Many stories *have* good guys, which is a so-called right-wing theme in itself (contrasting with moral relativism.)
That made me just cringe. As someone who wouldn't identify myself as anything but an independent on any political scale, let me suggest the following distinction:
In your "good guys" Sci Fi, the main characters are inherently good. The reader roots for them to accomplish the things they know they should do, which they very often know because they're opposing manifestly evil arch villains -- Sauron or whatever; whereas
In a ("left-wing") morally relativistic writer's world, characters actually have to struggle, with themselves and their consciences, to figure out the right things to do.
One of them is just escapism, the other one is much more satisfying, at least to me.
Apparently you think I'm trying to represent not only all of Christianity but also Satan? Sorry, I can't describe Satan's belief system in the manner you suggest.
But when you start talking "conscience" and "faith" then you get into the realm of psychosis. Is murdering innocent children "good" as long as you have "faith" that you're doing God's Will and a clear conscience?
For what little it's worth, I have the same problem with what you're talking about: "faith" is not in some way a wellspring of natural and total obedience to the will of God, and does not in any way trump or "clear" or obsolete one's conscience. The way authoritarian religions attempt to make religious doctrine into marching orders disturbs me. It leads to people's consciences being bent over ideological forges. I personally would describe that as "evil." Inherently so.
That's hardly a problem specific to Christianity, though.
Orson Scott Card is a mediocre writer with an ego that is completely out of proportion to his talent.
For whatever reason I've had five or six personal run-ins with mid-tier science fiction and fantasy authors. They've all fit your description: okay writers with colossal egos.
One example sent in a bombastic resume for a position we were hiring for. He asked for roughly twice the going market rate on the long-term contract, and his cover letter was two-plus pages of wildly arrogant justification for that. We all sat around reading it aloud and laughing, which was kind of low-class, but it was that unintentionally funny. Perhaps as a consequence of the unvarnished ego represented, he had also failed to edit it with any especial care.
That same guy shows up around the city I work in giving flambuoyant courses on the handling of concealed weapons.
Maybe the trials of getting published just select for people with more-than-healthy egos... But you know, I worked in book stores for a while, and then in a small publishing house, and other genres of book did not seem to be exclusively written by maladjusted ego cases. (Other genres didn't seem to be written almost exclusively by far-right-wing types, either.)
I have an outlaw who wrote a best selling novel maybe ten years ago now.
The movie rights for a book are by far the biggest source of money for any book that can sell them. Authors give up "creative control" and those rights get moved around quite a bit, usually, before anything is made. Meanwhile it's a nice source of income, and as the rights bounce from spot to spot they get sold and re-sold, and the author's intentions drift further from the minds of whoever owns the rights.
I believe my relation's book (and a sequel) have done the Hollywood circle once and are coming around for a second lap. He's made well more than half a million USD on the deal -- I don't ask -- while nothing's happening except for "rumored interest" from people like Eastwood and so on.
Actually Christianity says there is no way to earn your way into heaven.
The Bible has many, many things to say about "good works," and it would be fair to say they at least tend in different directions on this point. Here's a nice little Googled synopsis of the many and varied mentions of "good works" and "works" in the Bible.
For the resulting doctrinal ambiguity, one can also see those same google results (for "good works" and "Bible") to read lots of explanations like:
"Doing good works, obeying God, cannot of itself get anyone saved, but it determines very much who will be saved, and when..."
--The Church of God: Daily Bible Study
The expression "necessary but not sufficient" would just about sum that up. How would those works, then, not be "earning" one's way into heaven? The answer provided is all sorts of murky doctrine about how works are not the cause of salvation, but rather a sign of it. All of which seems to almost completely dispense with individual moral will in favor of obedience to divine will -- a point which I would describe as profoundly disturbing to me personally.
Frankly this seems to me like the sort of mess one comes across when trying to reconcile authoritarian ideas about God with any sort of active moral life. And different Christian groups come to quite different balance points for that. My Southern Baptist relations would see that very, very differently from my Northern Baptist ones.
"Christians" have, over the ages, held slaves, killed innocent people via "witch trials", and even gone to war with other "christians".
In order to be defined as "christian", what is the core belief(s) that distinguishes one from a non-"christian"?
Well, I don't think "Jesus Christ was a divine presence on earth" would be too far from the mark.
