A bit offtopic, I know, but can we please stop referring to everyone and everything as scientists?
Are you saying that anyone who does experimentation with DNA is thereby a scientist? I would disagree.
I don't think anybody *is* referring to everyone and everything as scientists. I think they only do it when the people doing whatever are actually connected to a university, or receive government funding for research. What it means is that the people who are doing this have some social legitimacy in so doing; it's not just a guy in his back yard doing DNA splicing.
I think your theory is right. This image looks particularly wax-figury. I got that vibe from the whole movie. CG-ing up live-shot images is a good way to get around the actual CG stuff looking different from the rest.
My bad. I was wrong. The whole thing looked CG to me. For instance, images like this. There were also some close-ups of his eye and face in the avatar chamber that seemed just seemed to give off a 'Final Fantasy' feel. Combined with Cameron's statements, I jumped to a conclusion.
Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features
He's talking about the human characters. ( and not the ones in avatars.)
I'm far far FAR from unbiased on this, but if you wanted to speculate on making actors look younger, you'd still be better served looking at Benjamin Button.
Man, for all the geeks on slashdot, nobody really understands what they saw.
In case you missed it, *all* the actors you saw on screen were CG'ed from motion capture. They captured the muscle movements of the actors and used that as the basis for CG. All those wrinkles on Weaver's human character? CG. They didn't have to put them there. They could make her appear as a 20-year-old, or as a man.
On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington...
What would have been more interesting would have been including data on how many semesters people had been on campus. I strongly suspect that freshmen would be more likely to notice the guy on the unicycle, and seniors to ignore him.
Or how about a follow-up question. "Did you notice anything unusual?" "Did you notice a clown on a bicycle?" "A man on a horse?" "A seven-foot-tall man?" "A stiltwaker?" and a few other red herrings.
That way we know if they actually saw the clown, and if they thought it was unusual.
What I meant was I think the test is bunk, because I didn't think anybody failed to notice the bear or the gorilla. I noticed the animal on my first go-around, and nobody clued me in to the trick. I was counting passes. My count was off after being distracted by a man in a gorilla suit walking though a game of basketball, so in that sense I failed the test.
What I meant was I thought that the test failed in measuring what it purported to measure -- people's ability to notice unusual things. Judging by other people's comments, I was wrong.
You know what? I think this test is bunk. Everyone sees the gorilla or bear or white rabbit, the first time around. Then, they smugly think "I'm so much smarter and aware than all those other morons in the human race." Meanwhile nobody actually fails this test.
Is there any actual study that shows numbers for how many people actually miss the suprise, really?
It's like when the reporter Mike Royko signed books for his colleagues at a party. He wrote in everyone's book "You were my favorite reporter -- don't let the others know!" Everyone thinks they're special.
But how can McGovern say that "one of the main reasons for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan" was "to secure continuing access to oil and natural gas?" ?" This doesn't make any sense. Saddam Hussein was exporting oil before we invaded in 2003. The invasion devastated oil production. And Afghanistan has never been a big oil producer.
You're thinking "nation-state" and not "regional".
We are not interested in anybody's particular oil fields -- not Iraq's, not Iran's, etc. What we want to ensure is that there is a free market, which means a free flow, of oil and natural gas, throughout the region. As you may know, there is a big narual gas pipeline being built through Afghanistan, which will connect the Ukraine and other big natural gas fields to the west. We want to make sure that no President Hussein or President Ahmadinejad can distrup the regional market over there, and that multi-national corporations are free to do their business. And we need military bases so nobody can even think about acting up.
The mafia boss in the neighborhood doesn't want to run anybody's business. They just want to make sure that business is happening, and they're getting the protection money, and nobody else is. Governments and their armies are the goons, and the Corporations are the bosses.
There's absolutely nothing of value on the moon. It's like going to the top of Mount Everest -- Bragging rights, nothing more.
I think it's crazy we're not doing all we can to save the rainforests, or the coral reefs. We live in a cornucopia of biological resources, and we're just burning it for hamburgers and fish sandwiches.
You don't consider a violation of the fourth amendment a human rights issue? Yeah, it's true the US is not locking up it's citizens en masse. But it has been spying on the entire population wholesale since the Clinton days -- and also performing extraordinary renditions. That's an OK human rights record in your book?
You're muddling the distinction between the concept of exact measurement with exact model.
If you choose to ignore the issue of imprecise measurement, you're hand-waiving away the fundamental issue.
We'll never really know how mathematically precise "reality" is if we can't measure it precisely! It may actually be more imprecise than our mathematical models.
