This didn't make sense to me until I scanned Wikipedia's article on orbital mechanics. It is counter-intuitive that lower orbits are faster and that increasing velocity will make you spiral outward. It turns out that firing a rocket to increase your velocity changes the shape of the orbit from circular to elliptical, so that the only point the two orbits have in common is the point at which you fired the rocket. In order to make the orbit circular again, a second firing must be done at the highest orbital point to lower the velocity.
Orbits are always elliptical, with circular orbits being a special case where both foci are the same. A change in velocity just changes the ellipse, but a constant acceleration will make you spiral outward.
Stop voting for the state-approved candidates. Stop relying on a party to do your homework for you. Stop believing that either of the main ones has your interests in mind.
Yep. The left wing and right wing both help to fly the same bird. The differing ideologies behind the two parties fade away the closer one gets to the center of power.
The way around it is public pressure. If enough people stopped only saying "something needs to change" and started calling their congressmen, they will be forced to listen. This is working for Ron Paul's Audit the Fed bill (317 cosponsors in the House, 31 in the Senate) and it will work for anything that has the broad support of citizens. All that has to happen is for enough people to say, "I do not like this policy, and if you continue to follow it I will give my vote to someone else."
The key is to put into practice the understanding we all have that our congressmen are representatives for us in name only, and their biggest concern is re-election. If people were willing to put in the minimal effort to take their guy to task when he does something they don't like, many of the abuses of congress would be stopped cold.
A few voices won't do it, which is why organizing is vital. The EFF does a decent job of getting the word out, but they would be more effective if they took a page from the Campaign For Liberty playbook and had a certain day or week to have people call their congressmen about a particular issue. Other orgs like DownsizeDC will send a message to your state's senators and your district's rep with a few clicks. Tools like these actually enable the public to make their opinions known directly to those responsible for representing them and ensure that they have an impact.
We can observe the outputs of numerous natural intelligence systems, but they remain quite opaque. Without much knowledge of the internals, there isn't much of a chance that we can get any real insight from them.
It's also presumptuous IMO to call them "systems." Who is to say that human intelligence isn't closer to a work of art, whose meaning lies not in its constituent parts but in the whole?
No it won't. The stochastic methods of refutation employed here clearly indicate the overwhelming futility of infiltration. It follows that, due to the undeserved insensitivity, such an undertaking would result in the theory being superseded by an ontological anamorphism. QED.
The negative conclusion offered up by the GP looks sound to me. If you believe otherwise, please explain why. Of course it isn't what Sunstein proposes, but the proposed method can easily be put to that end. The USA PATRIOT Act had some nice ideals behind it too.
Is it now considered nutty to look at the possible misuse of tools and methods? Even when the proposed user has repeatedly misused other, similar methods and tools in the recent past?
Actually these costs are really cheap for wealthy people, you would think that a lot more of these rich people who die of old age (lots of them around and many more rich baby boomers are in the pipeline.
That was the most frustrating thing I've tried to parse all year. Tell me son, have they already liquefied your brains?
When is the last time the theories on preparing Egyptian bodies for mummification were tested? We've seen documentation of the procedure on pyramid walls and we've seen the mummies themselves, but how do we know that the proposed mix and administration of chemicals are correct?
Performing the procedure will tell us more about it. So what if it's also a gimmick for raising ad revenue?
I have nystagmus, which means that my eyes constantly wiggle though I perceive an unmoving image. I bet that an onscreen pointer calculated by my gaze vector would be in constant motion and therefore unusable or at least very difficult for me.
I say this not in complaint, merely in observation. I'm sure this won't be adopted in the near future, and who knows if it will catch on once it's developed? But as someone who never before had to concern himself with being physically able to access things, it is an interesting shift in perspective.
Here's hoping that mice or touch will remain supported for the new disabled =)
See, I am sympathetic to this mindset, that there is more to life than Matter, but even I get turned off by empty phrases like "embrace potential, and free yourself." Nine times out of ten, if I ask what that means, the answer is either "you must discover that for yourself" or a stream of even emptier metaphors.
