But it happens more often in some than others, which was his point, and that's the best you can hope for. There is no way to close every loophole, and the quest to do just that would result only in widespread dissatisfaction and likely revolution.
Without a doubt, it would be very difficult to put someone into a position like CIO without the person having had much in the way of experience with large and successful companies. If they selected someone that was not of that sort, they would be asking some other very serious questions like "what makes you qualified for this position?"
This argument might have merit except that he was employed by Google as a lobbyist. He will be aware of new technologies, but only those developed by Google.
I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
eating a lot of seaweed, by itself, is unlikely to produce this result in an individual.
There was a story here a while ago which said you swap something like 50 species whenever you kiss someone, so here's your excuse to make out with a cute Japanese girl, provided she's cool with geeky gaijin.
"You'll be helping to spread Japanese culture, on several levels..."
is it really a surprise that the body will boost its immunity when it detects a possible disease threat? I think we have a word that already accounts for that: evolution.
What is novel is the mechanism. We know that once nasties get into the body it starts pumping up resistance. Yet these people only looked at pictures. That means that a specific pattern of light can boost your immune system. That's crazy!
There are also a number of very good reason why people thought the radio episode was actual news reporting, outlined in this Radiolab episode.
There was a disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast, which most people missed. There was a (fictitious) musical act "scheduled" for the show. The music was first interrupted to bring "breaking news" of "explosions seen on Mars." The next interruption reported that the explosions were rockets leaving the surface of mars, and a third said they were heading towards earth. Every time a report was finished, the music returned, leaving people to wonder. Every time there was another interruption, the whole thing gained more credibility.
Then they brought in actors portraying astronomers, government officials, and others, all of this offered up with the seriousness of the Hindenburg coverage--which Welles listed as one of his inspirations. One of the freakier parts that gave me chills even knowing it was fake is an on-scene reporter at the landing site. He sees something come out of the spacecraft, and it attacks the soldiers in front of him (with requisite gunfire and other sound effects). The reporter is emotionally distraught but still trying to report when suddenly---silence, he is cut off in mid-sentence. There's a good five or ten seconds of silence, which is almost unheard of on radio even today.
Welles knew what he was doing. He knew that War of the Worlds presented as originally told would be stale and get no listeners. He wanted to trick people, though he originally denied it, in order to teach them not to believe everything they see or hear from mass media. The lesson has obviously not been learned--people have pulled the same stunt successfully at least 3 times, discussed on Radiolab along with the occasionally disastrous results, and this makes a fourth.
I heard a Radiolab episode all about War of the Worlds, the original broadcast and repeat performances all over the world. "From Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador." This doesn't surprise me in the least, and it wouldn't be any more surprising if it happened in Kansas or California. The backlash has been worse than the threat of lawsuits--several employees of the news agency in Quito were killed when people realized they'd been tricked and stormed the news building, setting fire to it with them inside.
Welles' point, explained by him in an audio clip during the show, was to get people to realize that they can't automatically believe what they hear on the radio or any form of mass media. It's a lesson that never sank in, which is what makes it possible to continue pulling these stunts.
While this seems to be the case, I don't think it's right. I'm only pointing out how ridiculous it is to insinuate that the US Bill of Rights is applicable in a place that isn't the US, and is a war zone to boot. I thought it was pretty obvious, but...
It's probably worth mentioning that Jesus rarely (if ever?) talks about a separate "heaven" that you go to after you die. Most if not all of the times he uses the word it is in the phrase "kingdom of heaven," which he said is present in each of his followers. In context with his other teachings it seems to say that the way people should be living is to make the lives of those around them better. If everybody followed that ideal we'd be living in a utopia, i.e., heaven.
The mainstream Christian idea of an angelic afterlife came about some time later.
You won't find a warm reception here, as you've no doubt discovered by the responses.