This is a cool story and all, and I hate to be a buzz kill, but you can still lose things with people carting them around manually. It's not like everybody knows at all times the locations of everything they've handled that day.
Yeah, some people, like myself, are "hands-on" learners, and I luckily realized early on that writing things down was a hand-on way to assimilate information, at least for me. It might sound silly, but think about it: it involves motor functions of the brain, and its an act of both repetition and creation. It's a great way to absorb information.
Yeah.. I remember hearing somewhere along the line that there was a theory that a virus originated as a form of inter-cellular communication, and only later on 'went rogue' and became non-adaptive to host organisms. If this theory is true, some 8% of human DNA comes from viruses, doesn't that just mean that the system works as it originally did?
Well, I see it differently; to me he seemed to be expressing his subjective experience ( if he is a he), leaving it open to interpretation, not excluding the placebo effect. If I were experiencing the placebo effect, and someone asked me about it, this is how I would respond. "I do Y and X happens".
If was saying it works, why didn't he just say, "It works for me?"
Well, that or you just assume that's the effect it will have on you, and so you behave accordingly.
What you are claiming as a possibility is not exclusive to what OP said. They did not claim that "Ginko motivates me and I follow through on it", they just said, "When I take it, I do things."
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
That's true, but I also think that
If you're poor, your overriding goal in life is to survive. You don't have a very "empowered" mindset. Other articles have noted that the terrorists are all from middle class backgrounds. If you're middle-class, you have enough mental breathing room to ask "What do I want to be when I grow up?" and "How can I make the world a better place?" You feel that you have some power or leverage in life and society. You can make choices that can have real impact. In other words, you feel "empowered".
So why do terrorists have engineering degrees? Probably because they are middle-class.
Except many industries these days are global. The USA represents around 25% of the global economy. That means, a company would make three times as much money operating outside of the USA than inside it.
Red herring. If the US changed its trade rules, a truly global company would have the choice of adapting to it, or losing 25% of their market. What are they going to choose? The obvious choice is to adapt to the changing demands of the US market. Likewise, a new company would simply do whatever it takes to sell their products in the US market, just like they do in Asia, the EU, etc.
Hearkening back to days of protectionism through rose-tinted glasses is deluded. It's 2009, not 1500.
The fact that some number of years have ticked away is not evidence that the nature of production and economy has fundamentally changed in 30 years. It reminds me what I heard about the financial markets since the 1990s -- we're in a new era of history, where the business cycle doesn't matter anymore; there's only going to be progress and growth. The need to regulate banks hasn't changed since the 1890s or 1930s; neither has the nature of nations and economies. The only thing that's changed is the zeitgeist of the day.
Can you imagine how bad Detroit's big three would be if they didn't have Toyota and Honda to compete against?
This is some kind of logical fallacy, but I don't know which one. When we have a globalized economy, where will competition come from? Other planets? In other words, the big three were already competing against each other. We had imports from Europe, too. If competition didn't work in a unified American market, why would it work in a unified world market? So let's say we have a global economy, and some 20 or so car companies are all competing with each other, and they all get lazy and arrogant and start making crappy cars ala Detroit. How do you break this cycle? Where does the Japan come from then? This almost seems like an argument *against* globalization.
That Honda and Toyota out-competed them is not because of competition -- the big three were already competing against each other -- its because Honda and Toyota were good companies. An American car company could have started producing good cars. There wasn't anybody preventing a new company from starting up. The Japanese companies competed against them in spite of tariffs in the beginning, so an American start up would have been ahead from the get-go.
Did the big three get subsidies and bailouts from the American government? They did -- just has Japanese auto makers got support from the Japanese government.
And you haven't thought it through very well: protectionism works both ways. Cut yourself off from the world, and US companies won't be able to outsource any of their products. They'll have no option but to move their entire operations outside of the US, then you won't have any jobs at all.
That's fine. They can sell their products outside of one of the largest markets in the world. Plenty of other companies will be happy to sell products in the American marketplace, employing Americans to produce them.
Globalism is nothing new. It's been going on since the 1500s. Protectionism works very well for countries who want to build themselves up. All of the countries that have become industrial powerhouses -- the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Korea, and now China -- did so by using tarriffs to block imports, and government subsidies to foster national industries. Check out this Thom Hartmann article:
"Yet "free trade" is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation, and the evidence is overwhelming. The concept was introduced, in fact, by Henry VII, as something that England should encourage other countries to do while it maintained protectionism; a process known as the 1485 Tudor Plan that led to the rapid industrialization of England and the deeper impoverishment of its trading "partners."