I'd never claim to speak for the Christian world, though. A whole lot of that world has long since denied my belonging to it anyway -- including my own relations, who sent haranguing (and intended to be SORT of proselytizing) e-mails to me before my Grandma's funeral last month.
(Not that I'm completely outside the lines for them. I'm not some poor gay man who's facing their efforts at correction, or anything. I just think there's no "faith" of proper humility that isn't essentially a "strong" agnostic's stance: we aren't divine, we can't directly know the divine, but we can use conscience and a measure of faith to try to find our way.)
It's important that you understand that the U.S. constitution guarantees rights specifically to U.S. citizens
How splendidly you've just demonstated my point. This very important distinction would be exactly the sort of thing that, when our hypothetical person in Ireland thought about it, would make her think "Gee, why should the internet be run by a single state that's only concerned about the rights of its own?"
Even more broadly, speaking of choirs and people not in the choir, you went out of your way to tell me you had "no sympathy for" me if I'm not a US citizen. Way to persuade the doubters. Always best to flip them off in the process.
You display real gifts for alienating people you supposedly want to convince of something. Bolton's staff probably has periodic openings due to his managerial flaws; maybe you should apply.
It's only if you define anything approved by God as good and anything he disapproves of as sinful that "all the bad things" are attributed to sin.
The big difference for me lies in whether one regards morality as being inherent to things or not. Either actions are morally right and wrong owing to inherent qualities that make them so, or they're morally right or wrong because an external authority figure has decreed them to be so from above.
The latter position is essentially authoritarian; it's an argument from (God's) strength, not one about inherent justice or morality. The all-powerful God has said X is good and Y is bad, and our role is to follow orders, not to use our consciences to try to figure things out.
As a result of taking that stance, religious movements like American "fundamentalism" wind up talking a lot more about authority -- God's authority, which they claim for themselves based on interpretation of the Bible -- than they do about morality. My Southern Baptist relations' church sermons aren't about the struggle to figure out what's right and wrong, they're essentially about obedience and fulfilling a sort of contract for eternal life they think they have with God. I've sat through them, squirming.
The results can seem pretty arbitrary as they lurch around, can't they? One never knows what odd target their righteousness will light upon next. Will it be single mothers? But then the authority they claim is essentially arbitrary too. It's based on arbitrary force.
Of course, since this is exactly what you do when you adopt a Christian moral code, a Christian studying the Bible will naturally take away a completely different lesson than a non-believer.
It really isn't true that all Christians take the Bible in the way you're suggesting. Christianity is a big place. Every "book" religion has this tension about fundamentalist readings of the text, too.
Somehow my Southern Baptist relations have made Jesus into a figure shutting out everyone not in their congregation; they actually manage to have periodic schismatic breaks within their tiny, small town congregation. (The most recent one was about the role of women. Ugh.) My parents' Northern Baptist church couldn't be more antithetical to that narrow vision, and the sermons and forums there are truly about trying to be morally awake and alive. Both Christian.
the only reason the Internet is free is because the companies controlling its infrastructure are not only in a free country, but in the only country founded on individual rights.
I understand the gist of your post, particularly with respect to consensus and inaction... But this bit of rousing patriotism is a classic example of an argument aimed at the choir and not the people you're supposedly trying to persuade.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone in Shannon, Ireland, who's sitting at a screen and reading the words "Pentagon" and "Internet" in the same sentence. This person followed "carnivore" a bit. She's familiar with the RIAA and MPAA tensions here, and with the general pressure of corporate interests on the net. She also would scoff, frankly, at your describing the US as "the only country founded on individual rights" -- that bit of flag waving would be almost ridiculous in her mind, given what appears to be our current torture policy in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Gitmo.
From the perspective of anyone in Western Europe, have we recently looked like the best guardian of individual freedoms? I'm all for 'em, myself -- the Bill of Rights is tacked to my cube farm wall, right here -- and even I think some measure of international oversight could help ensure my own freedom to information.
And you think this would convince who, exactly, if it falls flat for me?
Architeuthis tentacles aren't "clawed" like others
on
Giant Squid Caught on Film
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· Score: 2, Informative
Of course, before this, the whale had to swim at a very high speed to get rid of the squid's clawed tentacles (this is why some sperm whales have scars on their heads, because you can't just take off a squid's tentacle, you have to rip it off - ouch).