The tenth time is the offer of a hit of acid, which is not what I am after.
an artist who has never ever touched a drug will inherently be a better artist than one who has had their faculties degraded due to drug use
So...my mom is a better trumpet player than Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong?
Your first mistake is to treat "drugs" as a single entity. Your second is to assume that talent never comes into play. Your third is to believe that no drug can have positive creative effects.
no artist, who has ever lived, has ever claimed that their drug use made them better artists.
I decided to do some tests. I made digital recordings of formula compositions in identical situations while completely free of any drug effects and while stoned on a dose-measured amount of marijuana. I did original music concerts in standardized conditions, performing to the best of my ability while intoxicated on marijuana and while not intoxicated. (Please note: when I say, "not intoxicated," I mean I did not ingest marijuana for at least four days prior to the session). I wrote my subjective observations about the difference between playing while high versus when not intoxicated. I compared recordings, listening for nuances of difference. I also allowed others to listen to and compare the recordings.
My research showed that when I was stoned, I was far more likely to take "chances" with my music. I experimented with novel chord structures and lead lines, stacked instruments in unlikely combinations, detuned instruments, varied rhythms and pacing, and added sound effects. Vocally, my stoned performances were a revelation. My voice was far more expressive and evocative. My range was extended, and I was more willing to take chances with phrasing and word usage.
Some final caveats. Cannabis was not uniformly beneficial for all my musical talents. I make more "mistakes" while stoned, and often forget my own songs. My hands at times freeze up or are hard to control, with critical dexterity and motor skills impaired. Lyrically, I noticed that if I had created a chorus, I often forgot it before the end of the song, necessitating the creation of a new chorus while I stalled for time, trying to recall the old one!
This guy has a more realistic view than you: that there are benefits and drawbacks to using marijuana to enhance their craft. I speak only of marijuana because in a discussion like this specifics are needed and marijuana is the one with the strongest argument to be made by looking at musicians who admit to its creative use, including the two I mentioned above.
I'm not advocating drug abuse. I'm not saying that getting high every day and always smoking before you play is going to make you better--that would be magic. I'm saying that when you've got something that sounds okay but not great, playing with it after smoking might give you some new, good creative ideas that you wouldn't have had otherwise. The drug can be a lifestyle, and in that case it may do more harm than good, but the drug can also be a tool.
We use our sanctioned drugs as tools all the time: caffeine to enhance alertness, Aspirin for preventing pain from distracting our attention, Viagra for overcoming ED...the list goes on. Marijuana, in addition to its validated medical uses, can also be seen as a creativity enhancer.
I suspect that much of this applies to psychedelics as well, but I would be speaking out of ignorance if I phrased it any stronger than suspicion.
There's so much effort put into trying not to be the crass, uncultured lout who doesn't understand 'the vision' that no-one actually realises that there IS no 'vision' and it's all just a big glob of pretentious wank.
"There is no vision" is an awfully large blanket statement. Pollock himself claimed that he let the painting reveal itself, which shows a vision that corresponds with the final image: no meaning is conveyed. The same can be said of most "abstract" art*. His method of phrasing might be considered pretentious; I would call it that too had I not experienced a similar feeling while writing music.
But just as with any segment of society, artists run the gamut. Some take pride in random action while others try to convey meaning, and neither one is guaranteed to be a good or bad artist. There are people who feel the need to defend their aesthetic preferences by saying, "if you don't like it then you don't understand it," and they are wrong. They are not wrong because there is no vision; they are wrong because they are trying to use analysis in a field where aesthetics reigns supreme. I like the work of Piet Mondrian, but you won't see me defending its vision, if it has one; I like the clean lines and sparse color. Conversely, I can't stand Thomas Kinkade's boring landscapes, but the artist certainly had a (bucolic, insipid) vision of what he wanted. Both of these are personal preferences on my part.
