I know it's a joke, but I can't help thinking that in the modern world, you may actually have a point.
There is no geographical isolation in the human species, but it may very well be that the cultural and/or economic polarization of humanity that we see in many aspects of modern life may be the factor that generates the necessary isolation for divergence of the species.
So the question is now, when will we start cracking each others skulls open and feast upon the goo inside?
That depends. It seems to me that space is a rather inhospitable environment. It may well be that survival of the fittest gets a comeback when radiation and muscle atrophy levels soar.
Also, eugenics may be a necessary evil in a spacefaring culture, since survival of the group depends much more on the abilities of the individuals it's composed of. A person with Downs Syndrome has every bit the right to live in an environment as resourceful as Earth, but parents would possibly be forced to get an abortion on the grounds that such a child would never be any good at calculating trajectories or high-tech maintenence and would (horrible to say, I know) basically be a waste of precious oxygen.
However, scientists are also human beings, and when many of them dedicate their entire career to string theory, you might say that they have a little more than a 'good feeling'.
Belief and faith are in my book two different things, and scientists believe a great many things. For a discussion of this see Edge Magazine.
On another note, as many others have posted here, proof of supersymmetry is, unfortunately, not proof of strings. But it is a step closer to one. A physics professor explained to me once that to probe the Planck length, you'd need an energy far beyond anything available to humanity for millenia to come. Something like the entire energy production of a star in its entire lifetime. So unless someone makes a really ingenious hack for this, we'll be stuck here for a while.
And if this one fails to provide supersymmetric particles, I have hopes that the Large Hadron Collider will.
Except criminals don't usually use rifles. You'd have to be a pretty good shot to hit someone with a pistol at 40m, but it should be pretty easy when lying down with a rifle. Or so you'd think.
Hey, this is just in: you can tell if someone is a pedophile by tossing them in the water. If they float, they're pedophiles. If they drown, eh, we had to make sure.
Now, I dislike pedophilia as much as the next guy, but the sort of furious demagogue rhetoric I hear from some people in this forum sounds like someone trying to inflame a mob to lynch a witch to me.
Further more, Emma Watson is 15 years old, which makes her below
age of consent, but only barely, so you are actually justified in your moral outrage legally. And I do understand you stance, being the protector of a little girl and all.
However, expression of sexual attraction to a physically adult human being sounds vulgar to me, but not nearly as vulgar as your threat of death by softball bat that you spewed. I really don't get how an expression of violence should somehow be acceptable, but one of sexual matters should be labelled "sicko".
Now que the "You're a God-damn pederass lover and need to be executed same as them!" flames.
Now, I'm probably going to be flamed due to my gross ignorance on the subject of Penrose and his science, but I did hear one thing about it once that made me a bit irritated: the Quantum Mind.
As far as I understand, his hypothesis is that within each neuron in the brain are certain structures that act as 'links' to the subatomic world of quantum phenomena. That for some reason, the immense complexity and sophisticated architecture of the brain is somehow insufficient to produce a conscious mind. That just sounds wrong for so many reasons. It 'violates' Ockham's Razor. It violates the macroscopic approximation.
Anyway, I haven't actually read any of his stuff, so I might be completely out of line here.
You may commence the flaming. Or even better, explain it to me.
I'd say you grossly underrate the importance of GEB. It's not supposed to be a manual for CS majors or math geeks.
It's written for the masses, and the, as you demeaningly call them, script kiddies.
I'm 24 now, and I also find the things in GEB to be a bit trivial. But when I read it, along with Kaku's 'Hyperspace' at the age of 14, I was awestruck. They almost singlehandedly were the cause of my choice to go into physics.
My point here is that GEB and popular science books are 'mind-molders'. They pack a greater punch in an open mind than an entire year of high school. And that's why popular science is so incredibly important. What's the point in doing basic science if nobody but you cares?
Tired of fundamentalist science haters? Dumb follow-the-leader sheep? Then do something, educate them!