Giant squid don't have clawed tentacles. "Colossal squid" do, but architeuthis does not, for whatever reasons.
There are some smaller species that have truly badass claws on there. Humboldt squid -- which we have on camera as they become curious about a diver, grab him, and easily pull him down below dive depth before deciding maybe the wetsuit isn't worth fooling with -- are around 6 feet long, big and muscular, and equipped with some very serious hardware nested in the middle of their suckers.
Humboldts are seriously aggressive hunters with those claws. The usual signs of cephalopod intelligence, though:
...From the depths of the sea, several five-foot squid are now hovering around Jacquie flashing colors in what we had learned was pre-attack behavior. I could see her readying herself for the impacts. Then, suddenly, they all retreated with blinding speed, leaving us with only one approaching squid. But this was no ordinary squid.
The largest Humboldt ever filmed was about six feet and weighed nearly 100 pounds. The Humboldt closing in on Jacquie was huge. Truly the giant of the shoal, he was nearly seven feet in length and about three feet across, and must have weighed 150 pounds. He seemed to move slower than the others, but then I realized his size merely made him look slower. He came in to about two feet of Jacquie's lure, then stopped cold. He studied the lure, and then I honestly think he saw the monofilament line because he deliberately raised up along it, right up to Jacquie's eye level. Then, he just hovered there, glaring into her faceplate. He did not flash color or attack, he just sat there for about four seconds and studied her.
I was horrified that this monster was going to attack and kill her. She was so much smaller than this creature that I feared she would have no chance of survival against an all-out attack. So I moved in quickly to help, knowing any second the situation could explode. Amazingly, the enormous squid just hovered there, intensely studying her with no aggressive actions. Then, slowly, without concern for my approach, it flapped its huge fins and glided back down to the black depths of the sea. Much to Jacquie's credit, she filmed the entire event.
Aren't giant squids one of those animals that lives so deep that it can't survive without really high pressure (too high for an aquarium)?
The basic answer: no one knows.
People are responding to different flavors of this question all over this post, and seemingly nobody realizes that squid of all sorts of species make a daily migration to and from deep water. As night falls, the largest migration known to us occurs: deep water critters, like squid, come up to shallower water. Sonar goes nuts with the sheer volume of animals that do this.
Giant squid have been encountered alive at the surface. One of the best stories involves Newfoundland fisherman who rowed out to what they thought was a big mass of wreck material at the surface, only to have it heave a huge tentacle up. A kid chopped the thing off. The assumption has always been that architeuthis was at the surface dying when encountered this way, but you know, nobody knows.
The more recently discovered "colossal squid" -- seemingly an even nastier item than architeuthis -- has been encountered at the surface aggressively feeding on Patagonian toothfish. Whether it too spends time in deep water isn't known.
Thank god the hunt is over. That was obviously worth the effort.
Ho ho. Imagine a 60-foot-long alien intelligence that's been living in the earth's oceans for millennia -- the source of countless myths and legends -- that escaped direct observation by modern science except in the form of dead specimens.
Cephalopods are cool stuff. Their nerve fibers are unbelievably thick -- used for all sorts of medical research, because you can actually see their axons with the naked eye in some species -- and fast. They don't have true brains, just big accretions of these ultra-thick nerve fibers, but they display many of the classic signs of intelligence. For example, octopuses are very adept problem solvers when hunting, and squid of lots of different species are astonishingly good at using changing skin coloration for camoflage and, seemingly, for communication.
Cool animals. Super big example that nobody's been able to find. It's worth being curious -- worth lots more than posing as too cool to be interested...
The whale breached a couple of times with the giant squid unrelentingly attached, attacking and maybe feeding.
Your dad's first hand story closely resembles those of whalers who saw Physeters with squid in their mouths. Sperm whales dive deep for Architeuthis, and apparently (it's still not clear) stun them with blasts of sound sent through their enormous heads. (Sperm whales with damaged or malformed lower jaws seem to do just fine -- some indication of their hunting technique.)
However, the feeding is clearly the other way around. Giant squid beaks routinely show up in the whales' stomachs. It also bears noting that sperm whales are apparently the largest classic predators ever known on earth -- certainly the largest now unless you count blue whales "preying" through their baleen -- and that they vastly outweigh giant squid. Impressive as it sounds, a 60-foot squid (the longest ever examined was something like 59 feet) is still no match for the whale. Whales eat these things.