We are collectively at a point where science is a dominant force in our culture, as the Church was in the Middle Ages. By this I simply mean it is poorly understood by most people yet most people put a great amount of faith into it, all sorts of popular myths have arisen around it (including the myth that it is a unified whole), and, this is the big one, it is not to be questioned. Lip service is paid to the basic tenet that "this is the best working model of what we observe; reality could be very different" while in practice anything that goes against what is already "settled" is laughed out of town. You won't get physically burned at the stake, something to be thankful for, yet the metaphorical practice is alive and well. This rigid thinking wasn't always the case (Newton wasn't the only one to dabble in alchemy) and it's more a trait of our aging culture than the fault of science--witness the increasing polarization of attitudes and ideals across the spectrum of human thought.
Like you, I do not say this to demean the myriad achievements of the age, but it will no doubt be taken that way by some. It's very hard not to become adversarial when the prevailing attitude is that Science is some automatic process independent of human ingenuity, and Science will solve all of our problems, and Science can achieve absolutely anything, and Science is the only truth. For an excellent critique of the practice, read Jacques Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment ("entertainment" is used in the sense "to entertain a thought"). It's out of print and some of the chapters dealing with behavioral science are outdated, yet the rest of the book's statements and critiques are as valid as the day they were written, if not more so due to the increase of rigid thinking I mentioned above. Barzun is as far as I can tell not a religious person, though some here would accuse him of "magical thinking" due to his respect for and appreciation of art, and his credentials as a historian and cultural critic are unassailable. I say this to make it clear that although the book is critical of our perception of science, it is in no way "anti-science." Every thinker owes it to himself to give it a try--you won't always agree with his conclusions, but you will find yourself thinking more clearly about science.
Now, to answer your question =) If spiritual experiences are real, in the sense of "there is a God/many gods/beings who don't follow our physical rules" as opposed to "people experience things which strike them as spiritual," then they must also be physical and material because we are physical and material. Dualism is dead, as TapeCutter wrote. Yet here we are nearly a century after quantum phenomena were discovered and we're still not sure what to make of them. We have no grand unified theory, and few people expect that we will anytime soon. The study of consciousness is in its infancy. The point is, we know a hell of a lot, and it's made our physical existence easier, but we're nowhere near getting to the bottom of things. Lots of science fiction has been written that puts mystical or spiritual things in a scientific frame, some of it even worth reading. Reality could turn out to be far stranger.
So, in theory, science could unveil the mechanics of the spiritual, if it exists. Whether it would know what it has discovered is another matter. Science is in the business of breaking wholes down into constituent parts, and learning about the whole through the parts. In addition, science works best in aggregate: the individual is always an anomaly; there is no average human being. Controlled, repeatable experiments must be set up, yet no such thing can exist in the human consciousness; witness the derision of the "soft" sciences like sociology. It all works very well for gross mechanical things but not for things that are unique to the individual, like emotional or spiritual significance. W
What if you can't tell the difference? Seems plausible to me, what with lobbyists writing legislation in addition to government takeovers...maybe we ought to tell our fearless leaders (or their corporate masters) to pick one strategy so we can label it a little more easily.
Tony Campolo, a Christian evangelist, put it well when he was on The Colbert Report. Paraphrasing, "Mixing religion with politics is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It doesn't really hurt the cow manure, but it ruins the ice cream."
I'm sorry you feel that 30 million fellow citizens and counting without health insurance suddenly being able to get insurance is such a burden for you when you probably already have health insurance and so the only way it will affect you is by lowering your premiums, oh the corruption!
This is simply not true. It will lower premiums for some people, but the projected difference is $100 less per year. Some groups of people will have their premiums raised by $300 or even a few thousand per year. And 30 million people who are uninsured will now be forced to buy private health insurance--sure, some will be assisted with subsidies, but certainly not all or even most.
Look at this analysis of the bill by FireDogLake, a well-known progressive website. They list 18 myths about the bill, two of which you just repeated, along with the unfortunate truth of the matter. I said it before: it's a turd of a bill, and it remains so no matter what your spot on the political spectrum is.
Jenkins seems to be quite similar the other female setting, Mrs. Miller, who sings popular music instead of classical but is equally entertainingly awful.
