In general, people have practiced infanticide with any baby that wasn't obviously healthy up until about 200 years ago.
But generally, once a person is a proper member of a community, they are taken care of when they're sick, with as much resources and technology as that society has. Oftentimes it's not very much.
It's not too much different from our society. 100 years ago, if you stopped breathing, you were dead. We didn't have the technology or know-how to sustain or revive you. Now we do, so we do.
Avatar wasn't just displaying a particular message. It did it in a biased and unrealistic way. For example: the Na'vi seldom, if ever, had a civil conflict in the movie that was not a direct result of the corporate occupation. One of them died of old age, but every other action that caused pain was due to sky people.
That's ridiculous. They even said in the movie that the chick's great-grandfather united the tribes way back when ( read: solved a big civil war ). The movie wasn't "The Entire History of the Na'vi", it was just a short episode of a few years.
By your standards, any movie that doesn't show people using the restroom is pure unrealistic fantasy. You don't have to go into every detail of everything in a movie. Some pieces are irrelevant to the story.
Dude, everything we have is from nature. Our food, our clothing, our oil, our raw materials, our bodies and minds are nature. "Nature" is us and we are it.
Nature has provided us with far less than it has provided these aliens. It seems gaia didn't love us from the start... my ancestors never rode on flying dragons.
Your ancestors didn't ride on dragons? Wah! They rode on horses, donkeys, mules, camels, elephants, dogsleds -- almost anything strong enough to carry a human being. Why do you feel so put out by "Gaia"?
all natural religions mandate intra-religious wars between families, individuals and villages, or various combinations of that.
Where are you getting this from? What in the world is a natural religion?
Another thing I find quite funny is the location of that village and that tree. What energy source would they have ? Given the extreme "coincidental" location they have, one would think it... just might be those very same minerals. This would mean, of course, that all that "native" stuff is just "plundering" exactly the mineral source as the humans want.
Their energy source was muscle. They didn't have machines or fire. They hunted on foot or mounted on dragon or 6-legged horse.
The whole moon was charged with a big electro-magnetic flux, sort of like a natural version of Tesla's vision of electrically charging the Earth's atmosphere to provide free power everywhere. The movie implied that organisms there were using it for communication. If they were using that free electricity for anything other than communication, there's no need to mine or harvest it. It's already out there and renewable, like solar power.
But, of course, keeping mountains floating in the air is just so much more important than keeping humans alive
(after all, the movie dialog makes clear that following any course of action other than acquiring those "unobtanium" minerals would result in massive casualties on earth.
No, it doesn't. It said that shareholders would face a short term loss if the mineral underneath the tree couldn't be mined. It said that people had *already* strip-mined earth to death and there was no ecosystem to support them in mass numbers anymore. The Earth was dying because man had over-harvested it, and now they wanted to do the same to the Na'vi homeworld. Why let them? They Na'vi were living sustainably.
So, what you're saying is that a human as a separate organism originates from the 'fetus' organ from a woman's body? Makes sense. ( What if the fetus is born, the cord is not cut, but the placenta is delivered? Still not a separate human? The placenta can just hang around and break off all by itself, you know.)
But still, if you wanted to trace the ultimate origin of an individual human to a single cell, I still think that egg cell is the best candidate, even though it passes through the fetus-organ-in-woman's-body stage.
Do they want to "learn programming", or do they want to make video games? ( Or do *you* want them to learn programming? ) If they want to make video games, have them check out Alice. They'll make a video game and learn to program as a bonus. For middle-school aged people, there is Storytelling Alice, which is pretty powerful in its own right, in terms of a teaching tool.
Where would you say an independent existence as an organism begins?
When the egg cell is fertilized? If this were your answer, consider that , even though it has 46 chromosomes, it has no other cells, no cell differentiation, no tissue, no organs, anything. How can a single cell be equivalent to a human? If not there, at what point then?
There is no such thing as an independent organism.
if the employees are unhappy they can always get another job, no shortages of those
This is sarcasm, right? The nation's running at about 10 unemployment, at about 17 percent. So yeah, there is a shortage of jobs. You can't just go anywhere and find another if you don't like your current one.