Critics of artistic vision need to understand that it exists. It is the same as a software developer's vision of his product. A clear vision results in a product that conforms well to it but is no guarantee of quality, while a cloudy vision or no vision results in a cobbled-together inconsistent mess that can rarely be very useful.
Proponents of art works need to understand that no one should be expected to appreciate something for the vision that inspired it, and that art appreciation is a matter of personal preference, not something that rests on scientific principles, despite what their art professors may have told them.
*"Abstract" is an awful term for this kind of art since "abstract" implies that it represents something, in the same way that a concert ticket represents that its holder is permitted to attend. Classical art is abstract, since it is paint on a canvas which represents people and buildings and landscapes. "Abstract" art is in truth concrete: it is an attempt to be devoid of external meaning so that the only means for judging the piece is on its own aesthetic merit.
We already have computer programs that can synthesize music passably-well.
Citation needed. The only "music" created by computer programs is an audio equivalent of the "art" produced by the neural nets in the article. Music need not be pleasant, but there is a subtlety to its structure that requires a human touch; probably because good music plays with human expectation and emotion, which cannot be factored into a program. That is why there is some passable material in the project linked from/. a month or so ago: it relies on genetic algorithms for generation of sound, but uses a population of humans to determine musical fitness.
It is also a misguided trend in modern times to try to explain an artist's work by delving into his biography. There are certainly life-changing events that affect every individual, but they are few and far between. Artists especially are more likely to be influenced by chance encounters that germinate ideas in their fertile imaginations, and they are often unlikely to recall or recognize the event that brought about the idea. Good biographies give insight into an artist's character, which will often show up in his work, but neither character nor past experience offer a blueprint for understanding works.
remember that scandal a couple of years ago when lead based paint was used in children's toys manufactured in China? Everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten that the problem then wasn't in China, but in the specifications sent to them by the American company that had the toys made. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened again.
Remember too the regulation we got from that incident: a broad law mandating that all products for children under a certain age must be tested for lead and other hazardous materials. This led to lots of small foreign companies pulling their products from American shelves, and small American companies closing their doors--not because they had any chance of containing lead, but because the mandatory testing and tracking is expensive enough to make the toys unprofitable. Hand-crafted children's toys, clothes and furniture are declining rapidly. There is still an issue with children's books in libraries: they fall under the law, too, and libraries aren't sure if they should pull their books to comply with the law (there's no way they can afford the testing).
Mattel and Hasbro, the world's largest toymakers and in Mattel's case the root of the scandal, both lobbied hard for the legislation. I think they saw an opportunity to save face and to squeeze out competition from local artisans in one move. A more thought-out law would have created a better process for determining the safety of non-industrial children's goods and would have had exemptions for books.
I think way too much is being made over a decision to hand-wave web shooters instead of wasting screen time and attention to the montage of Peter's attempts to create the advanced tech, both the nozzle and the web fluid, required for the mechanical version. These are action movies, and there is little to no science in action movies, only tech. When the tech is not pre-existing and is not hand-waved as "developed by a multinational corporation," it must be explained. When you already have one spider bite giving someone enhanced danger sense, crazy physical strength, and wall-climbing abilities, why not toss in web-slinging and free up a slow five minutes for more explosions?
Of course the villains (for the most part) have advanced tech of their own--they would otherwise fail to provide the entertainment value. Unless it's an X-men kind of universe where mutants are common, villains must have a way to use vast amounts of power for their evil deeds; otherwise the whole film is going to be a ho-hum series of thwarted muggings. The easiest way to give them superpowers is to make them technological superpowers and explain them by saying, "some company threw enough money at the idea to make it happen." This is of course also fantasy, but it's a staple that nobody takes issue with.
