. If all else fails, there's a big call center in the area where you answer incoming phone calls and input people's sales data into the computer - I hear that lots of the college students here may decent money off of that.
Are you actually in the Santa Barbara area? Or just wondering about the area? Or just pondering life and work in general and their many trials and tribulations?
But a how-many minute bike ride?
That depends, how fast do you ride? Around here the routes are mostly flat, a few small hills on the foothill routes (duh), but nothing like San Francisco. I can't bike worth crap so it'd probably take me forever (and exhaust me) just to bike one way, but I'm not exactly a model of fitness. YMMV (literally).
And are there always jobs for people who haven't been employed since graduating from college? Most job postings that I've responded to seem to turn me down for lack of paid experience.
Depends on what kind of work you're looking for. My girlfriend is looking for work right now and recently saw a job posting for UPS truck drivers paying $20/hr, no experience necessary, all you need is a licence. I hear that garbage men make about the same thing around here, I don't imagine that requires a lot of experience. Both of those are more than what I'm making - I mostly stick with this job because it's easy, steady, and extremely flexible, which is useful while I'm in college. Then again, what I really want to do for a living is graphic arts work, and I've not had much luck finding a job in that field... but I haven't looked extremely hard either since I'm not looking for full-time career work yet. But entry-level jobs aren't hard to find. What little unemployment rate we have seems to be the homeless people who come here because it's nice weather and there's a lot of rich people with spare change shopping downtown. People even commute to here from other cities to work, cause the pay is good but living elsewhere is cheaper.
That's the downside... it's a wonderful, beautiful, safe little place to live, with enough to do for work and for play, but all that comes at a price - I pay $500/mo for a room in a 4bed/2bath house here, and that's an unbelievable bargain by normal prices (I'm on a very old long-term lease with three of my friends, from back when housing was cheaper). A cheap studio apt runs at least $800/900 here. Houses are easily close to a million. Though I'm to understand that living downtown in a big city like SanFran will run you even more... my aunt who lives up there quoted me an average of $1500 for one of the yardless filing-cabinet apartments we were walking past at the time. All in all I feel I get a nice bang for my buck living here. If I wasn't planning to support a family eventually I'd be quite comfortable living on the level I am right now, and I'm not even out of college yet.
There are some interesting theories about extended childhoods I've read as well. Namely, that young people now (myself included) aren't *EVER* reaching what we would traditionally think of as "adulthood."
The author of the paper claimed that in the past, peoples thought processes and opinions and personalities would become fixed. The author went on to claim that as a byproduct of the rate of change of the world, this fixing process is not occuring in younger people.
I'd argue that in many ways this is a good thing. There are many good qualities that children have that the "real world" beats out of them as they become adults. There are also many good qualities that people learn as they become adults that children don't tend to have. If people can grow up in the good ways (learning to be responsible and considerate) without losing their "innocence" (the positive childlike qualities - curiosity, adaptability, seeing wonder and beauty in the world), then we'll have a much better crop of people.
Unfortunately it looks like we're losing a lot of the good adult qualities too, but then, people throughout history have always been irresponsible and inconsiderate when they could get away with it, so maybe the only difference now is that people can get away with it. I still hold out hope that it's at least theoretically possible to raise a child to retain the good qualities of childhood while also learning the important lessons of adulthood.
There's also an interesting parallel here to something I recall reading once, about humans being a neotenous species of ape - basically, humans are like chips who never "grow up" in many ways, even as we do grow larger and developmentally mature in other ways. Perhaps we've still been sociologically forced to grow up, life's hardships giving us psychological scars which mar the childlike innocence we're capable of, but maybe that necessity is lightening up now, and we might one day see a generation of people who can see the world through children's eyes for their entire lives.
Yes, it's a difficult issue -- do you move to the suburbs so your kids can play outside more freely, but you commute for two hours wasting gas (and time you can spend with your kids), contributing to exurban spawl and living somewhere that should be arable cropland or open space?