(And the lifeboats thing is probably apocryphal. Like any other legendary monster, giant squid have a lot of myths around them. One did bump a racing catamaran a couple of years ago -- during a "Jules Verne" oceanic race, no less -- seemingly accidentally. If it was that easy to find them, though, this story would have happened long since. The only quasi-documented encounter in a row boat that I know of was some Newfoundland fishermen in the late 1800s, IIRC.)
I wish we had line item veto at the national level. It would keep crap like this from ever seeing the light of day.
What it would do is give an opposing-party President with a narrow disadvantage in congress the power to kill stuff like this, potentially, yes. Clinton would have fit that profile. You think for a minute that W. Bush would expend political capital to do the right thing here? That wouldn't happen, period.
The argument that line items would either wipe out non-germane riders or eliminate pork is laughably naive. It would become a selectively-used partisan weapon for the party who had the White House.
Minnesota's 2003 concealed weapons law was found to violate the state's constitutional requirement that a bill have only one "subject."
That requirement is, needless to say, selectively enforced.
You've got to be a big Orwell reader. How one determines the boundaries of a "subject" or "spirit" when it comes to the propagandistic law titles we've gotten to over the last 20 years, I could not imagine. Defining the edges of a law's "spirit" would make for great C-Span, you're right. Lots more "I love America" acts, too.
Birders also know Soras as a quirky sort of rail. You can see them out in daylight sometimes, if you're hiking in a wetland area; they're a little less reclusive than other rail species.
This idea is really starting to annoy me... I've never, in 3 years, heard "He'll just play it at a friend's."
Rumors of rampant parental idiocy in our society are drastically overstated. People watch a little too much Jerry Springer or something. Basically when parents can be there, most of us sincerely try.
(If you want to get at the whole raft of problems people have raising their kids responsibly, try figuring out ways in which to encourage businesses to give their workers "flex time" arrangements. The real change people are perceiving is that both parents work now; that's what's changed in the last couple of generations. It's an economic thing. If our economic situation has changed enough that we all need full time jobs, we need to figure out ways to have parents around for the kids under those circumstances. That'll get at a ton of the anxieties people have about our society right now.)
Would increasing a state's sales tax by.01% provide enough revenue to send each household one of these emergency radios as well as 2 weeks worth of MRE's, water, and a first-aid kit, every year?
Or better yet, hey, we could fund some sort of central agency that could be responsible for getting people timely aid in an emergency. That system's worked pretty well over many years and administrations until the negligence and class-blindered indifference of the current round of political appointees made it look incompetent. Little thing called FEMA.
What better way to help prevent the large scale suffering that so many endured during Katrina while waiting for rescue efforts.
Keep them from having to wait for those efforts by electing people with a sense of responsibility and a conscience rather than a solipsistic authoritarian fantasy of a moral system?
these crazy convergence devices... (that don't) do any of them well!
A timeless cry from one end of that pendulum.
The flip side of this sentiment would be to look for something we could make that has a badly convoluted, trying-to-do-too-much interface now. Apple (or whoever) could then simplify the device, producing something with the iPod's attention to simplicity and pleasure in actual use.
My perennial candidate would be alarm clocks. Current alarm clocks are almost spectacularly badly designed -- both for their basic functions and because they're trying to be little radios and ambient noise makers and so on. Look at whatever buzzer's on your night stand right now, and think about how many finicky buttons and switches and wheels and sliders it has, all of them badly labeled and next to impossible to work with when you're sleepy and your glasses are off. (The radio frequency wheels in particular are inconceivably stupidly bad. So many of them have volume and tuning wheels you can't even tell apart. Eck.)
How Apple would manage to treat Alarm Clocks as an adjunct to the whole iLife-style bundle of technology apps is an open question, but there are lots of ways to handle it, seemingly. Use your iTunes library for the wakeup music. Add alarms in the underused (and underdeveloped) iCal. And so on.
Steve J, or someone at a watch company, please make me an elegant alarm clock. I'm pretty sure there's a colossal market that would buy one for $5 more than the competition if only it was a pleasure to use -- and you have NO competition when it comes to user interface design. Make it small enough to work as a travel alarm -- doesn't seem too hard in prospect.
