And you can say this for sure, even in a highly complex chaotic system that already relies on minuscule chemical changes? Anyway the article takes great pains to say that they are only speaking of the mathematical model and not the physical phenomenon, so...you're dumb.
The difference between the classical and quantum models lies in how the rational component and the cognitive dissonance component are combined. Even after adding the second component, the classical model predicts that the probability in the unknown scenario must equal the average of the probability for the two known cases. As such, the classical model continues to obey the law of total probability, and fails to explain the violations of the sure thing principle.
The sure thing principle "says that if you prefer choice A in two complementary known states (e.g., known winning and known losing), then you should also prefer choice A when the state is unknown." In their study, "participants who were told that their partner had defected or cooperated on the first round usually chose to defect on the second round (84% and 66%, respectively). But participants who did not know their partner's previous decision were more likely to cooperate than the others (only 55% defected)."
This topic comes up now and again, this idea that science requires no faith. It is a false, misleading idea, and it only serves to further fracture humanity. I responded to such a post a while back; you can read it in full here if you like. I'm reposting much of it below because it applies equally well here.
When a scientist posits a hypothesis, he believes it to be true, or that there is a good chance that it is true. This faith, based on his previous experience, is what compels him to run experiments to test his hypothesis, which may turn out to be true or false. More fundamentally, he has faith that by experimenting he will be able to prove or disprove his hypothesis, or at least discover whether or not it is provable at this time, even though the only thing he has to go on is his personal experience.
[Faith also] plays a role in science at a greater than individual level. Repeatability is well and good as a test, but one must have faith that testing was actually performed as reported, and accurate results obtained. A better example, perhaps, is when we accept the word of geologists that the rock in a certain area is X million years old. This statement is based on the faith that the geologist knows what he is about, and on his part, faith that the methods used by his testing equipment are sound, and so on. You also have faith that the scientific process will continue to yield practical results; otherwise what would be the point? "In its most extreme form, scientism is the faith that science has no boundaries, that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science alone." (source: wiki::scientism)
On faith in religion:
You may complain that I have been discussing "faith" while what you wrote is "blind faith." The truth is that there are individuals who take the existence of God on blind faith, that is, solely on the faith of others, and there are other individuals who take the truths found by science on blind faith. Yet just as there are also individuals who take science on informed faith, that is, their own experimentation, so too are there individuals who believe in God based on informed faith. What informs them is their own spiritual* experience, and though that may never satisfy you it certainly satisfies them. It is the divergence of experience that explains why believing in God is an option for some and not for others; it is the same thing that allows you and I to see the same film at the same time in the same theater and come out with opposite opinions as to its worth.
Science tells us a lot about the universe in which we live; I do not intend to dispute that by pointing out the role that faith plays in science. I do not intend to defend any religion in particular, either, only to defend the option of choosing to follow a religion without being viewed as somehow inferior to or less intelligent than those who choose no religion.
Faith should not be disparaged simply because it is faith, because that is a hypocrisy. Who among you desires an unfaithful wife or friend? The scientific method has produced many wonderful things, so faith in it is well-founded. Religions have also produced many wonderful things (though its productions are often social and personal) so for many individuals faith in them is also well-founded. If in cases it is not, that is a fault of judgment in the individuals practicing the religion and not a fault of faith. Your problem should be framed as "misplaced faith" and not "faith" as a whole, otherwise it is ludicrous when examined.
As for string theory, I know too little of it to say anything with authority, so I'm not going to write it off but I'm not going to try to build something using its principles either. The consensus is that it is currently untestable, so it probably shouldn't be hyped as much as it is. But cursing it as "Not Science!" and throwing it out entirely is prematurely destructive behavior. A surface-level explanation of Relativity sounds less bizarre to us now only because we've been living with it for a century.
And this is why a realtime public system would be irresponsible. You are giving criminals a great avoidance system while doing little more for the law-abiding public than what would be achieved by a similar system with at least a few hours' delay and a stored history so that you could play it back. Constant surveillance of private citizens is oppressive, but constant surveillance of public servants is an equalizer.
I like the idea of a realtime system but the drawbacks far outweigh the advantages. I'm sure that the police would hate any sort of public system because they don't want to be tracked over their entire shift, even on the shitter. My response to that is...neither do we, and our shifts don't end.
I was at Babbage's in the late '90s and our policy was (as you'd expect) the same. I'd just like to add a point about employee checkout of new games.
Several posters have expressed concern that these discs may be scratched or damaged when they come back. At my store, we always did a visual check of the disc before bringing it back into the system to be sold. This check is obviously performed by someone other than the employee who checked out the game. I don't know what the policy was for scratched disks because it never happened at my store and I wasn't a manager so didn't care.