I understand how this works in the land of mathematics. Does it play out the same way in reality? I didn't think to specify that I meant knot in the every-day sense of "piece of rope with two ends on it wrapped around itself," not in the mathematical sense of "a closed loop with a tangle you can't get rid of without cutting." You can see my ignorance of the terminology on display here...but now I'm not sure if you meant in the mathematical sense either, given that you wrote "you need at least 2 extra dimensions in order to *make* the knot."
What I mean to ask is this. An ideal 1D line can't be knotted in 2D because it can't get around itself without a 3rd dimension. I get that. Yet a piece of string is a real, 3D object that can and must be manipulated in all three dimensions to form a knot. I was led to believe that this wouldn't work if 4D is accessible because the extra dimension would let it be tugged around itself there. I imagine to us it would look something like two crossed pieces just sort of disappearing, then reappearing uncrossed. Anyway, I don't comprehend all of the mechanics but that makes sense to me.
But what it also seems to imply to me is that for any real 3D knottable (that is, string-like) object, knots (in the everyday sense) are not possible if forces in 4D can act on them. Wouldn't this hold for all 3D objects, then? Or would a 3D realization of a plane, like a piece of paper, become knottable in 4D? Yet paper tape is at once like a plane, having two non-negligible dimensions, and a string, since length greatly surpasses both width and height, and it can be knotted in 3D, while a square piece cannot...do the ratios of dimensions come into play somehow?
I think I befuddled myself beyond rescue while traversing this particular rabbit hole, but if you're willing to try to throw me a line (or a plane?) it will be appreciated. =)
Slashdot Mirror
But it happens more often in some than others, which was his point, and that's the best you can hope for. There is no way to close every loophole, and the quest to do just that would result only in widespread dissatisfaction and likely revolution.
and if you're seen even TALKING to an outsider, you're fined.
I'd say that's one easy way to quit.
You're an idiot, and your nick is misleading.
"Racism is ethical because they were racist against me first?" How do you expect to make any progress in eradicating it if you further it?
The ultimate goal is to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth
Isn't that handled by...y'know...the sun?
Without a doubt, it would be very difficult to put someone into a position like CIO without the person having had much in the way of experience with large and successful companies. If they selected someone that was not of that sort, they would be asking some other very serious questions like "what makes you qualified for this position?"
This argument might have merit except that he was employed by Google as a lobbyist. He will be aware of new technologies, but only those developed by Google.
I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?
New Zealanders. ;)
eating a lot of seaweed, by itself, is unlikely to produce this result in an individual.
There was a story here a while ago which said you swap something like 50 species whenever you kiss someone, so here's your excuse to make out with a cute Japanese girl, provided she's cool with geeky gaijin.
"You'll be helping to spread Japanese culture, on several levels..."
Heck, if kid really wants to fsck their parents, just claim something sexual.
I can't think of any other way they'd bring it up...
Really? I would have thought there were at least 53421 of you...
is it really a surprise that the body will boost its immunity when it detects a possible disease threat? I think we have a word that already accounts for that: evolution.
What is novel is the mechanism. We know that once nasties get into the body it starts pumping up resistance. Yet these people only looked at pictures. That means that a specific pattern of light can boost your immune system. That's crazy!
This is correct, except it's spelled "Welles."
There are also a number of very good reason why people thought the radio episode was actual news reporting, outlined in this Radiolab episode.
There was a disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast, which most people missed. There was a (fictitious) musical act "scheduled" for the show. The music was first interrupted to bring "breaking news" of "explosions seen on Mars." The next interruption reported that the explosions were rockets leaving the surface of mars, and a third said they were heading towards earth. Every time a report was finished, the music returned, leaving people to wonder. Every time there was another interruption, the whole thing gained more credibility.
Then they brought in actors portraying astronomers, government officials, and others, all of this offered up with the seriousness of the Hindenburg coverage--which Welles listed as one of his inspirations. One of the freakier parts that gave me chills even knowing it was fake is an on-scene reporter at the landing site. He sees something come out of the spacecraft, and it attacks the soldiers in front of him (with requisite gunfire and other sound effects). The reporter is emotionally distraught but still trying to report when suddenly---silence, he is cut off in mid-sentence. There's a good five or ten seconds of silence, which is almost unheard of on radio even today.