Talk like a pirate day was, what, two days ago? are you marooned in the past? Did you post that by bottle?
Also, on Earth, piracy is actually a worsening problem in areas like the Malacca straits. Our climate is getting warmer, though. So it's not an inverse correlation at all, is it? Huh?? Seems like pirates might be contributing to the problem.
Personally I think we have a much bigger set of information -- across multiple planets and decades of data -- showing that unmanned interplanetary probes inhibit White Shark attacks. When was the last time we had a shark attack problem with one of our probes? Never. Not one. Also there haven't been any problems with elephant stampedes. And have there been any race riots on Mars, or Saturn, or anywhere else we've sent a wee robot? Nope.
If only we'd kept these probes at home, they could be used to address pressing social problems like those. Instead the government throws money at these military industrial complex boondoggles. Sheesh.
Also, the color names sound like they are marketed to 8 year olds.
Which maybe tells us how lost IBM has been about how to broaden their "market space."
We all "get" that the look and feel is part of that whole brand thing that companies kill for, and that IBM offering two color choices maybe, maybe rates a news item based on their brand being associated with black cases. But those earlier color names go to the problem here, which is that IBM doesn't know how to get past the limited market they have now.
As a strategy for broadening the brand, their approach seems both extremely conservative and reactive. When did the G3 iMacs have their many-fruity-colors phase? "Mars Red Metallic" was trying to hop on that little trend probably. This titanium thing would be how far after that breaking wave? And to even do it, the decision has to be out of IBM's hands.
Pretty lukewarm for daring new design choices. Pretty IBM-as-dinosaur-ish, really.
Slashdot Mirror
That made me just cringe. As someone who wouldn't identify myself as anything but an independent on any political scale, let me suggest the following distinction:
One of them is just escapism, the other one is much more satisfying, at least to me.
(On the outside chance you read this even though it was an AC post -- yes.)
Apparently you think I'm trying to represent not only all of Christianity but also Satan? Sorry, I can't describe Satan's belief system in the manner you suggest.
But when you start talking "conscience" and "faith" then you get into the realm of psychosis. Is murdering innocent children "good" as long as you have "faith" that you're doing God's Will and a clear conscience?
For what little it's worth, I have the same problem with what you're talking about: "faith" is not in some way a wellspring of natural and total obedience to the will of God, and does not in any way trump or "clear" or obsolete one's conscience. The way authoritarian religions attempt to make religious doctrine into marching orders disturbs me. It leads to people's consciences being bent over ideological forges. I personally would describe that as "evil." Inherently so.
That's hardly a problem specific to Christianity, though.
For whatever reason I've had five or six personal run-ins with mid-tier science fiction and fantasy authors. They've all fit your description: okay writers with colossal egos.
One example sent in a bombastic resume for a position we were hiring for. He asked for roughly twice the going market rate on the long-term contract, and his cover letter was two-plus pages of wildly arrogant justification for that. We all sat around reading it aloud and laughing, which was kind of low-class, but it was that unintentionally funny. Perhaps as a consequence of the unvarnished ego represented, he had also failed to edit it with any especial care.
That same guy shows up around the city I work in giving flambuoyant courses on the handling of concealed weapons.
Maybe the trials of getting published just select for people with more-than-healthy egos... But you know, I worked in book stores for a while, and then in a small publishing house, and other genres of book did not seem to be exclusively written by maladjusted ego cases. (Other genres didn't seem to be written almost exclusively by far-right-wing types, either.)
The movie rights for a book are by far the biggest source of money for any book that can sell them. Authors give up "creative control" and those rights get moved around quite a bit, usually, before anything is made. Meanwhile it's a nice source of income, and as the rights bounce from spot to spot they get sold and re-sold, and the author's intentions drift further from the minds of whoever owns the rights.
I believe my relation's book (and a sequel) have done the Hollywood circle once and are coming around for a second lap. He's made well more than half a million USD on the deal -- I don't ask -- while nothing's happening except for "rumored interest" from people like Eastwood and so on.
"Selling out" maybe, but it does pay the rent.
The Bible has many, many things to say about "good works," and it would be fair to say they at least tend in different directions on this point. Here's a nice little Googled synopsis of the many and varied mentions of "good works" and "works" in the Bible.