The game once checked in was then shrinkwrapped and put back in the cabinet with the rest of them. I never had a customer complain or to my knowledge even notice that the wrap was different, and our customers loved that we had a shrinkwrapper so that we could rewrap display copies when they were purchased as gifts.
All of this to say that this is not new, it has been done for at least ten years, and I'm frankly surprised that more people had no knowledge of the practice until now. We didn't go around saying "if you work here you can rent games for free!" but it wasn't a secret either.
Ah, thanks. I've heard of it (I think it's in the list of Recommended Reading at the end of Ron Paul's book) but I haven't got around to reading it. I see from Ambitwistor's link that it's based on an essay by Bastiat...guess I'll have to bump up its priority.
Wow, both of those graphics are intellectually dishonest.
In the first, the blue lines go down despite the fact that all of them represent an increase in the national debt. As a fiscal conservative it offends me that recently the Republicans, who used to stand for that ideal, ran up the deficit so irresponsibly. It also offends me that whoever created that chart paints the Democrats as some sort of alternative when the reality is that they were still expanding spending every year. Clinton made a commendable effort at balancing the budget, and I don't wish to demean that. But why is it that he and Carter are the only Democrats on the chart? Why is the vast expansion under the New Deal by FDR not covered? Why are the staggering commitments of Barack Obama not on display? It couldn't possibly be that they'd make the chart look a lot more homogeneous (or even skewed blue) than the nice "red bad, blue good" it shows now, could it?
The second chart is even worse. The data is shown in order of Gini index increase instead of chronologically, something I didn't pick up on until my third or fourth look at it; with Roosevelt at the top and Bush at the bottom one could easily think otherwise. More importantly, the lack of a timeline makes it easy to ignore all of the factors that would affect income disparity besides who was President at the time. Bush 43's change, while positive, was a lower increase than both Bush 41 and Clinton, suggesting that a longer-term trend may be at work. Finally, the entire spread is +/- 10% of an index that at its highest was 0.47 and at its lowest was 0.386 (lowest estimated before reporting was 0.376). The chart appears to be plotting the percentage of change in the index, meaning that the highest positive change of 5% taken at the highest index of 0.47 results in an actual index change of only 0.0235.
There is also the question of whether or not inequality of wealth distribution provides an accurate portrayal of a society's "paradise index," but I'd rather have that debate with someone seeking truth instead of displaying propaganda.
Obviously imposing its will on other nations and disrespecting their sovereignity has never, ever been an issue to the US...
...in your lifetime. This nation didn't pull many (any?) stunts like that before the 20th century. Some of that has to do with our modern ease of travel, but I like to think it's mostly due to the principles of the early guys who believed in "peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."
I don't know how long that idea held sway, as my knowledge of the latter part of the 19th century is severely lacking, but I can only hope that it's coming back into vogue amongst the people, if not the plutocracy.
It will be interesting to see what happens between the US and Iran over the next few years. Iran no longer accepts US Dollars for oil, preferring to trade in Yen, Euro, and other major currencies. I certainly don't reject your statement because I am well aware of the financial manipulators that set US policy, but Iran's been doing this for over a year now with no (physical) repercussions. It's definitely something to keep an eye on.
This is a good idea, which means it has practically zero chance of being attempted =)
I find it interesting that we invent all sorts of systems that mimic natural processes* (whether or not we know they existed before our inventions) and yet aside from the obvious counterexample of computing power it has been rare that the man-made system will be as efficient, effective, and minimally destructive to its surrounding environment as its corresponding natural system.
I don't mean to imply that technology is inherently bad or that we ought to restore the Middle Ages from backup. In fact, those natural systems may have been destructive when they first appeared and we're only discovering them after they've stabilized. I do think that biology is underrated and that we've spent a significant amount of time reinventing wheels poorly instead of ferreting out the ones that have been refined over millennia. The fact that we have done so at such a fast pace is putting a lot of stress on the ecosystem at many levels, and it's smarter to try to reverse that through researching the natural world* instead of assuming that the best way to improve things is another layer of designed complexity.
*Spare me the argument about human activity being natural. You know what I mean by the distinction, and on top of that the 20th century consisted almost entirely of being too ignorant to realize that we've been shitting where we eat in massive proportions. No other creature on Earth does this, making us a perverse race and unfit to survive (in the Darwinian sense) unless we change fast.
We now have evidence that they are communicating with each other over thousands of miles of ocean. Singing is part of their social system and community.
You didn't read closely enough. The wands are (in my hypothetical history) ritualistic, serving the purpose of channeling intent to the nanomachines inside the human body. The wands' elevated status is a result cultural conditioning in the wizards that use them; they're really just nice-looking sticks. "Carry" in the first sentence is ambiguous, but "closed beta becoming open (through sexual promiscuity, naturally)" is the clue that unlocks the context.