And, to be frank, tech DOES have negative social influences, though "evil" is too strong a word for them and there are positives too. The society we live in extends breadth at the cost of depth. Myspa--er, Facebook friends are more numerous and less satisfying as flesh-and-blood friends. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory holds true. You probably do not know your neighbors. Despite the unquestionable increases in quality of life over the past hundred years, people are more stressed out than ever before. This is because we have gotten into the habit of modifying our behavior to better suit the needs of the tech we use, because the opposite is only lately becoming plausible. The Spider-Man villains were driven crazy by their tech: the Green Goblin had his serum and Doc Ock's harness hacked his mind. These are big-screen sized caricatures of the small sacrifices we make for techne all the time.
If there is some sort of message in these films about science and technology, which I really doubt, it is not "science is evil" but "ensure that technology serves you and not the other way around."
I believe randomness doesn't exist. In its place stands "too complicated to understand".
David Bohm wrote a lot about that, especially later in life. He essentially believed that what we perceive as randomness is a higher degree of order. An example he liked to use is a drop of ink placed in a cylindrical tank of glycerin, with a smaller central cylinder attached to a crank. If the crank is turned slowly in one direction, the drop of ink smears out and finally becomes invisible, dissolved in the surrounding medium. But if the crank is turned slowly back in the opposite direction, the drop of ink coalesces.
The unturned ink has a low (meaning simple) degree of order, while the spread-out ink has a high (complex) degree of order that is made apparent only when we wind it back to a state we can easily grasp. He also called these states the explicate, or what is readily apparent, and the implicate, or what is waiting to coalesce. The implicate order is why we have the maxim "hindsight is 20/20"--once something has happened, it often becomes easier to see how previous events lead up to this one.
It's interesting stuff, though certainly not orthodox, especially when one starts reading about the holomovement.
Genesis is only wrong if it is taken "literally," that is, reading the text alone regardless of context and taking it as truth. Apparently, though I don't read Hebrew so can't check this myself, in the original language the first two chapters of Genesis are allegorical poetry, intended to express the integral role God plays in creation, and not a play-by-play account of exact lengths of time and order.
The repeated line "there was evening, and there was morning--the N day" is a pretty good indicator of poetry even in English translations, but some sects (big ones, at least in the US) have decided to claim a literal interpretation. This is a fairly recent phenomenon--certainly not Jewish or Catholic in origin, and neither Calvin nor Luther made such claims. And it should be noted that this "literal" interpretation is not applied throughout. When Jesus says, "I am a door," they make no claims that in addition to being fully God and fully man he is also fully a hinged portal covering. There is allowance for the use of metaphor, but only when it suits their interpretation.
So, no, there is really no relation to the Bible at all, though there is an argument against a particular interpretation of Genesis. It does amuse me though that for as much as people here call religion unscientific (righty so), they sure do spend a lot of time trying to use science to "disprove" it. Roughly half of the religious flamewars started on/. are due to detractors who like to say they're all started by religious nutjobs, and vice versa.
If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of.
No. All it means is that whatever changes the virus makes, it doesn't greatly affect the ability (means and opportunity) of those who have it to reproduce. Remember, natural selection, the mechanism through which evolution operates, is not working toward a glorious future of perfection, it is a consequence of how adapted an organism is to its environment. If the organism can reproduce just as much with the virus as without, then it's going to stick around even if all it does is sometimes cause schizophrenia and provides no positive traits.
I wouldn't call transubstantiation uncommon, as flitty pointed out. The view you mention is also common, yet also not universal. When I last regularly attended church, it was one that believed communion was what it sounded like--a meal that includes the entire church community. There was a component of remembrance, but the focus was on keeping those people close-knit like a family.
This appealed to me far more than the once-a-month solemn ritual practiced in my ancestral church. To each his own, I guess, but remember that your choice is not necessarily universal, and not necessarily right--in this case, there is little enough doctrine on the matter that there are room for lots of different interpretations on what communion is.
Slashdot Mirror
This didn't make sense to me until I scanned Wikipedia's article on orbital mechanics. It is counter-intuitive that lower orbits are faster and that increasing velocity will make you spiral outward. It turns out that firing a rocket to increase your velocity changes the shape of the orbit from circular to elliptical, so that the only point the two orbits have in common is the point at which you fired the rocket. In order to make the orbit circular again, a second firing must be done at the highest orbital point to lower the velocity.