Well, that's a good definition of origin of self-consciousness, but I think if you want to talk about your very first existence as an independent organism ( and we're dependent on the web of life throughout our entire existence, from our mother's care and nurturing to the plants and animals we eat ) would be when the egg cell that became you first formed.
...and if you're a woman you produce one certain cell every four weeks...
I had heard that she produced them all when she was forming in the womb, and slowly shed 1 at a time every four weeks.
The implications of this is that when you first began your independent existence as a cell, you were in your mother's ovaries when she was developing in your grandmother's womb.
I didn't read the article. Does the fact of whose doing the research really have any bearing on the fact that we do have safer alternatives to alcohol already?
We already have alcohol substitutes ( read: recreational drugs ) that are safer than alcohol. Only problem is, they're illegal.
You can't handle the truth. Dr. David Nutt, the British government scientist that was recently fired, did an exhaustive study of the real impact of recreational drugs. Herion was 8.32, alcohol 5.54, Cannabis 4.00, LSD 3.68 and Ecstacy 3.27. A higher score is worse.( Many other drugs were in the study).
So we already have several safer alternatives to alcohol.
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor.
I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
I'm sorry, but Afghanistan was broken before the U.S. military arrived...before 9/11 happened.
Who said anything about the US military? In the 1970s, Afghanistan was a great place. I talked to a guy who visited their as a tourist, and he said all the people were friendly and welcoming. In every hotel he stayed at, there were two little hash chunks on the nightstand, like mints.
Generally countries tend to do well when their territory isn't use strategically for international power games.
Unless you watch every movie that comes out, you've already done it to some extent. You have to make a superficial judgment (that can be based on reviews) to choose what you're going to watch.
True, but to know "...that plot, craft, and character development don't matter, and that all that matters is effects" is more than just a gloss of the trailers. It's well-recieved among the critics and Cameron is known for making *good* blockbusters. It;s currently got a 83% at rottentomatoes; I think the tomatometer is a pretty good measuring device. And to know this much:
This sort of thought has made the bulk of Hollywood movies complete crap. I'm lucky if there is one or two movies a year that aren't nauseatingly bad.
The OP is bringing with him baggage from somewhere else into avatar -- perhaps films they've seen in the past.
I think the plot of Avatar is fairly good -- not too deep nor too shallow. It's just not original. We all saw it before when it was called _Dances with Wolves_. There isn't any good dialogue, but I'm of the school of thought that says that a movie is about showing, not telling.( Shakespeare's plays were written in verse, so they were more like poems, anyway). Some call this the David Mamet school. Do you remember any good dialogue from Glengarry Glen Ross? "What the hell are you? You're a fuckin' secretary. Fuck you. That's my message to ya: fuck you and you can kiss my ass and if you don't like it baby I'm going across the street to Jerry Graff, period, fuck you. ".
That's what they said about painting during the advent of the camera, and what they said about theater at the advent of the movie. Even if you have CGI, you still need to do all the lighting, cinematography, sets, costumes, make-up, acting, story-telling, etc. You still need to employ all those artists. Only difference is, it's all virtual, instead of in real life.
Or did you think they simply let a computer whir for a few years, while they shoveled money into a furnace underneath it?
There are plenty of people today who enjoy their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and regularly visit towns and interact with technology enough to know what they're missing out on. Nobody's a purist; they might wear durable western machined clothing and use shotguns, but they still have wandering lifestyle. OTOH, I know people who lament their "slavery" to "The Man", but enjoy going home and watching their big-screen TV and interacting with people on their internet.
So even if you can plug your braid into a tree and get 10^gazillion connections to all the trees on the planet, that doesn't mean you won't enjoy the fuck out of hunting down monkeys in trees from the back of a dragon! Who wants to sit around staring a computer all day?
I haven't seen it because all of my friends have torrented the damn movie
Why exactly haven't you seen it? You can't go to the theater because your friends are downloading torrents? What, are they hogging up all the bandwidth so you can't go to movietickets.com?
Nobody wants to go to the cinema any more.
Several avatar shows are sold out all through this week.
Seriously, I'm really missing your point here.
I saw it in 3D and I highly recommend it. It's immersive, not just a gimmick.