Energy is trickier, I'll admit. I suppose you won't let me get away with saying "non-local quantum-catalyst energy teleportation" and scribbling some pseudomath? =) Still, with all the weirdness going on at the quantum level and the development of new ideas such as string theory or (my personal favorite) the holographic universe, I'd wager that something like it is indeed theoretically possible.
To avoid multiposting, I'll respond to your other comment here as well.
The line is clear, and can be delineated by asking a simple question, "Does this story violate the constraints imposed by our universe?" If no it's science fiction. If yes it's fantasy fiction.
If that's the line, it may be clear but it is also mobile, since works will be crossing from SF to fantasy as old models are disproved (someone mentioned Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust;" I'd include War of the Worlds) and from fantasy to SF as new principles are discovered. So the line may be clear at any one point in time, but it will always be dancing (IMO anyway; perhaps you're more optimistic about our knowledge of the universe than I am).
Additionally, there are things that are speculated that we don't know enough about to declare them to be possible or impossible. Mind uploads, which I mentioned before, are a prime example. How would you classify fiction that deals with the Singularity, or cyberpunk such as Neuromancer? There will always be books that some (most, in this case) classify as SF and others as fantasy; at least with the spectrum viewpoint these are reconcilable.
Finally, by your edict, any fiction that is not theoretically impossible is SF. This would include romance novels and detective stories and Tom Clancy books. There is without a doubt something more to what the vast majority of people recognize as SF; some element that does not often exist in romance novels. Whatever that element is, its characteristics are more closely associated with fantasy than with any other genre of fiction: there may be a vast difference between dragons and rayguns, but they are more closely associated than either dragons or rayguns and, say, a terrorist plot to knock out the power grid. I would describe that element as being "fantastic." Heinlein's libertarian lunar prison society in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," while not strictly a violation of the constraints imposed by our universe, is certainly a fantastic idea (here, in a few senses of the word)!
Given all this, I have no problem with the separate distinctions of SF and fantasy because they are generally useful in knowing what kind of story you're getting into; I just don't see the value of attempting to Once And For All pin down the "border cases" when the reality is that both labels are just conceptual conventions applied to individual stories whose character and content is as varied as their authors.
All fiction is fantasy. Some is just more honest about it. - Gene Wolfe
Feel free to respond. I don't believe either one of us is willing to give up on his perspective, but the conversation can still be interesting.
Back on-topic though, I agree with your idea that SF/Fantasy can be a spectrum, not two utterly separate sets of a Venn diagram.
Back off-topic again, I utterly despise Venn diagrams. I'm not entirely sure why, but I recall loathing the "compare and contrast!" exercises in grade school, and to this day I refuse to get a MasterCard solely because of their symbol.
Perhaps this deep-seated hatred for the Venn diagram is rooted in my distaste for viewing things as black-and-white, or maybe it's the other way around.
And now, fully offtopic and replying to my own post to boot, I swear I wrote the one above before reading your (memorycardfull) other post calling my first one flippant =) I suppose I have to take some blame for my tone since we all independently arrived at the same conclusion.
For the record, the tone of my post was intended to be conversational, the ellipsis signaling my pause for a web search of "bicycle gyroscope balance trail", but it must not look that way since it's currently modded troll. I forget sometimes that my personality is a complete mystery to most people who come across my posts, and today those armed with mod points mistook my text as flippant.
Oh well, I'm glad that you're glad to have learned something new; that's more fulfilling to me than karma, though it's a shame that less eyeballs will see the interesting mechanics in the linked article.
I'm pretty sure that this information is false. Let me see...yeah, here we go:
Groundbreaking research in bicycle dynamics was published in 1970 by David Jones. He mounted counter-rotating gyroscopes on bikes to counteract the gyroscopic effect of the wheels. The resulting bikes were quite rideable. So why do bikes stay up?
The answer is: trail. Trail is the difference between where the bike's front wheel contacts the ground and where the steering axis (drawn through the fork of the front wheel) meets the ground. Well-designed bicycles have negative trail--that is, the wheel contacts the ground behind where the steering axis meets the ground. When you tilt, the trail causes the wheel to turn, thus converting the tilting motion into a turning motion, etc., as per my original report. The acid test done by Dr. Jones is in creating bikes with positive trail. Even professional cyclists can't ride those very far.
Even focusing on the activities of Congress would be a huge improvement, since they are, after all, the ones who write* and pass federal laws before they ever get to the President. They are also a hell of a lot easier to get hold of and influence, provided you can get enough people together to hit critical mass. I've seen it happen in my state (PA) beginning with the bank bailout: some of our reps listened to the >80% majority here who didn't want it to happen even as leaders of both parties were blathering on about its importance.