...But again, at a closer look, the reality is the opposite of what Friedman naively portrays in his book. In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950's. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM.
Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.
...
For about 200 years, we understood this in the United States. Had the fathers of the United States like Lincoln, Washington, Jackson or Grant applied for IMF loans, they would have been denied: All of them believed in high tariffs and a heavy control of foreign investment, and considered "free trade" to be absurd.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton submitted his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to the US Congress. In it he outlined the need for our government to subsidize new industries and subsequently protect them from the international markets until they become globally competitive.
Additionally, he proposed a roadmap for American industrial development. These steps included protective tariffs on imports, import bans, subsides, export bans on selected materials, and the development of product standards.
It was this policy, followed largely for most of the history of our country with average tariffs through most of the 19th and 20th centuries of around 40 percent, which built our American industry. All three times we radically dropped tariffs - for 3 years in 1857, for nine years in 1913 (just down to 25%), and in 1987 - what followed were economic disasters, particularly for small American manufacturers.
Since Reagan blew out our tariffs in the 1980s (and Clinton kicked the door totally open with GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO), our average tariffs are now around 2-4 percent. And the predictable result has been the hemorrhaging of American manufacturing capacity to those countries that do protect their industries through high import tariffs but allow exports on the cheap -- particularly China and South Korea."
I would counter that, while it inevitably would have happened at some point, it's not a given that the resulting OS would have been GPLed, and subsequently things could've turned out very differently.
I disagree. The very idea whose time had come was a GPL'ed operating system, leveraging *ahem* the open nature of the internet and collaborative tools.
There were some also-rans during that era, such as BeOS and all the other proprietary Unix clones. But the reason that they were also-rans is because they were closed -- they could not be freely spread, and therefore could not compete with Windows, which had a giant organization devoting much of its resources towards the propagation of Windows.
So long as there wasn't a GPL'ed OS, there would have been a serious hunger for it. *Something* would have arisen.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit offtopic, I know, but can we please stop referring to everyone and everything as scientists?
Are you saying that anyone who does experimentation with DNA is thereby a scientist? I would disagree.
I don't think anybody *is* referring to everyone and everything as scientists. I think they only do it when the people doing whatever are actually connected to a university, or receive government funding for research. What it means is that the people who are doing this have some social legitimacy in so doing; it's not just a guy in his back yard doing DNA splicing.
I think your theory is right. This image looks particularly wax-figury. I got that vibe from the whole movie. CG-ing up live-shot images is a good way to get around the actual CG stuff looking different from the rest.
My bad. I was wrong. The whole thing looked CG to me. For instance, images like this. There were also some close-ups of his eye and face in the avatar chamber that seemed just seemed to give off a 'Final Fantasy' feel. Combined with Cameron's statements, I jumped to a conclusion.
Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features
He's talking about the human characters. ( and not the ones in avatars.)
I'm far far FAR from unbiased on this, but if you wanted to speculate on making actors look younger, you'd still be better served looking at Benjamin Button.
Man, for all the geeks on slashdot, nobody really understands what they saw.
In case you missed it, *all* the actors you saw on screen were CG'ed from motion capture. They captured the muscle movements of the actors and used that as the basis for CG. All those wrinkles on Weaver's human character? CG. They didn't have to put them there. They could make her appear as a 20-year-old, or as a man.
On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington...
What would have been more interesting would have been including data on how many semesters people had been on campus. I strongly suspect that freshmen would be more likely to notice the guy on the unicycle, and seniors to ignore him.
Or how about a follow-up question. "Did you notice anything unusual?" "Did you notice a clown on a bicycle?" "A man on a horse?" "A seven-foot-tall man?" "A stiltwaker?" and a few other red herrings.
That way we know if they actually saw the clown, and if they thought it was unusual.
What I meant was I think the test is bunk, because I didn't think anybody failed to notice the bear or the gorilla. I noticed the animal on my first go-around, and nobody clued me in to the trick. I was counting passes. My count was off after being distracted by a man in a gorilla suit walking though a game of basketball, so in that sense I failed the test.
What I meant was I thought that the test failed in measuring what it purported to measure -- people's ability to notice unusual things. Judging by other people's comments, I was wrong.
You know what? I think this test is bunk. Everyone sees the gorilla or bear or white rabbit, the first time around. Then, they smugly think "I'm so much smarter and aware than all those other morons in the human race." Meanwhile nobody actually fails this test.
Is there any actual study that shows numbers for how many people actually miss the suprise, really?
