This doesn't explain attraction to gold, jewelry, ornate decorations, sunsets, pretty birds, etc. None of these seem to have any immediate survival value, but people spend a lot of time decorating, even the poorest of people.
Humans have been doing genetic engineering as long as we've been civilized.
This is a myth. People haven't been doing genetic engineering like what we're talking about today. No Aztec or Babylonian farmer cross-bred fireflies and rabbits to create a glow in the dark rabbit or cross bred flounder with tomatoes and got tomatoes that have anti-freeze proteins in them.
So no, this is something *radically different* than what people have been doing in the past.
I don't think we do, quite honestly, judging by the multiple scandals that have gone seemingly unpunished during the Bush administration.
That's no different from the multiple scandals that plagued the Clinton administration, the difference between that the media actively covered it up back then.
Unless I misunderstand you, I think it is quite different. During the Clinton era, we had attack dogs in congress spending millions of dollars investigating petty bullshit like Christmas Card lists and the firing of a travel agent.
Just to name one of the uninvestigated crimes of the Bush administration, we had the attorney firings scandal, where the administration fired dozens of federal prosecutors, who wouldn't play ball and pursue crimeless political cases. Or how about Bush's multiple meetings with Jeff Gannon, the gay male hooker who was posing as a member of the press, whose exit and entries logs in the whitehouse were deleted by the secret service? Or the outing of Valerie Plame! Argh, don't get me started!
The media was "covering it up"? All *I* remember from that time was something about Clinton being up to neck in scandals that didn't really seem all that scandalous. I remember Clinton firing missiles into Syria and Sudan to destroy Osama Bin Laden's suspected chemical weapons labs, and the next day the Republicans shouting "Wag the dog" and starting up the Lewinski bullshit. And it was minor, petty bullshit compared to what Bush has gotten away with.
While writing this post, I tried to look up references to Clinton's missle attacks on OBL. The wikipedia page doesn't mention it *at all* -- the wikipedia article on his presidency is mostly a list of scandals. What story has won the day?
Dr. John Sarno's _Healing Back Pain_ pretty much helped me rid my self of cluster headaches ( If you don't know what a cluster headache is, think of it as migraine's hyper-active type-A twin ).
Sarno's theory is that cluster headache is a stress symptom from people suppressing rage and frustration in order to be a civil member of society. Basically as adults we stop acting like kids -- we never shout, throw our toys, or hit other people when we become upset. He notes that highly-motivated, successful, and well-composed people suffer migraines and cluster headaches more frequently.
We encounter a lot of frustrations in our life, and deal with a lot of idiots, but if you want to keep your job and stay out of jail, you can never tell someone off or give them a piece of your mind. You have to intercept that impulse to raise your voice, say "that's stupid", or slam your keyboard into the monitor. Sarno says that as a result of this self-calming, our bodies de-oxygenate our blood, which leads to spasm and contraction in the spinal muscles, which causes backache, shoulder and neck pain, and also headaches and migraines. It's not quite a calming, but an arresting of the body's gearing up to shout, throw or hit. Imagine all the tension of your Mr. Hide tied up in a straight-jacket, while your Dr. Jekyll says, "Yes, Boss, we'll get started on that change right away. Sorry the product is late."
It sounded like a bunch of hooey to me, but people swore by it, so I read it, did the exercises, and stuck to it. It's almost an anger management program -- almost. But it really does work.
As a good Democrat he is all for the government programs that provide a basic "safety net" out of taxes, but he doesn't give anything to charity. Check the statistics on charitable giving to see what I mean.
Doesn't give anything? You are quite mistaken, sir. They give *less*, and it does reveal a difference in the views of the organization of society. Republicans believe that we should get by on Nobless Oblige, and Democrats believe that you have to pay dues in order to play in the clubhouse of civilized society... or else.
The truth is that labor relations and labor LAWS had been changing for a good 50 years by the time unions arrived on the scene.
This is just plain untrue. It was the labor movement ( read: unions ) who *got* those labor laws passed, by organizing the workers and supporting candidates who would pass those laws. You think that politicians passed those laws for the heck of it? The labor movement really started in the 1850s, and it wasn't until the 1900s that labor laws really started existing and being enforced.
And if your workplace or boss is ignoring labor laws, who do you complain to? The government? They don't give a shit. It's the union who does.
The lack of a union is why Walmart can get away with lock illegal workers in a store overnight, or deduct hours from paychecks.