Also, if you happened to be a molecular bioligist or some such, don't you think you gain something by reading a text meant for non-cognitive scientists? You couldn't if it was a full-blown textbook from a field you never studied...
Well, from someone who also spent half a year as a rifleman in Iraq: Me.
There's one of these guys in every outfit. I was the one in mine. Just because you're a soldier doesn't mean you should not be interested in other stuff. I went to Iraq while taking a Bachelor's degree in physics.
And furthermore, yes, you do get shot at every day. I was, and I was in Basrah, which is sorta the most peaceful place in all of Iraq. It just isn't that much of a big deal because the Hajis can't shoot worth shit. They think it's manly to take the butt of your AK-47 and shoot from the hip.
We went and trained the IPS(Iraqi Police Service) one day and found that even when instructed and shooting at fully automatic, these guys had less than a 25% hit percentage at a range of 40 m!
Combine this with being in a (usually) constantly moving vehicle, and you're not very likely to ever be hit. What did make me nervous were the IEDs planted on the roads and the guys with RPGs, but these were rare and I only ever had one fired at me.(range 30m, missed)
I've been thinking about this as well. But maybe it isn't going far enough to say that humanity is taking the earth into a new geological era. A better, be it more speculative, suggestion is that humanity actually has it in their power to usher in a new eon.
My reasoning for this is that eons are defined by whatever principal force that affects the earth most profoundly changes. A short list:
The Hadean(4550 mya - 3800 mya), where the earth was cooling and life was impossible.
The Archaean(3800 mya - 2500 mya), where life originates.
The Proterozoic(2500 mya - 570 mya), where single-celled life proliferates and evolves into forms that permanently changes the makeup of the atmosphere, and thus instills on the world a regulation feedback loop.
The Phanerozoic(570 mya - present day), where advanced life makes it's entry and further increases the level of control life has on its environment.
So my question is, since the passing of eons basically describe the amount of control and impact life has on its environment, isn't the speed and sophistication of humanity's effect on the environment so profound that we should be entering the Anthropean eon?
Join Asterix@home today, and use your idle computing power to help druidic scientists explore the possibility of creating super soldiers through chemical means!
And, coming soon, Obelix@home, which will attempt to genetically alter recipients to be permanently endowed with these abilities.
Warning, may cause lowered intelligence, anti-authoritarianism and increased risk of obesity.
Depending on the size of the company you're working for, your wacko boss may have a boss of his own.
And seeing as you won't be working for this guy anymore, maybe it would be time to let the boss of him in on what you and (probably) your colleagues think of him.
That way, even though you may have burned a bridge with him that was already smoldering, you might be able to maintain a general good standing in the company. You former co-workers, who may themselves be higher-ups later in your career, might even appreciate the gesture.
It can also be a preemptive strike to let him know about your strained relationship with your former boss, so the überboss won't be poisened by his lies...
Why is it that the astronomic community is always up in roars about these planets?
From what I gather, all the planets found are huge brown dwarfs, which are essentially stars with a mass too feeble to go critical and light up. In my book, that's not a planetary system, just a generic star system that happens to have had a little too much angular momentum when it started up. I'd even go as far as saying that several are just degenerate binary stars.
But maybe if someone can dream it, someone can build it.
Professor: "Nothing is imposible if you can imagine it. That's what being a scientist is all about!"
Qbert: "No, that's what being a magical elf is all about!"
And Soyuz 1. And Soyuz 11. But of course, they were russians...
Oh, and the X-15 was a suborbital flight, so that could count if you weren't picky...
And the six separate fatal training accidents...
And the hundreds of exploding unmanned rockets, of course...
Wow, it is pretty dangerous! But, as you say, everything is risk, and I sure as hell would rather die in a space shuttle than falling down the stairs. Yee-HAW!!
It's that kind of moral relativism that motivates terrorists and neocons? Now that's a laughable statement!