It's like when the reporter Mike Royko signed books for his colleagues at a party. He wrote in everyone's book "You were my favorite reporter -- don't let the others know!" Everyone thinks they're special.
But how can McGovern say that "one of the main reasons for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan" was "to secure continuing access to oil and natural gas?" ?" This doesn't make any sense. Saddam Hussein was exporting oil before we invaded in 2003. The invasion devastated oil production. And Afghanistan has never been a big oil producer.
You're thinking "nation-state" and not "regional".
We are not interested in anybody's particular oil fields -- not Iraq's, not Iran's, etc. What we want to ensure is that there is a free market, which means a free flow, of oil and natural gas, throughout the region. As you may know, there is a big narual gas pipeline being built through Afghanistan, which will connect the Ukraine and other big natural gas fields to the west. We want to make sure that no President Hussein or President Ahmadinejad can distrup the regional market over there, and that multi-national corporations are free to do their business. And we need military bases so nobody can even think about acting up.
The mafia boss in the neighborhood doesn't want to run anybody's business. They just want to make sure that business is happening, and they're getting the protection money, and nobody else is. Governments and their armies are the goons, and the Corporations are the bosses.
There's absolutely nothing of value on the moon. It's like going to the top of Mount Everest -- Bragging rights, nothing more.
I think it's crazy we're not doing all we can to save the rainforests, or the coral reefs. We live in a cornucopia of biological resources, and we're just burning it for hamburgers and fish sandwiches.
You don't consider a violation of the fourth amendment a human rights issue? Yeah, it's true the US is not locking up it's citizens en masse. But it has been spying on the entire population wholesale since the Clinton days -- and also performing extraordinary renditions. That's an OK human rights record in your book?
So if you get 'caught', not only do you have to zip up, switch to some innocuous application, but now you also have to rip off and hide 3D glasses?
What are the chances that these glasses aren't going to be called "Jack-off Glasses"?
And while he mostly succeeding in killing only himself with little harm to others, that's because he detonated it in his ass.
So if we want to make a bomb-proof plane, we should build it out of ass, because ass has magical bomb-muffling properties?
:D
And yes, I'm being an ass here!
You're muddling the distinction between the concept of exact measurement with exact model.
If you choose to ignore the issue of imprecise measurement, you're hand-waiving away the fundamental issue.
We'll never really know how mathematically precise "reality" is if we can't measure it precisely! It may actually be more imprecise than our mathematical models.
This is a cool story and all, and I hate to be a buzz kill, but you can still lose things with people carting them around manually. It's not like everybody knows at all times the locations of everything they've handled that day.
Yeah, some people, like myself, are "hands-on" learners, and I luckily realized early on that writing things down was a hand-on way to assimilate information, at least for me. It might sound silly, but think about it: it involves motor functions of the brain, and its an act of both repetition and creation. It's a great way to absorb information.
Yeah.. I remember hearing somewhere along the line that there was a theory that a virus originated as a form of inter-cellular communication, and only later on 'went rogue' and became non-adaptive to host organisms. If this theory is true, some 8% of human DNA comes from viruses, doesn't that just mean that the system works as it originally did?
At this point I would say that the phone book *is* far, far behind us.
Well, I see it differently; to me he seemed to be expressing his subjective experience ( if he is a he), leaving it open to interpretation, not excluding the placebo effect. If I were experiencing the placebo effect, and someone asked me about it, this is how I would respond. "I do Y and X happens".
If was saying it works, why didn't he just say, "It works for me?"
Well, that or you just assume that's the effect it will have on you, and so you behave accordingly.
What you are claiming as a possibility is not exclusive to what OP said. They did not claim that "Ginko motivates me and I follow through on it", they just said, "When I take it, I do things."
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
That's true, but I also think that
If you're poor, your overriding goal in life is to survive. You don't have a very "empowered" mindset. Other articles have noted that the terrorists are all from middle class backgrounds. If you're middle-class, you have enough mental breathing room to ask "What do I want to be when I grow up?" and "How can I make the world a better place?" You feel that you have some power or leverage in life and society. You can make choices that can have real impact. In other words, you feel "empowered".
So why do terrorists have engineering degrees? Probably because they are middle-class.
Can't be a very competent review with that kind of language.
Yeah, exactly. George Carlin was the world's most incompetent comedian.
Except many industries these days are global. The USA represents around 25% of the global economy. That means, a company would make three times as much money operating outside of the USA than inside it.