In fact, without some major action of states' rights campaigns (which may yet come to fruition) the states are emasculated by the federal government and can't really set much meaningful policy, so congressional elections are even more important than state and local.
(All you federalist folks should please ignore the above post and keep fighting over presidents so that we can sneak our like-minded people into Congress and stop the behemoth. Thanks.)
*at least, when they don't let their lobbyists write the legislation for them
You can keep telling yourself that, but its pretty obviously false.
[citation needed]
It's pretty obvious to me that neither of them is very addictive, and I have evidence--they're pretty much even (and significantly lower than alcohol, the usual drug on the "legal" end of the double standard argument), but they have different characteristics. Health problems are arguable, but the only ones I am aware of are the ones caused by smoking, which is not the only way to ingest marijuana.
Regardless, the double standard (assuming you are disagreeing with that as well as OP's sketchy facts) most definitely exists, and organizations such as LEAP show that it is not only marijuana users who see it.
I've heard it mentioned on Penny-Arcade, I think, but never knew anything about it until now. Like I said in the post, it wasn't a very original or deep idea; it was mainly a foil for highlighting SF/Fantasy as a spectrum rather than fully distinct genres.
I love the term "handwavium"! Amusingly enough, the first draft of my history was even wackier: the tech was invented by servants of the Great Old Ones on a distant planet, a splinter faction of which used it to escape from their rule to live freely Earth (temporarily--Cthulhu naturally found them, who are now us, and bides his time beneath the waves). That version with its rebellion on a distant planet mirrored the Anarchy Online back story even more closely. I scrapped it because I thought it downplayed the tech flavor too much, but now I think it would have been even more interesting for the discussion since it further muddies the waters with yet another brand as well as introducing aspects of horror, another genre that can be hard to pin down.
If you read true *science* fiction (as opposed to future fantasy)
All true Scotsmen wear kilts.
There are certainly differences between sf and fantasy, but I think you're trying to draw a line in the sand that doesn't exist, or if it does it's probably fractal and not at all straight or easy to delimit. As a faster poster wrote, both are subsets of speculative fiction, and IMO they have much more common ground than difference. Someone else wrote of the hard/soft SF distinction which seems a closer match to the concept you've presented. Even so, there's enough mingling between SF and fantasy that makes it hard to pin down the genre of many stories and a lot of it depends on what you, individually, think is possible or plausible. I don't believe that "mind uploads" or strong AI are plausible, so going by your categories I would call them future fantasy even though they are staples of SF. In everyday conversation I would also call them SF because that is their flavor. Where would a lunar base fall? A lunar society? A medieval society that unearths advanced technology?
Harry Potter (and other wizards) do magic without using any technology.
If you can't BS a tech history for Harry Potter, then you're not trying hard enough.
Just for fun (mine, mostly):
Harry Potter and his ilk lost the knowledge of the nanomachines that they carry, and by the fourth centuray AD had developed the ritual incantations and wizardly trappings upon which they have come to rely in order to use them. These self-replicating machines (and they are machines, though they were bio-engineered and so have yet to be rediscovered) were created long ago in an event more monumental than the Singularity because reality itself became malleable to the extent that the user understood how--not all the nasty math and quantum psych/physics, but how to pass one's intent on to the machines. Like any complex system, it took some effort for most people to get even small results and a lot more to master, and the unforeseen consequences of a closed beta becoming open (through sexual promiscuity, naturally) resulted in the demise of the advanced global civilization that had created it. Survivors eked out a living how and where they could and, for the most part, passed on the information in story form to their offspring, as well as the nanomchines. The stories changed over the years and many wrote them off as mythical; even more forgot them entirely. You can still find some dedicated users; some wizards but many more mystics, who have guarded themselves against the colossal forces at their command by constructing elaborate belief systems that govern their usage. There is a reason for the strict rules at monastic orders and Hogwarts.
The truth is that we all have this power. I fear the day when the men of science begin to convince us that it is so.
There's Harry Potter explained, with Jesus and all miracle-workers thrown in for free. I might as well have called 'em Midichlorians and gotten Jedi in the mix. It's not a very good or original backstory, and it's certainly not hard SF, in fact it has a fantasy flavor (not surprising given the task), but the technological elements are there.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy is in trouble.
And you can say this for sure, even in a highly complex chaotic system that already relies on minuscule chemical changes? Anyway the article takes great pains to say that they are only speaking of the mathematical model and not the physical phenomenon, so...you're dumb.