Times change, economic realities change and we now have institutions like OSHA. If all unions were to disappear tomorrow, we will not return to The Jungle.
Why in the world would you believe this? American companies have no problems subcontracting work to countries that practice slave or servitude labor. They have no problems having American prisoners do work. Without union protections, if one kind-hearted company refuses to employ slaves, then meaner, greedier companies will come along and eat their lunch. Welcome to the real wold.
Naked mole rat is one of the two species of mammals that exhibit eusociality. They have a complex social structure in which only one female (the queen) and one to three males reproduce, while the rest of the members of the colony function as workers. As in certain bee species, the workers are divided along a continuum of different worker-caste behaviors instead of discrete groups.[2] Some function primarily as tunnellers, expanding the large network of tunnels within the burrow system, and some primarily as soldiers, protecting the group from outside predators.
This eusocial organisation social structure, similar to that found in ants, termites, and some bees and wasps, is very rare among mammals. The Damaraland Mole Rat (Coetomys damarensis) is the only other eusocial mammal currently known.
The relationships between the queen and the breeding males may last for many years. A behaviour called reproductive suppression is believed to be the reason why the other females do not reproduce, meaning that the infertility in the working females is only temporary, and not genetic. Queens live from 13 to 18 years, and are extremely hostile to other females behaving like queens, or producing hormones for becoming queens. When the queen dies, another female takes her place, sometimes after a violent struggle with her competitors.
Males and females are able to breed at one year of age. Gestation is about 70 days. A litter typically ranges from three to twelve pups, but may be as large as 28. The average litter size is 11.[3] In the wild, naked mole-rats usually breed once a year, if the litter survives. In captivity, they breed all year long. The young are born blind and weigh about 2 g. The queen nurses them for the first month; after which the other members of the colony feed them feces until they are old enough to eat solid food.
So it doesn't say if the workers are infertile, or if they are even all female, like social insects.
My favorite example is the Naked Mole Rat. It lives in Africa in underground, and it is a kind of rat. However, as far as mammals go, it's very weird.
First of all, it's completely cold blooded. It cannot regulate its temperature at all. It's also blind and hairless. They have a queen that gives birth, and the others are workers in various castes, such as tunnel-maintainers, guards, or nurses.
So convergent evolution also happens in social structures, not just physiology.
For example, lots of people have a checking account, savings account, credit card, poersonal line of credit, HELOC, brokerage account, and more. I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
I don't want a single account. I don't want my bank or "Financial institution" fucking with my IRA or checking account if I'm a few days late on my credit card bill. I keep all my financial serviced housed with separate institutions.
Just get a couple of online rsync hosts. Two, in case one goes down. When you get a new system, just sync the data back to it.
Although, since you do want to store 500 GB, that could be a little expensive at this point. Maybe you can juggle external drives for now, and then do an online host when the price comes down.
I think it generally means "a big company". My impression is basically that it's so large, it's at a point where you have to share information amongst groups of people who cannot reasonably be expected to communicate in person or face-to-face everyday. Thus the need for departments, procedures, paperwork, etc. You have to be able to get the information to do your job without being able to ask someone questions at any moment.
I've never worked at a big company. As a software person in a small company, it was typically my job to bring in some software package that was going to solve all the office communication problems. Inevitably, because you could just walk across the hall, or holler down into another office, people would never use the software ( or even bother to learn it ), and instead rely on their old habits of "just asking". And they wondered why the software didn't solve all the problems:)
Yeah, but we've been building things for 5,000 years or more. We've pretty much figured out how to build large things safely.
As far as computers, we're still in the wild west. It's only been relatively recently that garbage-collecting languages have become widespread. How many bugs has this in itself prevented? I imagine in 100 years or so, a lot of debates about kinds of programming and programming styles will have been more or less figured out. I think a lot of it will depend on how the human programmer interacts with the program -- what kinds of practices cause people to write bugs? -- rather than the abstract mechanics of the program itself. So then, you could look at a program and say "Look what they did here; this is a classic wrong way of doing things."
Do good mathematicians really have to visualize all the math they are capable of doing? Certainly some, if not most, can and do, but I always thought that some people were good at math because they could read equations like sentences.
I've always been terrible at math. From long division up to algebra and calculus, I was straight Cs -- except for geometry. As I took it in high school, it was almost an art class. Mostly drawing, very few numbers. No equations. A lot of proofs, which I excelled at. At the time, I thought, "Damn, if only the rest of math could be like this".