City-dwellers always seem to be mentally trapped in this false dichotomy of either "live in the big city" or "live in the suburbs and commute to the big city", with an offhand notion in the back of their heads of "unless you want to live out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no running water much less broadband internet".
What is excluded here, that makes this a false dichotomy, is the people who live in small towns and medium-sized cities which are NOT huge urban jungles, nor are they satellite sprawls around them. Rather they are self-sufficient towns and cities big enough that you can live and work around the same place (a 10-20 minute drive), but not so incredibly dense that you can't let your children run free in the front yard or even, heaven forbid, your neighbor's yards, where their friends live.
For reference and to give you an idea what I'm talking about, I grew up in Ojai, CA (small town, maybe a little too small but good for raising a family), and now live in Santa Barbara, CA (a medium-sized city with an abundance of colleges), though I hope to move back to Ojai when I'm done with school. Most of the cities in California that I've seen seem to be in that range, besides the obvious huge ones (Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc), and there's an hour or two (by freeway) of open countryside and farmland dotted by smaller towns between each of the medium-sized ones. Maybe it's different elsewhere, but out here we're not limited to just "big city" or "suburbs".
The model of the web was broken the instant people started using it as a front-end for remote applications.
The World Wide Web is (ostensibly) a network of hyperlinked documents. Dynamically-generated pages pulled as requests from a database is a bit of a stretch but still basically within that model, as a database record is not so different from a traditional stand-alone document: it's still just data.
But cramming fancy interactive applications (games, etc) into this model is already a bastardization of it, with or without requiring external plugins. The notion of remote applications is fine, and I make great use of a number of "applications" on the web, but they really shouldn't be outputting their interface to what is essentially a document markup language. Imagine using an application whose interface was a read-only Word file that it updated and force-refreshed every time something changed. Sound ridiculous? Web applications aren't much different.
Blue light? This is possibly a stupid question, but isn't sunlight yellow?
Yes, but skylight is blue.
I know it's off-topic, but I just had to share the image that came to mind when I first read this:
:-)
Once upon a time, I was chairing an out-of-town meeting with a roomful of engineers...
Picture, if you will, a meeting room filled with terrified engineers, all cowering behind one end of the table and desperately trying to shield their heads from ballistic chairs, being hurled by a Donkey-Kong like Steve Ballmer, who in turn is jumping up and down upon the far end of the table...
I know the Steve Ballmer jokes are old and off-topic (and I don't mean to compare you to him) but the image of "chairing" a meeting full of engineers was just to hilarious not to share.
Personally I am a proponent of Daniel Quinn's "New Tribal Revolution" which is not the best name for most people, but an accurate one when one understands what Quinn means by it - probably the most controversial word is 'Tribal' - but it is used in the sense that the most successful basic human social unit has always been the tribe - it's why they worked so well for our species for 200,000 years, and the reference has nothing to do with religious belief or physical prosperity.
The short answer to "Where do you GO?" is.. nowhere. You change the world very close to you, your neighborhood, or your town if it's very small. Some people are trying to buy up existing wild land and create small communities of like-minded people to try to build new ways of life (please keep in mind these are NOT communes as they are not ideologically based and not led by a single god-like leader; also, they are not Luddite in any way - most of them have all the modern amenities, just without the monstrous amount of waste that we tend to create), but these are as yet somewhat unstable, and very young communities and it remains to be seen whether they will be stable enough to really provide an example to the rest of the world.
If I had mode points I'd mod you up, since I don't really have that much to add other than what amounts to a simple "me too".
I've long been a fan of organizing the world into tribes of tribes. Basically the notion you're talking about: keep all the modern amenities, run the governments more or less like we do today (in terms of constitutional democracy, mixed economies, etc)... but have the size of each unit of government much smaller, "tribal" sized, on a manageable scale, with as little bureaucracy as possible at each level; but many levels. A many-layered federal system.