FTA:
The difference between the classical and quantum models lies in how the rational component and the cognitive dissonance component are combined. Even after adding the second component, the classical model predicts that the probability in the unknown scenario must equal the average of the probability for the two known cases. As such, the classical model continues to obey the law of total probability, and fails to explain the violations of the sure thing principle.
The sure thing principle "says that if you prefer choice A in two complementary known states (e.g., known winning and known losing), then you should also prefer choice A when the state is unknown." In their study, "participants who were told that their partner had defected or cooperated on the first round usually chose to defect on the second round (84% and 66%, respectively). But participants who did not know their partner's previous decision were more likely to cooperate than the others (only 55% defected)."
Account for THAT, classical decision theory!
This topic comes up now and again, this idea that science requires no faith. It is a false, misleading idea, and it only serves to further fracture humanity. I responded to such a post a while back; you can read it in full here if you like. I'm reposting much of it below because it applies equally well here.
When a scientist posits a hypothesis, he believes it to be true, or that there is a good chance that it is true. This faith, based on his previous experience, is what compels him to run experiments to test his hypothesis, which may turn out to be true or false. More fundamentally, he has faith that by experimenting he will be able to prove or disprove his hypothesis, or at least discover whether or not it is provable at this time, even though the only thing he has to go on is his personal experience.
[Faith also] plays a role in science at a greater than individual level. Repeatability is well and good as a test, but one must have faith that testing was actually performed as reported, and accurate results obtained. A better example, perhaps, is when we accept the word of geologists that the rock in a certain area is X million years old. This statement is based on the faith that the geologist knows what he is about, and on his part, faith that the methods used by his testing equipment are sound, and so on. You also have faith that the scientific process will continue to yield practical results; otherwise what would be the point? "In its most extreme form, scientism is the faith that science has no boundaries, that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science alone." (source: wiki::scientism)
On faith in religion:
You may complain that I have been discussing "faith" while what you wrote is "blind faith." The truth is that there are individuals who take the existence of God on blind faith, that is, solely on the faith of others, and there are other individuals who take the truths found by science on blind faith. Yet just as there are also individuals who take science on informed faith, that is, their own experimentation, so too are there individuals who believe in God based on informed faith. What informs them is their own spiritual* experience, and though that may never satisfy you it certainly satisfies them. It is the divergence of experience that explains why believing in God is an option for some and not for others; it is the same thing that allows you and I to see the same film at the same time in the same theater and come out with opposite opinions as to its worth.
Science tells us a lot about the universe in which we live; I do not intend to dispute that by pointing out the role that faith plays in science. I do not intend to defend any religion in particular, either, only to defend the option of choosing to follow a religion without being viewed as somehow inferior to or less intelligent than those who choose no religion.
Faith should not be disparaged simply because it is faith, because that is a hypocrisy. Who among you desires an unfaithful wife or friend? The scientific method has produced many wonderful things, so faith in it is well-founded. Religions have also produced many wonderful things (though its productions are often social and personal) so for many individuals faith in them is also well-founded. If in cases it is not, that is a fault of judgment in the individuals practicing the religion and not a fault of faith. Your problem should be framed as "misplaced faith" and not "faith" as a whole, otherwise it is ludicrous when examined.
As for string theory, I know too little of it to say anything with authority, so I'm not going to write it off but I'm not going to try to build something using its principles either. The consensus is that it is currently untestable, so it probably shouldn't be hyped as much as it is. But cursing it as "Not Science!" and throwing it out entirely is prematurely destructive behavior. A surface-level explanation of Relativity sounds less bizarre to us now only because we've been living with it for a century.
That's the first connection I made, too.
Not to mention, Tesla makes cars that are fugly
I think you mis-read me. I think the Tesla looks GREAT
I think you mis-wrote ;)
No, his name is "gandhi 2," completely different.
If you're a criminal, well, that ones obvious.
And this is why a realtime public system would be irresponsible. You are giving criminals a great avoidance system while doing little more for the law-abiding public than what would be achieved by a similar system with at least a few hours' delay and a stored history so that you could play it back. Constant surveillance of private citizens is oppressive, but constant surveillance of public servants is an equalizer.
I like the idea of a realtime system but the drawbacks far outweigh the advantages. I'm sure that the police would hate any sort of public system because they don't want to be tracked over their entire shift, even on the shitter. My response to that is...neither do we, and our shifts don't end.
I was at Babbage's in the late '90s and our policy was (as you'd expect) the same. I'd just like to add a point about employee checkout of new games.
Several posters have expressed concern that these discs may be scratched or damaged when they come back. At my store, we always did a visual check of the disc before bringing it back into the system to be sold. This check is obviously performed by someone other than the employee who checked out the game. I don't know what the policy was for scratched disks because it never happened at my store and I wasn't a manager so didn't care.