For the resulting doctrinal ambiguity, one can also see those same google results (for "good works" and "Bible") to read lots of explanations like:
The expression "necessary but not sufficient" would just about sum that up. How would those works, then, not be "earning" one's way into heaven? The answer provided is all sorts of murky doctrine about how works are not the cause of salvation, but rather a sign of it. All of which seems to almost completely dispense with individual moral will in favor of obedience to divine will -- a point which I would describe as profoundly disturbing to me personally.
Frankly this seems to me like the sort of mess one comes across when trying to reconcile authoritarian ideas about God with any sort of active moral life. And different Christian groups come to quite different balance points for that. My Southern Baptist relations would see that very, very differently from my Northern Baptist ones.
"Christians" have, over the ages, held slaves, killed innocent people via "witch trials", and even gone to war with other "christians".
In order to be defined as "christian", what is the core belief(s) that distinguishes one from a non-"christian"?
Well, I don't think "Jesus Christ was a divine presence on earth" would be too far from the mark.
I'd never claim to speak for the Christian world, though. A whole lot of that world has long since denied my belonging to it anyway -- including my own relations, who sent haranguing (and intended to be SORT of proselytizing) e-mails to me before my Grandma's funeral last month.
(Not that I'm completely outside the lines for them. I'm not some poor gay man who's facing their efforts at correction, or anything. I just think there's no "faith" of proper humility that isn't essentially a "strong" agnostic's stance: we aren't divine, we can't directly know the divine, but we can use conscience and a measure of faith to try to find our way.)
How splendidly you've just demonstated my point. This very important distinction would be exactly the sort of thing that, when our hypothetical person in Ireland thought about it, would make her think "Gee, why should the internet be run by a single state that's only concerned about the rights of its own?"
Even more broadly, speaking of choirs and people not in the choir, you went out of your way to tell me you had "no sympathy for" me if I'm not a US citizen. Way to persuade the doubters. Always best to flip them off in the process.
You display real gifts for alienating people you supposedly want to convince of something. Bolton's staff probably has periodic openings due to his managerial flaws; maybe you should apply.
The big difference for me lies in whether one regards morality as being inherent to things or not. Either actions are morally right and wrong owing to inherent qualities that make them so, or they're morally right or wrong because an external authority figure has decreed them to be so from above.
The latter position is essentially authoritarian; it's an argument from (God's) strength, not one about inherent justice or morality. The all-powerful God has said X is good and Y is bad, and our role is to follow orders, not to use our consciences to try to figure things out.
As a result of taking that stance, religious movements like American "fundamentalism" wind up talking a lot more about authority -- God's authority, which they claim for themselves based on interpretation of the Bible -- than they do about morality. My Southern Baptist relations' church sermons aren't about the struggle to figure out what's right and wrong, they're essentially about obedience and fulfilling a sort of contract for eternal life they think they have with God. I've sat through them, squirming.
The results can seem pretty arbitrary as they lurch around, can't they? One never knows what odd target their righteousness will light upon next. Will it be single mothers? But then the authority they claim is essentially arbitrary too. It's based on arbitrary force.
Of course, since this is exactly what you do when you adopt a Christian moral code, a Christian studying the Bible will naturally take away a completely different lesson than a non-believer.
It really isn't true that all Christians take the Bible in the way you're suggesting. Christianity is a big place. Every "book" religion has this tension about fundamentalist readings of the text, too.
Somehow my Southern Baptist relations have made Jesus into a figure shutting out everyone not in their congregation; they actually manage to have periodic schismatic breaks within their tiny, small town congregation. (The most recent one was about the role of women. Ugh.) My parents' Northern Baptist church couldn't be more antithetical to that narrow vision, and the sermons and forums there are truly about trying to be morally awake and alive. Both Christian.
I understand the gist of your post, particularly with respect to consensus and inaction... But this bit of rousing patriotism is a classic example of an argument aimed at the choir and not the people you're supposedly trying to persuade.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone in Shannon, Ireland, who's sitting at a screen and reading the words "Pentagon" and "Internet" in the same sentence. This person followed "carnivore" a bit. She's familiar with the RIAA and MPAA tensions here, and with the general pressure of corporate interests on the net. She also would scoff, frankly, at your describing the US as "the only country founded on individual rights" -- that bit of flag waving would be almost ridiculous in her mind, given what appears to be our current torture policy in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Gitmo.