Orbits are always elliptical, with circular orbits being a special case where both foci are the same. A change in velocity just changes the ellipse, but a constant acceleration will make you spiral outward.
I told you so.
Not that McCain would have been any better.
Stop voting for the state-approved candidates.
Stop relying on a party to do your homework for you.
Stop believing that either of the main ones has your interests in mind.
Yep. The left wing and right wing both help to fly the same bird. The differing ideologies behind the two parties fade away the closer one gets to the center of power.
The way around it is public pressure. If enough people stopped only saying "something needs to change" and started calling their congressmen, they will be forced to listen. This is working for Ron Paul's Audit the Fed bill (317 cosponsors in the House, 31 in the Senate) and it will work for anything that has the broad support of citizens. All that has to happen is for enough people to say, "I do not like this policy, and if you continue to follow it I will give my vote to someone else."
The key is to put into practice the understanding we all have that our congressmen are representatives for us in name only, and their biggest concern is re-election. If people were willing to put in the minimal effort to take their guy to task when he does something they don't like, many of the abuses of congress would be stopped cold.
A few voices won't do it, which is why organizing is vital. The EFF does a decent job of getting the word out, but they would be more effective if they took a page from the Campaign For Liberty playbook and had a certain day or week to have people call their congressmen about a particular issue. Other orgs like DownsizeDC will send a message to your state's senators and your district's rep with a few clicks. Tools like these actually enable the public to make their opinions known directly to those responsible for representing them and ensure that they have an impact.
I use three spaces, but I'm odd.
We can observe the outputs of numerous natural intelligence systems, but they remain quite opaque. Without much knowledge of the internals, there isn't much of a chance that we can get any real insight from them.
It's also presumptuous IMO to call them "systems." Who is to say that human intelligence isn't closer to a work of art, whose meaning lies not in its constituent parts but in the whole?
No it won't. The stochastic methods of refutation employed here clearly indicate the overwhelming futility of infiltration. It follows that, due to the undeserved insensitivity, such an undertaking would result in the theory being superseded by an ontological anamorphism. QED.
He doesn't even have to go that far. Just turn on a light and check the mirror to see skin blemishes, all in the comfort of his (mom's) basement!
The negative conclusion offered up by the GP looks sound to me. If you believe otherwise, please explain why. Of course it isn't what Sunstein proposes, but the proposed method can easily be put to that end. The USA PATRIOT Act had some nice ideals behind it too.
Is it now considered nutty to look at the possible misuse of tools and methods? Even when the proposed user has repeatedly misused other, similar methods and tools in the recent past?
Well there you go. But aren't repeated experiments an important part of the scientific method? ;)
Actually these costs are really cheap for wealthy people, you would think that a lot more of these rich people who die of old age (lots of them around and many more rich baby boomers are in the pipeline.
That was the most frustrating thing I've tried to parse all year. Tell me son, have they already liquefied your brains?
When is the last time the theories on preparing Egyptian bodies for mummification were tested? We've seen documentation of the procedure on pyramid walls and we've seen the mummies themselves, but how do we know that the proposed mix and administration of chemicals are correct?
Performing the procedure will tell us more about it. So what if it's also a gimmick for raising ad revenue?
I have nystagmus, which means that my eyes constantly wiggle though I perceive an unmoving image. I bet that an onscreen pointer calculated by my gaze vector would be in constant motion and therefore unusable or at least very difficult for me.
I say this not in complaint, merely in observation. I'm sure this won't be adopted in the near future, and who knows if it will catch on once it's developed? But as someone who never before had to concern himself with being physically able to access things, it is an interesting shift in perspective.
Here's hoping that mice or touch will remain supported for the new disabled =)
See, I am sympathetic to this mindset, that there is more to life than Matter, but even I get turned off by empty phrases like "embrace potential, and free yourself." Nine times out of ten, if I ask what that means, the answer is either "you must discover that for yourself" or a stream of even emptier metaphors.