The game once checked in was then shrinkwrapped and put back in the cabinet with the rest of them. I never had a customer complain or to my knowledge even notice that the wrap was different, and our customers loved that we had a shrinkwrapper so that we could rewrap display copies when they were purchased as gifts.
All of this to say that this is not new, it has been done for at least ten years, and I'm frankly surprised that more people had no knowledge of the practice until now. We didn't go around saying "if you work here you can rent games for free!" but it wasn't a secret either.
Ah, thanks. I've heard of it (I think it's in the list of Recommended Reading at the end of Ron Paul's book) but I haven't got around to reading it. I see from Ambitwistor's link that it's based on an essay by Bastiat...guess I'll have to bump up its priority.
The link in your sig is broken (suspended account). What's the book that you were referring to in it?
Wow, both of those graphics are intellectually dishonest.
In the first, the blue lines go down despite the fact that all of them represent an increase in the national debt. As a fiscal conservative it offends me that recently the Republicans, who used to stand for that ideal, ran up the deficit so irresponsibly. It also offends me that whoever created that chart paints the Democrats as some sort of alternative when the reality is that they were still expanding spending every year. Clinton made a commendable effort at balancing the budget, and I don't wish to demean that. But why is it that he and Carter are the only Democrats on the chart? Why is the vast expansion under the New Deal by FDR not covered? Why are the staggering commitments of Barack Obama not on display? It couldn't possibly be that they'd make the chart look a lot more homogeneous (or even skewed blue) than the nice "red bad, blue good" it shows now, could it?
The second chart is even worse. The data is shown in order of Gini index increase instead of chronologically, something I didn't pick up on until my third or fourth look at it; with Roosevelt at the top and Bush at the bottom one could easily think otherwise. More importantly, the lack of a timeline makes it easy to ignore all of the factors that would affect income disparity besides who was President at the time. Bush 43's change, while positive, was a lower increase than both Bush 41 and Clinton, suggesting that a longer-term trend may be at work. Finally, the entire spread is +/- 10% of an index that at its highest was 0.47 and at its lowest was 0.386 (lowest estimated before reporting was 0.376). The chart appears to be plotting the percentage of change in the index, meaning that the highest positive change of 5% taken at the highest index of 0.47 results in an actual index change of only 0.0235.
There is also the question of whether or not inequality of wealth distribution provides an accurate portrayal of a society's "paradise index," but I'd rather have that debate with someone seeking truth instead of displaying propaganda.
Obviously imposing its will on other nations and disrespecting their sovereignity has never, ever been an issue to the US...
...in your lifetime. This nation didn't pull many (any?) stunts like that before the 20th century. Some of that has to do with our modern ease of travel, but I like to think it's mostly due to the principles of the early guys who believed in "peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."
I don't know how long that idea held sway, as my knowledge of the latter part of the 19th century is severely lacking, but I can only hope that it's coming back into vogue amongst the people, if not the plutocracy.
It will be interesting to see what happens between the US and Iran over the next few years. Iran no longer accepts US Dollars for oil, preferring to trade in Yen, Euro, and other major currencies. I certainly don't reject your statement because I am well aware of the financial manipulators that set US policy, but Iran's been doing this for over a year now with no (physical) repercussions. It's definitely something to keep an eye on.
This is a good idea, which means it has practically zero chance of being attempted =)
I find it interesting that we invent all sorts of systems that mimic natural processes* (whether or not we know they existed before our inventions) and yet aside from the obvious counterexample of computing power it has been rare that the man-made system will be as efficient, effective, and minimally destructive to its surrounding environment as its corresponding natural system.
I don't mean to imply that technology is inherently bad or that we ought to restore the Middle Ages from backup. In fact, those natural systems may have been destructive when they first appeared and we're only discovering them after they've stabilized. I do think that biology is underrated and that we've spent a significant amount of time reinventing wheels poorly instead of ferreting out the ones that have been refined over millennia. The fact that we have done so at such a fast pace is putting a lot of stress on the ecosystem at many levels, and it's smarter to try to reverse that through researching the natural world* instead of assuming that the best way to improve things is another layer of designed complexity.
*Spare me the argument about human activity being natural. You know what I mean by the distinction, and on top of that the 20th century consisted almost entirely of being too ignorant to realize that we've been shitting where we eat in massive proportions. No other creature on Earth does this, making us a perverse race and unfit to survive (in the Darwinian sense) unless we change fast.
> Whales communicate for several hundred miles
That's a pretty lowball estimate (src):
We now have evidence that they are communicating with each other over thousands of miles of ocean. Singing is part of their social system and community.