Welles knew what he was doing. He knew that War of the Worlds presented as originally told would be stale and get no listeners. He wanted to trick people, though he originally denied it, in order to teach them not to believe everything they see or hear from mass media. The lesson has obviously not been learned--people have pulled the same stunt successfully at least 3 times, discussed on Radiolab along with the occasionally disastrous results, and this makes a fourth.
I heard a Radiolab episode all about War of the Worlds, the original broadcast and repeat performances all over the world. "From Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador." This doesn't surprise me in the least, and it wouldn't be any more surprising if it happened in Kansas or California. The backlash has been worse than the threat of lawsuits--several employees of the news agency in Quito were killed when people realized they'd been tricked and stormed the news building, setting fire to it with them inside.
Welles' point, explained by him in an audio clip during the show, was to get people to realize that they can't automatically believe what they hear on the radio or any form of mass media. It's a lesson that never sank in, which is what makes it possible to continue pulling these stunts.
While this seems to be the case, I don't think it's right. I'm only pointing out how ridiculous it is to insinuate that the US Bill of Rights is applicable in a place that isn't the US, and is a war zone to boot. I thought it was pretty obvious, but...
It's cool; we'll have it printed up for you by next week.
This was in Baghdad, not Kansas.
That was very well put. I haven't heard of Midgley; I'll have to check my library for that book.
It's probably worth mentioning that Jesus rarely (if ever?) talks about a separate "heaven" that you go to after you die. Most if not all of the times he uses the word it is in the phrase "kingdom of heaven," which he said is present in each of his followers. In context with his other teachings it seems to say that the way people should be living is to make the lives of those around them better. If everybody followed that ideal we'd be living in a utopia, i.e., heaven.
The mainstream Christian idea of an angelic afterlife came about some time later.
You won't find a warm reception here, as you've no doubt discovered by the responses.
We are collectively at a point where science is a dominant force in our culture, as the Church was in the Middle Ages. By this I simply mean it is poorly understood by most people yet most people put a great amount of faith into it, all sorts of popular myths have arisen around it (including the myth that it is a unified whole), and, this is the big one, it is not to be questioned. Lip service is paid to the basic tenet that "this is the best working model of what we observe; reality could be very different" while in practice anything that goes against what is already "settled" is laughed out of town. You won't get physically burned at the stake, something to be thankful for, yet the metaphorical practice is alive and well. This rigid thinking wasn't always the case (Newton wasn't the only one to dabble in alchemy) and it's more a trait of our aging culture than the fault of science--witness the increasing polarization of attitudes and ideals across the spectrum of human thought.
Like you, I do not say this to demean the myriad achievements of the age, but it will no doubt be taken that way by some. It's very hard not to become adversarial when the prevailing attitude is that Science is some automatic process independent of human ingenuity, and Science will solve all of our problems, and Science can achieve absolutely anything, and Science is the only truth. For an excellent critique of the practice, read Jacques Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment ("entertainment" is used in the sense "to entertain a thought"). It's out of print and some of the chapters dealing with behavioral science are outdated, yet the rest of the book's statements and critiques are as valid as the day they were written, if not more so due to the increase of rigid thinking I mentioned above. Barzun is as far as I can tell not a religious person, though some here would accuse him of "magical thinking" due to his respect for and appreciation of art, and his credentials as a historian and cultural critic are unassailable. I say this to make it clear that although the book is critical of our perception of science, it is in no way "anti-science." Every thinker owes it to himself to give it a try--you won't always agree with his conclusions, but you will find yourself thinking more clearly about science.