The tenth time is the offer of a hit of acid, which is not what I am after.
an artist who has never ever touched a drug will inherently be a better artist than one who has had their faculties degraded due to drug use
So...my mom is a better trumpet player than Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong?
Your first mistake is to treat "drugs" as a single entity. Your second is to assume that talent never comes into play. Your third is to believe that no drug can have positive creative effects.
no artist, who has ever lived, has ever claimed that their drug use made them better artists.
WRONG! From the link:
I decided to do some tests. I made digital recordings of formula compositions in identical situations while completely free of any drug effects and while stoned on a dose-measured amount of marijuana. I did original music concerts in standardized conditions, performing to the best of my ability while intoxicated on marijuana and while not intoxicated. (Please note: when I say, "not intoxicated," I mean I did not ingest marijuana for at least four days prior to the session). I wrote my subjective observations about the difference between playing while high versus when not intoxicated. I compared recordings, listening for nuances of difference. I also allowed others to listen to and compare the recordings.
My research showed that when I was stoned, I was far more likely to take "chances" with my music. I experimented with novel chord structures and lead lines, stacked instruments in unlikely combinations, detuned instruments, varied rhythms and pacing, and added sound effects. Vocally, my stoned performances were a revelation. My voice was far more expressive and evocative. My range was extended, and I was more willing to take chances with phrasing and word usage.
Some final caveats. Cannabis was not uniformly beneficial for all my musical talents. I make more "mistakes" while stoned, and often forget my own songs. My hands at times freeze up or are hard to control, with critical dexterity and motor skills impaired. Lyrically, I noticed that if I had created a chorus, I often forgot it before the end of the song, necessitating the creation of a new chorus while I stalled for time, trying to recall the old one!
This guy has a more realistic view than you: that there are benefits and drawbacks to using marijuana to enhance their craft. I speak only of marijuana because in a discussion like this specifics are needed and marijuana is the one with the strongest argument to be made by looking at musicians who admit to its creative use, including the two I mentioned above.
I'm not advocating drug abuse. I'm not saying that getting high every day and always smoking before you play is going to make you better--that would be magic. I'm saying that when you've got something that sounds okay but not great, playing with it after smoking might give you some new, good creative ideas that you wouldn't have had otherwise. The drug can be a lifestyle, and in that case it may do more harm than good, but the drug can also be a tool.
We use our sanctioned drugs as tools all the time: caffeine to enhance alertness, Aspirin for preventing pain from distracting our attention, Viagra for overcoming ED...the list goes on. Marijuana, in addition to its validated medical uses, can also be seen as a creativity enhancer.
I suspect that much of this applies to psychedelics as well, but I would be speaking out of ignorance if I phrased it any stronger than suspicion.
There's so much effort put into trying not to be the crass, uncultured lout who doesn't understand 'the vision' that no-one actually realises that there IS no 'vision' and it's all just a big glob of pretentious wank.
"There is no vision" is an awfully large blanket statement. Pollock himself claimed that he let the painting reveal itself, which shows a vision that corresponds with the final image: no meaning is conveyed. The same can be said of most "abstract" art*. His method of phrasing might be considered pretentious; I would call it that too had I not experienced a similar feeling while writing music.
But just as with any segment of society, artists run the gamut. Some take pride in random action while others try to convey meaning, and neither one is guaranteed to be a good or bad artist. There are people who feel the need to defend their aesthetic preferences by saying, "if you don't like it then you don't understand it," and they are wrong. They are not wrong because there is no vision; they are wrong because they are trying to use analysis in a field where aesthetics reigns supreme. I like the work of Piet Mondrian, but you won't see me defending its vision, if it has one; I like the clean lines and sparse color. Conversely, I can't stand Thomas Kinkade's boring landscapes, but the artist certainly had a (bucolic, insipid) vision of what he wanted. Both of these are personal preferences on my part.