You didn't read closely enough. The wands are (in my hypothetical history) ritualistic, serving the purpose of channeling intent to the nanomachines inside the human body. The wands' elevated status is a result cultural conditioning in the wizards that use them; they're really just nice-looking sticks. "Carry" in the first sentence is ambiguous, but "closed beta becoming open (through sexual promiscuity, naturally)" is the clue that unlocks the context.
Energy is trickier, I'll admit. I suppose you won't let me get away with saying "non-local quantum-catalyst energy teleportation" and scribbling some pseudomath? =) Still, with all the weirdness going on at the quantum level and the development of new ideas such as string theory or (my personal favorite) the holographic universe, I'd wager that something like it is indeed theoretically possible.
To avoid multiposting, I'll respond to your other comment here as well.
The line is clear, and can be delineated by asking a simple question, "Does this story violate the constraints imposed by our universe?" If no it's science fiction. If yes it's fantasy fiction.
If that's the line, it may be clear but it is also mobile, since works will be crossing from SF to fantasy as old models are disproved (someone mentioned Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust;" I'd include War of the Worlds) and from fantasy to SF as new principles are discovered. So the line may be clear at any one point in time, but it will always be dancing (IMO anyway; perhaps you're more optimistic about our knowledge of the universe than I am).
Additionally, there are things that are speculated that we don't know enough about to declare them to be possible or impossible. Mind uploads, which I mentioned before, are a prime example. How would you classify fiction that deals with the Singularity, or cyberpunk such as Neuromancer? There will always be books that some (most, in this case) classify as SF and others as fantasy; at least with the spectrum viewpoint these are reconcilable.
Finally, by your edict, any fiction that is not theoretically impossible is SF. This would include romance novels and detective stories and Tom Clancy books. There is without a doubt something more to what the vast majority of people recognize as SF; some element that does not often exist in romance novels. Whatever that element is, its characteristics are more closely associated with fantasy than with any other genre of fiction: there may be a vast difference between dragons and rayguns, but they are more closely associated than either dragons or rayguns and, say, a terrorist plot to knock out the power grid. I would describe that element as being "fantastic." Heinlein's libertarian lunar prison society in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," while not strictly a violation of the constraints imposed by our universe, is certainly a fantastic idea (here, in a few senses of the word)!
Given all this, I have no problem with the separate distinctions of SF and fantasy because they are generally useful in knowing what kind of story you're getting into; I just don't see the value of attempting to Once And For All pin down the "border cases" when the reality is that both labels are just conceptual conventions applied to individual stories whose character and content is as varied as their authors.
All fiction is fantasy. Some is just more honest about it.
- Gene Wolfe
Feel free to respond. I don't believe either one of us is willing to give up on his perspective, but the conversation can still be interesting.
Back on-topic though, I agree with your idea that SF/Fantasy can be a spectrum, not two utterly separate sets of a Venn diagram.
Back off-topic again, I utterly despise Venn diagrams. I'm not entirely sure why, but I recall loathing the "compare and contrast!" exercises in grade school, and to this day I refuse to get a MasterCard solely because of their symbol.
Perhaps this deep-seated hatred for the Venn diagram is rooted in my distaste for viewing things as black-and-white, or maybe it's the other way around.
And now, fully offtopic and replying to my own post to boot, I swear I wrote the one above before reading your (memorycardfull) other post calling my first one flippant =) I suppose I have to take some blame for my tone since we all independently arrived at the same conclusion.
How wonderfully post-structuralist!
You're welcome.
For the record, the tone of my post was intended to be conversational, the ellipsis signaling my pause for a web search of "bicycle gyroscope balance trail", but it must not look that way since it's currently modded troll. I forget sometimes that my personality is a complete mystery to most people who come across my posts, and today those armed with mod points mistook my text as flippant.
Oh well, I'm glad that you're glad to have learned something new; that's more fulfilling to me than karma, though it's a shame that less eyeballs will see the interesting mechanics in the linked article.
I'm pretty sure that this information is false. Let me see...yeah, here we go:
Groundbreaking research in bicycle dynamics was published in 1970 by David Jones. He mounted counter-rotating gyroscopes on bikes to counteract the gyroscopic effect of the wheels. The resulting bikes were quite rideable. So why do bikes stay up?
The answer is: trail. Trail is the difference between where the bike's front wheel contacts the ground and where the steering axis (drawn through the fork of the front wheel) meets the ground. Well-designed bicycles have negative trail--that is, the wheel contacts the ground behind where the steering axis meets the ground. When you tilt, the trail causes the wheel to turn, thus converting the tilting motion into a turning motion, etc., as per my original report. The acid test done by Dr. Jones is in creating bikes with positive trail. Even professional cyclists can't ride those very far.