Now, to answer your question =) If spiritual experiences are real, in the sense of "there is a God/many gods/beings who don't follow our physical rules" as opposed to "people experience things which strike them as spiritual," then they must also be physical and material because we are physical and material. Dualism is dead, as TapeCutter wrote. Yet here we are nearly a century after quantum phenomena were discovered and we're still not sure what to make of them. We have no grand unified theory, and few people expect that we will anytime soon. The study of consciousness is in its infancy. The point is, we know a hell of a lot, and it's made our physical existence easier, but we're nowhere near getting to the bottom of things. Lots of science fiction has been written that puts mystical or spiritual things in a scientific frame, some of it even worth reading. Reality could turn out to be far stranger.
So, in theory, science could unveil the mechanics of the spiritual, if it exists. Whether it would know what it has discovered is another matter. Science is in the business of breaking wholes down into constituent parts, and learning about the whole through the parts. In addition, science works best in aggregate: the individual is always an anomaly; there is no average human being. Controlled, repeatable experiments must be set up, yet no such thing can exist in the human consciousness; witness the derision of the "soft" sciences like sociology. It all works very well for gross mechanical things but not for things that are unique to the individual, like emotional or spiritual significance. W
But it DOES browse the web!
The screenshot on Wikipedia looks like the ashen remains of iTunes after a fire visualizer got out of hand. I'll pass anyway, thanks.
What if you can't tell the difference? Seems plausible to me, what with lobbyists writing legislation in addition to government takeovers...maybe we ought to tell our fearless leaders (or their corporate masters) to pick one strategy so we can label it a little more easily.
Tony Campolo, a Christian evangelist, put it well when he was on The Colbert Report. Paraphrasing, "Mixing religion with politics is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It doesn't really hurt the cow manure, but it ruins the ice cream."
I happen to think it hurts the cow manure too.
I'm sorry you feel that 30 million fellow citizens and counting without health insurance suddenly being able to get insurance is such a burden for you when you probably already have health insurance and so the only way it will affect you is by lowering your premiums, oh the corruption!
This is simply not true. It will lower premiums for some people, but the projected difference is $100 less per year. Some groups of people will have their premiums raised by $300 or even a few thousand per year. And 30 million people who are uninsured will now be forced to buy private health insurance--sure, some will be assisted with subsidies, but certainly not all or even most.
Look at this analysis of the bill by FireDogLake, a well-known progressive website. They list 18 myths about the bill, two of which you just repeated, along with the unfortunate truth of the matter. I said it before: it's a turd of a bill, and it remains so no matter what your spot on the political spectrum is.
Jenkins seems to be quite similar the other female setting, Mrs. Miller, who sings popular music instead of classical but is equally entertainingly awful.
like...repeatedly
no /. for me today, i guess =\
Interesting.
I understand how this works in the land of mathematics. Does it play out the same way in reality? I didn't think to specify that I meant knot in the every-day sense of "piece of rope with two ends on it wrapped around itself," not in the mathematical sense of "a closed loop with a tangle you can't get rid of without cutting." You can see my ignorance of the terminology on display here...but now I'm not sure if you meant in the mathematical sense either, given that you wrote "you need at least 2 extra dimensions in order to *make* the knot."
What I mean to ask is this. An ideal 1D line can't be knotted in 2D because it can't get around itself without a 3rd dimension. I get that. Yet a piece of string is a real, 3D object that can and must be manipulated in all three dimensions to form a knot. I was led to believe that this wouldn't work if 4D is accessible because the extra dimension would let it be tugged around itself there. I imagine to us it would look something like two crossed pieces just sort of disappearing, then reappearing uncrossed. Anyway, I don't comprehend all of the mechanics but that makes sense to me.
But what it also seems to imply to me is that for any real 3D knottable (that is, string-like) object, knots (in the everyday sense) are not possible if forces in 4D can act on them. Wouldn't this hold for all 3D objects, then? Or would a 3D realization of a plane, like a piece of paper, become knottable in 4D? Yet paper tape is at once like a plane, having two non-negligible dimensions, and a string, since length greatly surpasses both width and height, and it can be knotted in 3D, while a square piece cannot...do the ratios of dimensions come into play somehow?
I think I befuddled myself beyond rescue while traversing this particular rabbit hole, but if you're willing to try to throw me a line (or a plane?) it will be appreciated. =)