Critics of artistic vision need to understand that it exists. It is the same as a software developer's vision of his product. A clear vision results in a product that conforms well to it but is no guarantee of quality, while a cloudy vision or no vision results in a cobbled-together inconsistent mess that can rarely be very useful.
Proponents of art works need to understand that no one should be expected to appreciate something for the vision that inspired it, and that art appreciation is a matter of personal preference, not something that rests on scientific principles, despite what their art professors may have told them.
*"Abstract" is an awful term for this kind of art since "abstract" implies that it represents something, in the same way that a concert ticket represents that its holder is permitted to attend. Classical art is abstract, since it is paint on a canvas which represents people and buildings and landscapes. "Abstract" art is in truth concrete: it is an attempt to be devoid of external meaning so that the only means for judging the piece is on its own aesthetic merit.
We already have computer programs that can synthesize music passably-well.
Citation needed. The only "music" created by computer programs is an audio equivalent of the "art" produced by the neural nets in the article. Music need not be pleasant, but there is a subtlety to its structure that requires a human touch; probably because good music plays with human expectation and emotion, which cannot be factored into a program. That is why there is some passable material in the project linked from /. a month or so ago: it relies on genetic algorithms for generation of sound, but uses a population of humans to determine musical fitness.
It is also a misguided trend in modern times to try to explain an artist's work by delving into his biography. There are certainly life-changing events that affect every individual, but they are few and far between. Artists especially are more likely to be influenced by chance encounters that germinate ideas in their fertile imaginations, and they are often unlikely to recall or recognize the event that brought about the idea. Good biographies give insight into an artist's character, which will often show up in his work, but neither character nor past experience offer a blueprint for understanding works.
remember that scandal a couple of years ago when lead based paint was used in children's toys manufactured in China? Everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten that the problem then wasn't in China, but in the specifications sent to them by the American company that had the toys made. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened again.
Remember too the regulation we got from that incident: a broad law mandating that all products for children under a certain age must be tested for lead and other hazardous materials. This led to lots of small foreign companies pulling their products from American shelves, and small American companies closing their doors--not because they had any chance of containing lead, but because the mandatory testing and tracking is expensive enough to make the toys unprofitable. Hand-crafted children's toys, clothes and furniture are declining rapidly. There is still an issue with children's books in libraries: they fall under the law, too, and libraries aren't sure if they should pull their books to comply with the law (there's no way they can afford the testing).
Mattel and Hasbro, the world's largest toymakers and in Mattel's case the root of the scandal, both lobbied hard for the legislation. I think they saw an opportunity to save face and to squeeze out competition from local artisans in one move. A more thought-out law would have created a better process for determining the safety of non-industrial children's goods and would have had exemptions for books.
I think way too much is being made over a decision to hand-wave web shooters instead of wasting screen time and attention to the montage of Peter's attempts to create the advanced tech, both the nozzle and the web fluid, required for the mechanical version. These are action movies, and there is little to no science in action movies, only tech. When the tech is not pre-existing and is not hand-waved as "developed by a multinational corporation," it must be explained. When you already have one spider bite giving someone enhanced danger sense, crazy physical strength, and wall-climbing abilities, why not toss in web-slinging and free up a slow five minutes for more explosions?
Of course the villains (for the most part) have advanced tech of their own--they would otherwise fail to provide the entertainment value. Unless it's an X-men kind of universe where mutants are common, villains must have a way to use vast amounts of power for their evil deeds; otherwise the whole film is going to be a ho-hum series of thwarted muggings. The easiest way to give them superpowers is to make them technological superpowers and explain them by saying, "some company threw enough money at the idea to make it happen." This is of course also fantasy, but it's a staple that nobody takes issue with.