Bush, who paints an "Axis of Evil". Osama who calls USA the "Great Satan". These guys are moral relativists?
You're right, it is pretty fundamental philosophy. It's Machiavelli. It's Hitler. It's Platos "Noble Lie". Good and Evil are perpetuated myths that people like Bush and bin Laden use as their power bases to manipulate their followers into righteous frenzies. They are the very concepts that are at the root of all the animosity and self-righteousness. And that's a big part of what's wrong with the world today.
If you don't buy this, which I'd be surprised by if you did, watch the BBCs The Power of Nightmares and I think you'll find that your view on the world today and moral relativism is somewhat misconstrued.
Finally, I'm very sorry if I came across as a merciless mocker. It was not my intention in my post. But of course, you did the same to the great-great-grandparent, didn't you?
... things wouldn't be too different from what they are here and now! There's still good and evil...
My man, you watch entirely too much television if you think good and evil are facets of reality. Black and white hats are concepts that exist only as mythologies in peoples minds; sweet, sweet concepts that makes it terribly easy to label everybody as friend or enemy, but tell me, is there any person who was ever motivated by a conscious desire to be Evil.
But anyway, this is my take on Firefly: Though the setting is basically Western, it doesn't have much in common with old shows like Gunsmoke, where moral boundaries were very clear. Most of the characters, both protagonists and antagonists are motivated simply by survival and moral standpoints are secondary. I also think that the choice of characters in the series is to emphasize this and challenge them to find more to live for than just taking it one day at a time.
1. Map out the world in x and y coordinates.
2. Feed google buzz data into huge neural network.
3. Predict location and magnitude of future events.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's a joke, but I can't help thinking that in the modern world, you may actually have a point.
There is no geographical isolation in the human species, but it may very well be that the cultural and/or economic polarization of humanity that we see in many aspects of modern life may be the factor that generates the necessary isolation for divergence of the species.
So the question is now, when will we start cracking each others skulls open and feast upon the goo inside?
The more intelligent you are, the better education you get, and the more education you get, the less children you have.
However, intelligent people are generally attracted to other intelligent people. There's your isolation right there.
Morlocks and Eloi, baby.
That depends. It seems to me that space is a rather inhospitable environment. It may well be that survival of the fittest gets a comeback when radiation and muscle atrophy levels soar.
Also, eugenics may be a necessary evil in a spacefaring culture, since survival of the group depends much more on the abilities of the individuals it's composed of. A person with Downs Syndrome has every bit the right to live in an environment as resourceful as Earth, but parents would possibly be forced to get an abortion on the grounds that such a child would never be any good at calculating trajectories or high-tech maintenence and would (horrible to say, I know) basically be a waste of precious oxygen.
However, scientists are also human beings, and when many of them dedicate their entire career to string theory, you might say that they have a little more than a 'good feeling'.
Belief and faith are in my book two different things, and scientists believe a great many things. For a discussion of this see Edge Magazine.
On another note, as many others have posted here, proof of supersymmetry is, unfortunately, not proof of strings. But it is a step closer to one. A physics professor explained to me once that to probe the Planck length, you'd need an energy far beyond anything available to humanity for millenia to come. Something like the entire energy production of a star in its entire lifetime. So unless someone makes a really ingenious hack for this, we'll be stuck here for a while.
And if this one fails to provide supersymmetric particles, I have hopes that the Large Hadron Collider will.
Except criminals don't usually use rifles. You'd have to be a pretty good shot to hit someone with a pistol at 40m, but it should be pretty easy when lying down with a rifle. Or so you'd think.
Oh, then forget it. I thought you ment the other kind of CPU.
Hey, this is just in: you can tell if someone is a pedophile by tossing them in the water. If they float, they're pedophiles. If they drown, eh, we had to make sure.
Now, I dislike pedophilia as much as the next guy, but the sort of furious demagogue rhetoric I hear from some people in this forum sounds like someone trying to inflame a mob to lynch a witch to me.