You're going to judge it before you've even seen it?
I saw it, and I think it was a great movie. It's not Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. It's a *simple* story, painted in primary colors. Don't confuse that with bad ( Come to think of it, some of Shakespeare's stories were rather simple -- Romeo and Juliet, anyone?). The effects are also good, and are masterfully woven into the story, not just there for no reason ( Except for Cameron's canonical human in robot-suit versus giant living organism. I think it's his leitmotif of man+technology versus nature, so it kind of summarizes the whole film, one could argue.)
Hollywood will make crap movies regardless of what Cameron does. This one is good. See it in 3D; it's not just a gimmick, it aids in your immersion into a fictional world.
I am doing what Perelman surely would have wanted.
Who cares? Are our lives subject to the whims of crazy geniuses?
I'm sure Pythagoras doesn't want me to know his precious theorem, or any other math for that matter, because I'm not a member of his mystical, math-worshiping cult. Fuck him! Knowledge wants to be free:D
If nothing else he could give it to a charity that helps children who have a gift in Math.
Why? So they can get caught up in the corrupt, political, back-stabbing system of politics? You think a purist like this is gonna think this way? Hell no! Keep the children pure! You'll only taint their precious innocence with greed. It would be the epitome of money corrupting math.
Politician: "You're good at math? Wonderful! Here's $1,000 to help you go to school." child prodigy:"Oh, so I do math in order to get money!"
I don't know, I'm still unconvinced. How would this be different from reverse engineering, say, the first television set? You could make a television set as a demonstration that you understand electromagnetism, but showing it to others and letting them see how it works isn't really "teaching" them.
I was ran across the pythagorian theorem in a book well before anyone taught it to me. I could see that it worked, but I couldn't prove it. Say I had been smart enough to work out a proof for it -- essentially to reverse engineer it. And say that the person how gave me the theorem or wrote the book I read it in didn't actually understand the proof. Did they teach it to me?
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In general, people have practiced infanticide with any baby that wasn't obviously healthy up until about 200 years ago.
But generally, once a person is a proper member of a community, they are taken care of when they're sick, with as much resources and technology as that society has. Oftentimes it's not very much.
It's not too much different from our society. 100 years ago, if you stopped breathing, you were dead. We didn't have the technology or know-how to sustain or revive you. Now we do, so we do.
Avatar wasn't just displaying a particular message. It did it in a biased and unrealistic way. For example: the Na'vi seldom, if ever, had a civil conflict in the movie that was not a direct result of the corporate occupation. One of them died of old age, but every other action that caused pain was due to sky people.
That's ridiculous. They even said in the movie that the chick's great-grandfather united the tribes way back when ( read: solved a big civil war ). The movie wasn't "The Entire History of the Na'vi", it was just a short episode of a few years.
By your standards, any movie that doesn't show people using the restroom is pure unrealistic fantasy. You don't have to go into every detail of everything in a movie. Some pieces are irrelevant to the story.
Nature has provided us with far less than it has provided these aliens. It seems gaia didn't love us from the start ... my ancestors never rode on flying dragons.
Your ancestors didn't ride on dragons? Wah! They rode on horses, donkeys, mules, camels, elephants, dogsleds -- almost anything strong enough to carry a human being. Why do you feel so put out by "Gaia"?
all natural religions mandate intra-religious wars between families, individuals and villages, or various combinations of that.
Where are you getting this from? What in the world is a natural religion?
Another thing I find quite funny is the location of that village and that tree. What energy source would they have ? Given the extreme "coincidental" location they have, one would think it ... just might be those very same minerals. This would mean, of course, that all that "native" stuff is just "plundering" exactly the mineral source as the humans want.
Their energy source was muscle. They didn't have machines or fire. They hunted on foot or mounted on dragon or 6-legged horse.
The whole moon was charged with a big electro-magnetic flux, sort of like a natural version of Tesla's vision of electrically charging the Earth's atmosphere to provide free power everywhere. The movie implied that organisms there were using it for communication. If they were using that free electricity for anything other than communication, there's no need to mine or harvest it. It's already out there and renewable, like solar power.