And, to be frank, tech DOES have negative social influences, though "evil" is too strong a word for them and there are positives too. The society we live in extends breadth at the cost of depth. Myspa--er, Facebook friends are more numerous and less satisfying as flesh-and-blood friends. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory holds true. You probably do not know your neighbors. Despite the unquestionable increases in quality of life over the past hundred years, people are more stressed out than ever before. This is because we have gotten into the habit of modifying our behavior to better suit the needs of the tech we use, because the opposite is only lately becoming plausible. The Spider-Man villains were driven crazy by their tech: the Green Goblin had his serum and Doc Ock's harness hacked his mind. These are big-screen sized caricatures of the small sacrifices we make for techne all the time.
If there is some sort of message in these films about science and technology, which I really doubt, it is not "science is evil" but "ensure that technology serves you and not the other way around."
I believe randomness doesn't exist. In its place stands "too complicated to understand".
David Bohm wrote a lot about that, especially later in life. He essentially believed that what we perceive as randomness is a higher degree of order. An example he liked to use is a drop of ink placed in a cylindrical tank of glycerin, with a smaller central cylinder attached to a crank. If the crank is turned slowly in one direction, the drop of ink smears out and finally becomes invisible, dissolved in the surrounding medium. But if the crank is turned slowly back in the opposite direction, the drop of ink coalesces.
The unturned ink has a low (meaning simple) degree of order, while the spread-out ink has a high (complex) degree of order that is made apparent only when we wind it back to a state we can easily grasp. He also called these states the explicate, or what is readily apparent, and the implicate, or what is waiting to coalesce. The implicate order is why we have the maxim "hindsight is 20/20"--once something has happened, it often becomes easier to see how previous events lead up to this one.
It's interesting stuff, though certainly not orthodox, especially when one starts reading about the holomovement.
Does the belief in a universe that is not random necessarily imply a belief in God?
The thing is though, I'd much rather a dog, mouse, or even a monkey suffer compared to a human.
Violent Criminals.
FLAME ON!!
Genesis is only wrong if it is taken "literally," that is, reading the text alone regardless of context and taking it as truth. Apparently, though I don't read Hebrew so can't check this myself, in the original language the first two chapters of Genesis are allegorical poetry, intended to express the integral role God plays in creation, and not a play-by-play account of exact lengths of time and order.
The repeated line "there was evening, and there was morning--the N day" is a pretty good indicator of poetry even in English translations, but some sects (big ones, at least in the US) have decided to claim a literal interpretation. This is a fairly recent phenomenon--certainly not Jewish or Catholic in origin, and neither Calvin nor Luther made such claims. And it should be noted that this "literal" interpretation is not applied throughout. When Jesus says, "I am a door," they make no claims that in addition to being fully God and fully man he is also fully a hinged portal covering. There is allowance for the use of metaphor, but only when it suits their interpretation.
So, no, there is really no relation to the Bible at all, though there is an argument against a particular interpretation of Genesis. It does amuse me though that for as much as people here call religion unscientific (righty so), they sure do spend a lot of time trying to use science to "disprove" it. Roughly half of the religious flamewars started on /. are due to detractors who like to say they're all started by religious nutjobs, and vice versa.
If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of.
No. All it means is that whatever changes the virus makes, it doesn't greatly affect the ability (means and opportunity) of those who have it to reproduce. Remember, natural selection, the mechanism through which evolution operates, is not working toward a glorious future of perfection, it is a consequence of how adapted an organism is to its environment. If the organism can reproduce just as much with the virus as without, then it's going to stick around even if all it does is sometimes cause schizophrenia and provides no positive traits.
I wouldn't call transubstantiation uncommon, as flitty pointed out. The view you mention is also common, yet also not universal. When I last regularly attended church, it was one that believed communion was what it sounded like--a meal that includes the entire church community. There was a component of remembrance, but the focus was on keeping those people close-knit like a family.
This appealed to me far more than the once-a-month solemn ritual practiced in my ancestral church. To each his own, I guess, but remember that your choice is not necessarily universal, and not necessarily right--in this case, there is little enough doctrine on the matter that there are room for lots of different interpretations on what communion is.