Further more, Emma Watson is 15 years old, which makes her below age of consent, but only barely, so you are actually justified in your moral outrage legally. And I do understand you stance, being the protector of a little girl and all.
However, expression of sexual attraction to a physically adult human being sounds vulgar to me, but not nearly as vulgar as your threat of death by softball bat that you spewed. I really don't get how an expression of violence should somehow be acceptable, but one of sexual matters should be labelled "sicko".
Now que the "You're a God-damn pederass lover and need to be executed same as them!" flames.
Now, I'm probably going to be flamed due to my gross ignorance on the subject of Penrose and his science, but I did hear one thing about it once that made me a bit irritated: the Quantum Mind.
As far as I understand, his hypothesis is that within each neuron in the brain are certain structures that act as 'links' to the subatomic world of quantum phenomena. That for some reason, the immense complexity and sophisticated architecture of the brain is somehow insufficient to produce a conscious mind. That just sounds wrong for so many reasons. It 'violates' Ockham's Razor. It violates the macroscopic approximation.
Anyway, I haven't actually read any of his stuff, so I might be completely out of line here.
You may commence the flaming. Or even better, explain it to me.
I'd say you grossly underrate the importance of GEB. It's not supposed to be a manual for CS majors or math geeks.
It's written for the masses, and the, as you demeaningly call them, script kiddies.
I'm 24 now, and I also find the things in GEB to be a bit trivial. But when I read it, along with Kaku's 'Hyperspace' at the age of 14, I was awestruck. They almost singlehandedly were the cause of my choice to go into physics.
My point here is that GEB and popular science books are 'mind-molders'. They pack a greater punch in an open mind than an entire year of high school. And that's why popular science is so incredibly important. What's the point in doing basic science if nobody but you cares?
Tired of fundamentalist science haters? Dumb follow-the-leader sheep? Then do something, educate them!
Also, if you happened to be a molecular bioligist or some such, don't you think you gain something by reading a text meant for non-cognitive scientists? You couldn't if it was a full-blown textbook from a field you never studied...
</rant>
Well, from someone who also spent half a year as a rifleman in Iraq: Me.
There's one of these guys in every outfit. I was the one in mine. Just because you're a soldier doesn't mean you should not be interested in other stuff. I went to Iraq while taking a Bachelor's degree in physics.
And furthermore, yes, you do get shot at every day. I was, and I was in Basrah, which is sorta the most peaceful place in all of Iraq.
It just isn't that much of a big deal because the Hajis can't shoot worth shit. They think it's manly to take the butt of your AK-47 and shoot from the hip.
We went and trained the IPS(Iraqi Police Service) one day and found that even when instructed and shooting at fully automatic, these guys had less than a 25% hit percentage at a range of 40 m!
Combine this with being in a (usually) constantly moving vehicle, and you're not very likely to ever be hit. What did make me nervous were the IEDs planted on the roads and the guys with RPGs, but these were rare and I only ever had one fired at me.(range 30m, missed)
I've been thinking about this as well. But maybe it isn't going far enough to say that humanity is taking the earth into a new geological era. A better, be it more speculative, suggestion is that humanity actually has it in their power to usher in a new eon.
My reasoning for this is that eons are defined by whatever principal force that affects the earth most profoundly changes. A short list:
The Hadean(4550 mya - 3800 mya), where the earth was cooling and life was impossible.
The Archaean(3800 mya - 2500 mya), where life originates.
The Proterozoic(2500 mya - 570 mya), where single-celled life proliferates and evolves into forms that permanently changes the makeup of the atmosphere, and thus instills on the world a regulation feedback loop.
The Phanerozoic(570 mya - present day), where advanced life makes it's entry and further increases the level of control life has on its environment.
So my question is, since the passing of eons basically describe the amount of control and impact life has on its environment, isn't the speed and sophistication of humanity's effect on the environment so profound that we should be entering the Anthropean eon?