Red herring. If the US changed its trade rules, a truly global company would have the choice of adapting to it, or losing 25% of their market. What are they going to choose? The obvious choice is to adapt to the changing demands of the US market. Likewise, a new company would simply do whatever it takes to sell their products in the US market, just like they do in Asia, the EU, etc.
Hearkening back to days of protectionism through rose-tinted glasses is deluded. It's 2009, not 1500.
The fact that some number of years have ticked away is not evidence that the nature of production and economy has fundamentally changed in 30 years. It reminds me what I heard about the financial markets since the 1990s -- we're in a new era of history, where the business cycle doesn't matter anymore; there's only going to be progress and growth. The need to regulate banks hasn't changed since the 1890s or 1930s; neither has the nature of nations and economies. The only thing that's changed is the zeitgeist of the day.
Can you imagine how bad Detroit's big three would be if they didn't have Toyota and Honda to compete against?
This is some kind of logical fallacy, but I don't know which one. When we have a globalized economy, where will competition come from? Other planets? In other words, the big three were already competing against each other. We had imports from Europe, too. If competition didn't work in a unified American market, why would it work in a unified world market? So let's say we have a global economy, and some 20 or so car companies are all competing with each other, and they all get lazy and arrogant and start making crappy cars ala Detroit. How do you break this cycle? Where does the Japan come from then? This almost seems like an argument *against* globalization.
That Honda and Toyota out-competed them is not because of competition -- the big three were already competing against each other -- its because Honda and Toyota were good companies. An American car company could have started producing good cars. There wasn't anybody preventing a new company from starting up. The Japanese companies competed against them in spite of tariffs in the beginning, so an American start up would have been ahead from the get-go.
Did the big three get subsidies and bailouts from the American government? They did -- just has Japanese auto makers got support from the Japanese government.
And you haven't thought it through very well: protectionism works both ways. Cut yourself off from the world, and US companies won't be able to outsource any of their products. They'll have no option but to move their entire operations outside of the US, then you won't have any jobs at all.
That's fine. They can sell their products outside of one of the largest markets in the world. Plenty of other companies will be happy to sell products in the American marketplace, employing Americans to produce them.
...But again, at a closer look, the reality is the opposite of what Friedman naively portrays in his book. In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950's. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM.
Globalism is nothing new. It's been going on since the 1500s. Protectionism works very well for countries who want to build themselves up. All of the countries that have become industrial powerhouses -- the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Korea, and now China -- did so by using tarriffs to block imports, and government subsidies to foster national industries. Check out this Thom Hartmann article:
"Yet "free trade" is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation, and the evidence is overwhelming. The concept was introduced, in fact, by Henry VII, as something that England should encourage other countries to do while it maintained protectionism; a process known as the 1485 Tudor Plan that led to the rapid industrialization of England and the deeper impoverishment of its trading "partners."
Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.
... For about 200 years, we understood this in the United States. Had the fathers of the United States like Lincoln, Washington, Jackson or Grant applied for IMF loans, they would have been denied: All of them believed in high tariffs and a heavy control of foreign investment, and considered "free trade" to be absurd.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton submitted his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to the US Congress. In it he outlined the need for our government to subsidize new industries and subsequently protect them from the international markets until they become globally competitive.
Additionally, he proposed a roadmap for American industrial development. These steps included protective tariffs on imports, import bans, subsides, export bans on selected materials, and the development of product standards.
It was this policy, followed largely for most of the history of our country with average tariffs through most of the 19th and 20th centuries of around 40 percent, which built our American industry. All three times we radically dropped tariffs - for 3 years in 1857, for nine years in 1913 (just down to 25%), and in 1987 - what followed were economic disasters, particularly for small American manufacturers.
Since Reagan blew out our tariffs in the 1980s (and Clinton kicked the door totally open with GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO), our average tariffs are now around 2-4 percent. And the predictable result has been the hemorrhaging of American manufacturing capacity to those countries that do protect their industries through high import tariffs but allow exports on the cheap -- particularly China and South Korea."
I would counter that, while it inevitably would have happened at some point, it's not a given that the resulting OS would have been GPLed, and subsequently things could've turned out very differently.
I disagree. The very idea whose time had come was a GPL'ed operating system, leveraging *ahem* the open nature of the internet and collaborative tools.
There were some also-rans during that era, such as BeOS and all the other proprietary Unix clones. But the reason that they were also-rans is because they were closed -- they could not be freely spread, and therefore could not compete with Windows, which had a giant organization devoting much of its resources towards the propagation of Windows.
So long as there wasn't a GPL'ed OS, there would have been a serious hunger for it. *Something* would have arisen.
Oh, man, this is heavy!