But, of course, keeping mountains floating in the air is just so much more important than keeping humans alive
(after all, the movie dialog makes clear that following any course of action other than acquiring those "unobtanium" minerals would result in massive casualties on earth.
No, it doesn't. It said that shareholders would face a short term loss if the mineral underneath the tree couldn't be mined. It said that people had *already* strip-mined earth to death and there was no ecosystem to support them in mass numbers anymore. The Earth was dying because man had over-harvested it, and now they wanted to do the same to the Na'vi homeworld. Why let them? They Na'vi were living sustainably.
So, what you're saying is that a human as a separate organism originates from the 'fetus' organ from a woman's body? Makes sense. ( What if the fetus is born, the cord is not cut, but the placenta is delivered? Still not a separate human? The placenta can just hang around and break off all by itself, you know.)
But still, if you wanted to trace the ultimate origin of an individual human to a single cell, I still think that egg cell is the best candidate, even though it passes through the fetus-organ-in-woman's-body stage.
Do they want to "learn programming", or do they want to make video games? ( Or do *you* want them to learn programming? ) If they want to make video games, have them check out Alice. They'll make a video game and learn to program as a bonus. For middle-school aged people, there is Storytelling Alice, which is pretty powerful in its own right, in terms of a teaching tool.
Where would you say an independent existence as an organism begins?
When the egg cell is fertilized? If this were your answer, consider that , even though it has 46 chromosomes, it has no other cells, no cell differentiation, no tissue, no organs, anything. How can a single cell be equivalent to a human? If not there, at what point then?
There is no such thing as an independent organism.
if the employees are unhappy they can always get another job, no shortages of those
This is sarcasm, right? The nation's running at about 10 unemployment, at about 17 percent. So yeah, there is a shortage of jobs. You can't just go anywhere and find another if you don't like your current one.
Well, that's a good definition of origin of self-consciousness, but I think if you want to talk about your very first existence as an independent organism ( and we're dependent on the web of life throughout our entire existence, from our mother's care and nurturing to the plants and animals we eat ) would be when the egg cell that became you first formed.
...and if you're a woman you produce one certain cell every four weeks...
I had heard that she produced them all when she was forming in the womb, and slowly shed 1 at a time every four weeks.
The implications of this is that when you first began your independent existence as a cell, you were in your mother's ovaries when she was developing in your grandmother's womb.
Perhaps Professor Nutt knows a little bit more about drug safety and legislation than you.
If he knows so much, why'd he get fired? :D I guess he knows so much now...
I didn't read the article. Does the fact of whose doing the research really have any bearing on the fact that we do have safer alternatives to alcohol already?
We already have alcohol substitutes ( read: recreational drugs ) that are safer than alcohol. Only problem is, they're illegal.
You can't handle the truth. Dr. David Nutt, the British government scientist that was recently fired, did an exhaustive study of the real impact of recreational drugs. Herion was 8.32, alcohol 5.54, Cannabis 4.00, LSD 3.68 and Ecstacy 3.27. A higher score is worse.( Many other drugs were in the study).
So we already have several safer alternatives to alcohol.
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor.
I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
No, what I'm saying is that the *Russian AND US* invasion is leaving the country in rubble. Sheesh!
I'm sorry, but Afghanistan was broken before the U.S. military arrived...before 9/11 happened.
Who said anything about the US military? In the 1970s, Afghanistan was a great place. I talked to a guy who visited their as a tourist, and he said all the people were friendly and welcoming. In every hotel he stayed at, there were two little hash chunks on the nightstand, like mints.
Generally countries tend to do well when their territory isn't use strategically for international power games.
Unless you watch every movie that comes out, you've already done it to some extent. You have to make a superficial judgment (that can be based on reviews) to choose what you're going to watch.
True, but to know "...that plot, craft, and character development don't matter, and that all that matters is effects" is more than just a gloss of the trailers. It's well-recieved among the critics and Cameron is known for making *good* blockbusters. It;s currently got a 83% at rottentomatoes; I think the tomatometer is a pretty good measuring device. And to know this much:
This sort of thought has made the bulk of Hollywood movies complete crap. I'm lucky if there is one or two movies a year that aren't nauseatingly bad.