Individuals form households. Households form neighborhoods; a leader from each household representing their household's interests in the neighborhood council. The same rules for interpersonal relations applying as the rules for inter-household relations. Neighborhoods then form boroughs or districts, again with a leader from each neighborhood representing them at the district level, so you never have more than a manageably small number of people in one council. These groups would be self-selecting (i.e. secession is always allowable), so "manageable size" is a variable number; when it gets too big to manage the internal conflicts amicably, they can split along whatever lines. (This is basically so that you've never got a group bigger than someone's "monkeysphere"; and everyone in one of the higher-level groups represents the consensus of another small group of sub-monkeysphere size, and so on down the line). Districts then group into cities, cities into counties, counties into provinces, provinces into subcontinental-scale groups, and those in turn into the kind of vast continental-scale governments that the United States (almost) is today. Global-scale relations would naturally be handled the same way.
It's at the same time a "one world government", and a vast decentralization of power. A similar concept I've heard referred to as "panarchy", and I'm becoming rather fond of that term myself. I'm also fond of drawing parallels between the psychological concept of the "inner child", with the notion of an "inner tribe". The same way that pop psych would have people "get in touch with" their "inner child" - thinking and behaving from a more simple and innocent place, without all the complex psychological bullshit layers we've built up as adults - I think that societies could do well to get back in touch with their "inner tribe". Which isn't to say that we should eschew technology and go live in caves, but rather that we should do our best to see through and work around the layers of bureaucratic and political bullshit that we as a society have built up, and deal with each other in a straightforward interpersonal manner whenever possible.
News.com is the name of the organization.
.coms, as is quite often mockingly noted.
Their American site is News.com.com - yes, two
News.com.au is the Australian site for News.com.
Maybe he just used up the last of his mod points elsewhere in this thread and is posting as AC so as not to undo said moderation...
That logic is reversible. All other competitive factors being equal, if two species are equally adaptable, but one of them is also best fit in their current environment, the odds are in favor of the more adapted. So your preference for opportunism is a perception bias, not a logical postulate.
I'm not saying that a species that is a "jack of all trades, ace of none" is superior. Just that a good way of measuring the fitness of a species would be not to look at it in the isolation of the environment it's currently thriving in - in which case all species are perfectly fit, cause they're surviving - but rather to imagine that species being placed in all possible environments (along with other species already adapted to those environments), or imagine the environment changing to different extremes over a long period of time (pausing between changes to allow other species to adapt to those new environments), and see how well it holds up. Species which need to change the least in order to thrive in all those different environments were more fit to begin with.
And yes, this means that bacteria are presently some of the most fit species on the planet. Multicellular life has some advantages it offers, but the bacteria will outlive us all until some sort of multicellular life comes up with an advantage equal to those that the microorganisms have. I think the human brain is a good start, as it allows for rapid adaptation to new and different environmental conditions (and competitors), but even then, it's yet to be proven to be as advantageous as everything the microbes have.
Can you cite one single environment in which you could survive and reproduce while bacteria couldnt't ?
People keep thinking that I'm making some assumption that things which are typically considered "higher" organisms are superior or more fit. Look at the list that I gave... rats, cockroaches, fungi and bacteria... in increasing order of fitness (roughly, based on what I know about those species). Yes, I'd say that some of the best (by evolutionary fitness standards) species around are usually microorganisms. This isn't some kind of human-centric "we're better" thing.
Unfortunately, according to your criterion, the "best" group is precisely the first one which ever appeared ! At the very least, it appeared three *billion* years before the first multicellular animals, to which it is so clearly "superior" (again, according to your own criteria). How's that for a "progression" ?
Which would make sense, since the measure of fitness is "ability to survive the longest". Obviously, those species which have been around the longest are likely going to be some of the most fit around. (I say only "likely" because a newer species *could* be more fit and just not have had the time to let history prove that yet). But it's important not to group all bacteria in as one species. Yes, some sort of bacterium could survive in pretty much any niche, but then, there's some sort of multicellular organism to be found in most niches. But is there *one* bacterial species that can survive (even against competition) in all (or most) of them? If so, then *that* would be a very fit species. And it most likely wasn't the first bacteria around, but rather evolved that way through the fierce, rapid-breeding competition that bacteria face.