From the perspective of anyone in Western Europe, have we recently looked like the best guardian of individual freedoms? I'm all for 'em, myself -- the Bill of Rights is tacked to my cube farm wall, right here -- and even I think some measure of international oversight could help ensure my own freedom to information.
And you think this would convince who, exactly, if it falls flat for me?
Giant squid don't have clawed tentacles. "Colossal squid" do, but architeuthis does not, for whatever reasons.
There are some smaller species that have truly badass claws on there. Humboldt squid -- which we have on camera as they become curious about a diver, grab him, and easily pull him down below dive depth before deciding maybe the wetsuit isn't worth fooling with -- are around 6 feet long, big and muscular, and equipped with some very serious hardware nested in the middle of their suckers.
Humboldts are seriously aggressive hunters with those claws. The usual signs of cephalopod intelligence, though:
http://diver.net/seahunt/fend/f_scottc.htm
The basic answer: no one knows.
People are responding to different flavors of this question all over this post, and seemingly nobody realizes that squid of all sorts of species make a daily migration to and from deep water. As night falls, the largest migration known to us occurs: deep water critters, like squid, come up to shallower water. Sonar goes nuts with the sheer volume of animals that do this.
Giant squid have been encountered alive at the surface. One of the best stories involves Newfoundland fisherman who rowed out to what they thought was a big mass of wreck material at the surface, only to have it heave a huge tentacle up. A kid chopped the thing off. The assumption has always been that architeuthis was at the surface dying when encountered this way, but you know, nobody knows.
The more recently discovered "colossal squid" -- seemingly an even nastier item than architeuthis -- has been encountered at the surface aggressively feeding on Patagonian toothfish. Whether it too spends time in deep water isn't known.
Ho ho. Imagine a 60-foot-long alien intelligence that's been living in the earth's oceans for millennia -- the source of countless myths and legends -- that escaped direct observation by modern science except in the form of dead specimens.
Cephalopods are cool stuff. Their nerve fibers are unbelievably thick -- used for all sorts of medical research, because you can actually see their axons with the naked eye in some species -- and fast. They don't have true brains, just big accretions of these ultra-thick nerve fibers, but they display many of the classic signs of intelligence. For example, octopuses are very adept problem solvers when hunting, and squid of lots of different species are astonishingly good at using changing skin coloration for camoflage and, seemingly, for communication.
Cool animals. Super big example that nobody's been able to find. It's worth being curious -- worth lots more than posing as too cool to be interested...
Your dad's first hand story closely resembles those of whalers who saw Physeters with squid in their mouths. Sperm whales dive deep for Architeuthis, and apparently (it's still not clear) stun them with blasts of sound sent through their enormous heads. (Sperm whales with damaged or malformed lower jaws seem to do just fine -- some indication of their hunting technique.)
However, the feeding is clearly the other way around. Giant squid beaks routinely show up in the whales' stomachs. It also bears noting that sperm whales are apparently the largest classic predators ever known on earth -- certainly the largest now unless you count blue whales "preying" through their baleen -- and that they vastly outweigh giant squid. Impressive as it sounds, a 60-foot squid (the longest ever examined was something like 59 feet) is still no match for the whale. Whales eat these things.
(And the lifeboats thing is probably apocryphal. Like any other legendary monster, giant squid have a lot of myths around them. One did bump a racing catamaran a couple of years ago -- during a "Jules Verne" oceanic race, no less -- seemingly accidentally. If it was that easy to find them, though, this story would have happened long since. The only quasi-documented encounter in a row boat that I know of was some Newfoundland fishermen in the late 1800s, IIRC.)
The flesh is highly ammoniac. Butter won't cover that.
What it would do is give an opposing-party President with a narrow disadvantage in congress the power to kill stuff like this, potentially, yes. Clinton would have fit that profile. You think for a minute that W. Bush would expend political capital to do the right thing here? That wouldn't happen, period.
The argument that line items would either wipe out non-germane riders or eliminate pork is laughably naive. It would become a selectively-used partisan weapon for the party who had the White House.
That requirement is, needless to say, selectively enforced.