Join Asterix@home today, and use your idle computing power to help druidic scientists explore the possibility of creating super soldiers through chemical means!
And, coming soon, Obelix@home, which will attempt to genetically alter recipients to be permanently endowed with these abilities.
Warning, may cause lowered intelligence, anti-authoritarianism and increased risk of obesity.
Well, I did submit as an anonymous reader...
Whoops.
Depending on the size of the company you're working for, your wacko boss may have a boss of his own.
And seeing as you won't be working for this guy anymore, maybe it would be time to let the boss of him in on what you and (probably) your colleagues think of him.
That way, even though you may have burned a bridge with him that was already smoldering, you might be able to maintain a general good standing in the company. You former co-workers, who may themselves be higher-ups later in your career, might even appreciate the gesture.
It can also be a preemptive strike to let him know about your strained relationship with your former boss, so the überboss won't be poisened by his lies...
Will this be the kind, benign wireless juice making machine, or the bad-mouthed, citrus-raping kind?
Why is it that the astronomic community is always up in roars about these planets?
From what I gather, all the planets found are huge brown dwarfs, which are essentially stars with a mass too feeble to go critical and light up. In my book, that's not a planetary system, just a generic star system that happens to have had a little too much angular momentum when it started up. I'd even go as far as saying that several are just degenerate binary stars.
Wake me up when they find extrasolar rocks.
No no no. The formalism is:
Wired: Cell phone fusion reactors
Tired: Cell phone fuel cells
Expired:Cell phone batteries
But maybe if someone can dream it, someone can build it.
Professor: "Nothing is imposible if you can imagine it. That's what being a scientist is all about!"
Qbert: "No, that's what being a magical elf is all about!"
Well, wonder no more!
And Soyuz 1. And Soyuz 11. But of course, they were russians...
Oh, and the X-15 was a suborbital flight, so that could count if you weren't picky...
And the six separate fatal training accidents...
And the hundreds of exploding unmanned rockets, of course...
Wow, it is pretty dangerous! But, as you say, everything is risk, and I sure as hell would rather die in a space shuttle than falling down the stairs. Yee-HAW!!
It's that kind of moral relativism that motivates terrorists and neocons? Now that's a laughable statement!
Bush, who paints an "Axis of Evil". Osama who calls USA the "Great Satan". These guys are moral relativists?
You're right, it is pretty fundamental philosophy. It's Machiavelli. It's Hitler. It's Platos "Noble Lie". Good and Evil are perpetuated myths that people like Bush and bin Laden use as their power bases to manipulate their followers into righteous frenzies. They are the very concepts that are at the root of all the animosity and self-righteousness.
And that's a big part of what's wrong with the world today.
If you don't buy this, which I'd be surprised by if you did, watch the BBCs The Power of Nightmares and I think you'll find that your view on the world today and moral relativism is somewhat misconstrued.
Finally, I'm very sorry if I came across as a merciless mocker. It was not my intention in my post. But of course, you did the same to the great-great-grandparent, didn't you?
... things wouldn't be too different from what they are here and now! There's still good and evil...
My man, you watch entirely too much television if you think good and evil are facets of reality. Black and white hats are concepts that exist only as mythologies in peoples minds; sweet, sweet concepts that makes it terribly easy to label everybody as friend or enemy, but tell me, is there any person who was ever motivated by a conscious desire to be Evil.
But anyway, this is my take on Firefly: Though the setting is basically Western, it doesn't have much in common with old shows like Gunsmoke, where moral boundaries were very clear. Most of the characters, both protagonists and antagonists are motivated simply by survival and moral standpoints are secondary. I also think that the choice of characters in the series is to emphasize this and challenge them to find more to live for than just taking it one day at a time.
It's just a screenshot from the NORAD command center!
1. Map out the world in x and y coordinates.
2. Feed google buzz data into huge neural network.
3. Predict location and magnitude of future events.
4. ???
5. Profit!
You must be new here.