Multicellular organisms are capable of some useful things that microorganism aren't, such as more versatile forms of locomotion (I'm curious, and honestly don't know - did bacteria colonize the land before multicellular organisms crawled up out of the sea, or did they follow up there with the plants and/or insects?). But complex multicellular organisms take much longer to evolve, since they grow and breed so much slower than microorganisms. It's no surprise then that multicellular life hasn't yet evolved such versatile forms as the bacteria have.
But the big feature that that sets humans apart (again, not claiming that humans are superior in every way - just that we have a nifty new feature) is the moving of much of our programming from hardware (genes) to software - that is, the development of a mind capable of reason. This in a big way offsets the slow evolution of multicellular life, and combined with our ability to manipulate our environment precisely (opposable thumbs and all) has allowed humans to "adapt" to a comparatively huge variety of environments beyond the one that we evolved for, without actually having to evolve our genes much at all to make that adaptation. Instead, we develop behaviors that modify ourselves and our environments, things like clothing and housing, which allow us to live in places that, without such ingenuity, we could never survive. Our digestive tract is also versatile enough that, given our adaptable behavioral abilities, we're able to figure out new food sources for all these different environments as well, and more effective and efficient ways of collecting that food - without having to genetically evolve such changes at all.
The evolution of the brain has allowed us to modify our behaviors and capabilities far faster than evolution could, and as such, maybe multicellular life form (humans at least) are finally starting to catch up with the versatility and adaptability of bacteria - and bringing the advantages of multicellular structures with them.
There may be an increase in organismal complexity over time, but this increase can be easily explained by a randomwalk phenomenon, without invoking "progress". It's time people get over it.
First off - I'm not saying complexity is progress. See above.
Second - please explain "randomwalk", I've not heard this term before.
Not necessarily. You can be the best at adapting to a new environment, and then being eaten by a highly specialiced predator (that can only live at that environment, but it doesn't matter after you're dead).
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Being good at adapting (also called oportunistic) is just a survival strategy among others, but it's only superior when it makes you survive better than a specialist - i.e. when the environment goes through steep changing.
The only point I was making was that being opportunistic - adaptable - is in itself an advantage. Thus, all other competitive factors being equal, the adaptable one will tend to win. If two species are equally fit in a certain environment, but one of them is also fit to survive in another environment, the odds are in favor of the more versatile, adaptable, opportunistic one.
What makes you think that we are dominant? Certainly there are other species with more presence in the planet than us, either in number of individuals or in total living mass. Plankton comes to mind, and several insects. By your criteria of ability to propagate, these species are much more successful!
Note my qualifier "dominant large animal". Amongst large animals, humans are a dominant species.
Also, note that the criteria of "ability to propagate" (which isn't my personal criteria, but rather the definition of evolutionary fitness) doesn't mean "the most populous", but rather "the most longevous". A species which breeds very little, but which can adapt to many different environments and deal with all variety of competitors, would be a very successful species by my criteria, even if they never have more than say, a thousand of them alive at once. Having such low numbers is certainly a disadvantage toward longevity, because high numbers helps to make a species more adaptable and able to recover from injury to the population, but if sufficiently counterbalanced by other strong advantages, a low-population species could be extremely successful. If there were only a single individual of some strange species that was nearly immortal and invulnerable but only able to have one child, asexually, every ten thousand years - but its other advantages let it easily survive that long - then that would be a fairly successful species, even if there's only ever two or three of them alive at a time. The low numbers and asexuality are disadvantages, but nigh-immortality and nigh-invulnerability are strong enough advantages to counteract them.
I think we are indeed superior (though I might be a bit biased), but I don't think it's because our numbers, but because of our reasoning capabilities. This would be true even if our presence in the planet was smaller and limited to just certain environments.
I agree that our reasoning abilities are our great advantage as a species, but it is because of the adaptability that such mental prowess gives us that it is an advantage. If we were all observational super-geniuses who could each individually discern the laws of physics as we know them today within less than a lifetime's observations, but weren't clever enough to realize how to take practical advantage of such knowledge to our advantage, then our intellect would be of no use to us.