You've got to be a big Orwell reader. How one determines the boundaries of a "subject" or "spirit" when it comes to the propagandistic law titles we've gotten to over the last 20 years, I could not imagine. Defining the edges of a law's "spirit" would make for great C-Span, you're right. Lots more "I love America" acts, too.
Wouldn't make a bad starting point for a company logo of some sort.
Rumors of rampant parental idiocy in our society are drastically overstated. People watch a little too much Jerry Springer or something. Basically when parents can be there, most of us sincerely try.
(If you want to get at the whole raft of problems people have raising their kids responsibly, try figuring out ways in which to encourage businesses to give their workers "flex time" arrangements. The real change people are perceiving is that both parents work now; that's what's changed in the last couple of generations. It's an economic thing. If our economic situation has changed enough that we all need full time jobs, we need to figure out ways to have parents around for the kids under those circumstances. That'll get at a ton of the anxieties people have about our society right now.)
It's a colossal market, totally being underserved by complacent companies whose user interfaces were designed in a funhouse mirror.
Try reading my post again with the irony mod pack installed, friend. Holy Cheeze-its.
Or better yet, hey, we could fund some sort of central agency that could be responsible for getting people timely aid in an emergency. That system's worked pretty well over many years and administrations until the negligence and class-blindered indifference of the current round of political appointees made it look incompetent. Little thing called FEMA.
What better way to help prevent the large scale suffering that so many endured during Katrina while waiting for rescue efforts.
Keep them from having to wait for those efforts by electing people with a sense of responsibility and a conscience rather than a solipsistic authoritarian fantasy of a moral system?
A timeless cry from one end of that pendulum.
The flip side of this sentiment would be to look for something we could make that has a badly convoluted, trying-to-do-too-much interface now. Apple (or whoever) could then simplify the device, producing something with the iPod's attention to simplicity and pleasure in actual use.
My perennial candidate would be alarm clocks. Current alarm clocks are almost spectacularly badly designed -- both for their basic functions and because they're trying to be little radios and ambient noise makers and so on. Look at whatever buzzer's on your night stand right now, and think about how many finicky buttons and switches and wheels and sliders it has, all of them badly labeled and next to impossible to work with when you're sleepy and your glasses are off. (The radio frequency wheels in particular are inconceivably stupidly bad. So many of them have volume and tuning wheels you can't even tell apart. Eck.)
How Apple would manage to treat Alarm Clocks as an adjunct to the whole iLife-style bundle of technology apps is an open question, but there are lots of ways to handle it, seemingly. Use your iTunes library for the wakeup music. Add alarms in the underused (and underdeveloped) iCal. And so on.
Steve J, or someone at a watch company, please make me an elegant alarm clock. I'm pretty sure there's a colossal market that would buy one for $5 more than the competition if only it was a pleasure to use -- and you have NO competition when it comes to user interface design. Make it small enough to work as a travel alarm -- doesn't seem too hard in prospect.
Seriously.
Also, on Earth, piracy is actually a worsening problem in areas like the Malacca straits. Our climate is getting warmer, though. So it's not an inverse correlation at all, is it? Huh?? Seems like pirates might be contributing to the problem.
Personally I think we have a much bigger set of information -- across multiple planets and decades of data -- showing that unmanned interplanetary probes inhibit White Shark attacks. When was the last time we had a shark attack problem with one of our probes? Never. Not one. Also there haven't been any problems with elephant stampedes. And have there been any race riots on Mars, or Saturn, or anywhere else we've sent a wee robot? Nope.
If only we'd kept these probes at home, they could be used to address pressing social problems like those. Instead the government throws money at these military industrial complex boondoggles. Sheesh.
Which maybe tells us how lost IBM has been about how to broaden their "market space."
We all "get" that the look and feel is part of that whole brand thing that companies kill for, and that IBM offering two color choices maybe, maybe rates a news item based on their brand being associated with black cases. But those earlier color names go to the problem here, which is that IBM doesn't know how to get past the limited market they have now.
As a strategy for broadening the brand, their approach seems both extremely conservative and reactive. When did the G3 iMacs have their many-fruity-colors phase? "Mars Red Metallic" was trying to hop on that little trend probably. This titanium thing would be how far after that breaking wave? And to even do it, the decision has to be out of IBM's hands.
Pretty lukewarm for daring new design choices. Pretty IBM-as-dinosaur-ish, really.