The OP is bringing with him baggage from somewhere else into avatar -- perhaps films they've seen in the past.
I think the plot of Avatar is fairly good -- not too deep nor too shallow. It's just not original. We all saw it before when it was called _Dances with Wolves_. There isn't any good dialogue, but I'm of the school of thought that says that a movie is about showing, not telling.( Shakespeare's plays were written in verse, so they were more like poems, anyway). Some call this the David Mamet school. Do you remember any good dialogue from Glengarry Glen Ross? "What the hell are you? You're a fuckin' secretary. Fuck you. That's my message to ya: fuck you and you can kiss my ass and if you don't like it baby I'm going across the street to Jerry Graff, period, fuck you. ".
That's what they said about painting during the advent of the camera, and what they said about theater at the advent of the movie. Even if you have CGI, you still need to do all the lighting, cinematography, sets, costumes, make-up, acting, story-telling, etc. You still need to employ all those artists. Only difference is, it's all virtual, instead of in real life.
Or did you think they simply let a computer whir for a few years, while they shoveled money into a furnace underneath it?
There are plenty of people today who enjoy their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and regularly visit towns and interact with technology enough to know what they're missing out on. Nobody's a purist; they might wear durable western machined clothing and use shotguns, but they still have wandering lifestyle. OTOH, I know people who lament their "slavery" to "The Man", but enjoy going home and watching their big-screen TV and interacting with people on their internet.
So even if you can plug your braid into a tree and get 10^gazillion connections to all the trees on the planet, that doesn't mean you won't enjoy the fuck out of hunting down monkeys in trees from the back of a dragon! Who wants to sit around staring a computer all day?
If it's any consolation, Shakespeare's plays were considered trashy pulp theater at the time.
I haven't seen it because all of my friends have torrented the damn movie
Why exactly haven't you seen it? You can't go to the theater because your friends are downloading torrents? What, are they hogging up all the bandwidth so you can't go to movietickets.com?
Nobody wants to go to the cinema any more.
Several avatar shows are sold out all through this week.
Seriously, I'm really missing your point here.
I saw it in 3D and I highly recommend it. It's immersive, not just a gimmick.
You're going to judge it before you've even seen it?
I saw it, and I think it was a great movie. It's not Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. It's a *simple* story, painted in primary colors. Don't confuse that with bad ( Come to think of it, some of Shakespeare's stories were rather simple -- Romeo and Juliet, anyone?). The effects are also good, and are masterfully woven into the story, not just there for no reason ( Except for Cameron's canonical human in robot-suit versus giant living organism. I think it's his leitmotif of man+technology versus nature, so it kind of summarizes the whole film, one could argue.)
Hollywood will make crap movies regardless of what Cameron does. This one is good. See it in 3D; it's not just a gimmick, it aids in your immersion into a fictional world.
There is an AviSynth 3, which is planned to run on Linux, but development seems to have stalled. Last news from 2007. :(
I am doing what Perelman surely would have wanted.
Who cares? Are our lives subject to the whims of crazy geniuses?
:D
I'm sure Pythagoras doesn't want me to know his precious theorem, or any other math for that matter, because I'm not a member of his mystical, math-worshiping cult. Fuck him! Knowledge wants to be free
If nothing else he could give it to a charity that helps children who have a gift in Math.
Why? So they can get caught up in the corrupt, political, back-stabbing system of politics? You think a purist like this is gonna think this way? Hell no! Keep the children pure! You'll only taint their precious innocence with greed. It would be the epitome of money corrupting math.
Politician: "You're good at math? Wonderful! Here's $1,000 to help you go to school."
child prodigy:"Oh, so I do math in order to get money!"
-- from the mind of Grigor Perelman
I don't know, I'm still unconvinced. How would this be different from reverse engineering, say, the first television set? You could make a television set as a demonstration that you understand electromagnetism, but showing it to others and letting them see how it works isn't really "teaching" them.
I was ran across the pythagorian theorem in a book well before anyone taught it to me. I could see that it worked, but I couldn't prove it. Say I had been smart enough to work out a proof for it -- essentially to reverse engineer it. And say that the person how gave me the theorem or wrote the book I read it in didn't actually understand the proof. Did they teach it to me?