Even focusing on the activities of Congress would be a huge improvement, since they are, after all, the ones who write* and pass federal laws before they ever get to the President. They are also a hell of a lot easier to get hold of and influence, provided you can get enough people together to hit critical mass. I've seen it happen in my state (PA) beginning with the bank bailout: some of our reps listened to the >80% majority here who didn't want it to happen even as leaders of both parties were blathering on about its importance.
In fact, without some major action of states' rights campaigns (which may yet come to fruition) the states are emasculated by the federal government and can't really set much meaningful policy, so congressional elections are even more important than state and local.
(All you federalist folks should please ignore the above post and keep fighting over presidents so that we can sneak our like-minded people into Congress and stop the behemoth. Thanks.)
*at least, when they don't let their lobbyists write the legislation for them
You can keep telling yourself that, but its pretty obviously false.
[citation needed]
It's pretty obvious to me that neither of them is very addictive, and I have evidence--they're pretty much even (and significantly lower than alcohol, the usual drug on the "legal" end of the double standard argument), but they have different characteristics. Health problems are arguable, but the only ones I am aware of are the ones caused by smoking, which is not the only way to ingest marijuana.
Regardless, the double standard (assuming you are disagreeing with that as well as OP's sketchy facts) most definitely exists, and organizations such as LEAP show that it is not only marijuana users who see it.
I've heard it mentioned on Penny-Arcade, I think, but never knew anything about it until now. Like I said in the post, it wasn't a very original or deep idea; it was mainly a foil for highlighting SF/Fantasy as a spectrum rather than fully distinct genres.
I love the term "handwavium"! Amusingly enough, the first draft of my history was even wackier: the tech was invented by servants of the Great Old Ones on a distant planet, a splinter faction of which used it to escape from their rule to live freely Earth (temporarily--Cthulhu naturally found them, who are now us, and bides his time beneath the waves). That version with its rebellion on a distant planet mirrored the Anarchy Online back story even more closely. I scrapped it because I thought it downplayed the tech flavor too much, but now I think it would have been even more interesting for the discussion since it further muddies the waters with yet another brand as well as introducing aspects of horror, another genre that can be hard to pin down.
If you read true *science* fiction (as opposed to future fantasy)
All true Scotsmen wear kilts.
There are certainly differences between sf and fantasy, but I think you're trying to draw a line in the sand that doesn't exist, or if it does it's probably fractal and not at all straight or easy to delimit. As a faster poster wrote, both are subsets of speculative fiction, and IMO they have much more common ground than difference. Someone else wrote of the hard/soft SF distinction which seems a closer match to the concept you've presented. Even so, there's enough mingling between SF and fantasy that makes it hard to pin down the genre of many stories and a lot of it depends on what you, individually, think is possible or plausible. I don't believe that "mind uploads" or strong AI are plausible, so going by your categories I would call them future fantasy even though they are staples of SF. In everyday conversation I would also call them SF because that is their flavor. Where would a lunar base fall? A lunar society? A medieval society that unearths advanced technology?
Harry Potter (and other wizards) do magic without using any technology.
If you can't BS a tech history for Harry Potter, then you're not trying hard enough.
Just for fun (mine, mostly):
Harry Potter and his ilk lost the knowledge of the nanomachines that they carry, and by the fourth centuray AD had developed the ritual incantations and wizardly trappings upon which they have come to rely in order to use them. These self-replicating machines (and they are machines, though they were bio-engineered and so have yet to be rediscovered) were created long ago in an event more monumental than the Singularity because reality itself became malleable to the extent that the user understood how--not all the nasty math and quantum psych/physics, but how to pass one's intent on to the machines. Like any complex system, it took some effort for most people to get even small results and a lot more to master, and the unforeseen consequences of a closed beta becoming open (through sexual promiscuity, naturally) resulted in the demise of the advanced global civilization that had created it. Survivors eked out a living how and where they could and, for the most part, passed on the information in story form to their offspring, as well as the nanomchines. The stories changed over the years and many wrote them off as mythical; even more forgot them entirely. You can still find some dedicated users; some wizards but many more mystics, who have guarded themselves against the colossal forces at their command by constructing elaborate belief systems that govern their usage. There is a reason for the strict rules at monastic orders and Hogwarts.
The truth is that we all have this power. I fear the day when the men of science begin to convince us that it is so.
There's Harry Potter explained, with Jesus and all miracle-workers thrown in for free. I might as well have called 'em Midichlorians and gotten Jedi in the mix. It's not a very good or original backstory, and it's certainly not hard SF, in fact it has a fantasy flavor (not surprising given the task), but the technological elements are there.