Anywho, I watch those physicists throw up equation after equation on the board, and I think, "Man, those guys can really read those things." -- and I mean read. Is it possible that there are some mathematicians who don't have to "convert to vision"? I can't imagine trying to explain or understand DeMorgan's Laws visually; it just seemed like pure reading to me.
And, say it were true that people do math by converting writing to vision, understanding it, and then converting it back to writing to communicate it. Why do we write math in a style like written language? Why couldn't we do more drawing?
We went to moon with engineers and scientists who did not have computers.
Yeah, but when they were in school, they were taught how to read, look up information, use the Dewey Decimal system -- all the things you would need to find information in the culture that they lived in.
Nowadays kids are growing up in an age with the internet, google, and wikipedia. Do you really want them *not knowing* how to use them? Of course, the wealthy kids will have them at home. But the poor kids, no. They could graduate high school never having sent an email. I know because I help get free computers to them. Will that really prepare them for college?
My mom grew up on a farm. She says she loved going to school because they had exciting books, posters, lessons, etc. I hated school for the those same books, posters, lessons, etc. They weren't half as cool as what I could get at home, on TV, or at the library.
I remember walking through Home Depot a while ago, looking for something I wasn't sure existed, and of course, I didn't know the name of it. I asked a few sales people, but of course, they weren't any help. I walked down the isle again for the 20th time, wondering if I would find my mystery object*, and suddenly I realized, "Of course! I'll google it!" Now, I've been online since the days of BBSes and FIDOnet. I'm fairly web savvy. But, I grew up in a time where there wasn't information ubiquity. It just wasn't part of the paradigm that my mind created for itself. Kids these days need never really waste time in the library, asking unhelpful sales people questions. They need to be comfortable expecting information and knowing how to find it. How redundant would school seem if the very institution of learning didn't have access to the greatest information resource created thus far?
We need to make school competitive for kids attention these days. If it isn't; they will spend their time texting each other about the latest you tube videos, etc. They will tune out from school, to their detriment, and to ours, as we will in turn rely on them to run society when we are old.
Think of Donald in Mathemamagic land, or any really great PBS series. That's what we need more of. Multi-media, multi-sensory learning situations. And they're fun and interesting, too! I love watching Donald in Mathemagic Land because it's a great cartoon.
It is laudable, but I wonder how much doubt there was going on at the time. For instance, the Greeks knew that the Earth was round, but there was common conception that the Earth was flat -- I'm not talking about what educated people thought, but what the commoners thought. European scholars studied classical literature ( back then it was just "literature" I guess ), and they were exposed to ideas from the Greeks and the Muslims, who helped transmit the Greek texts. So they got exposed to a lot of different ideas.
The official line of the church was that the heavens never changed and were perfect, and if you wanted to be in the good graces of the church, which was a good idea to a lot of people, they towed the line. Of course, to the common person, the sky was a round dome, because that's what it looks like, and that's what the priest tells him. But I think that the educated class might have been more open-minded.
Anywho I have a friend who claims that our perception of the universe is wrong -- we're basically looking at a big optical illusion that also affects gravity somehow. He doesn't claim to know what it should really look like, but he says what we are seeing is an optical illusion. I can kinda see his point -- all the instruments we have are earth based, and if there's some uniform membrane or something around the solar system, how could we tell? I don't know enough to prove him wrong, so whatever.
So how would anybody come to know her name? Does she just go by "the Lady"? So then fate is kind of predestination, a clock-work universe, and the Lady represents chance and possibility?
I don't know if it would be considered a "scientific" theory or not, but consciousness is often considered to be simply an emergent property of the complexity of the brain.
This might some dumb, but does this really say anything? Isn't it just adding the geek buzzword "emergent" to the idea that the mind is in the brain? Just a Web 2.0 saying that the brain creates mind? Like, is anyone really still considering that the mind is a soul, a ghost, or some being from another dimension that interfaces with the body?
Personally, I'm in favor of the cemi theory of consciousness. It holds that consciousness is the EM interference field generated by nervous systems.
An interesting illustration of the idea is presented in Verner Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, some dog-like creatures are individually incapable of coherent thought, but can join together in packs, and self-awareness and human-level intelligence emerges. Very interesting treatment.
This strikes me as modern-day homunculism. Instead of a homunculus that can do everything a person can do, it's a slightly dumber homunculus, and a whole group of them at that.
Yes, I'm aware that we've identified emergent behavior in certain flocking phenomena, like an ant colony, but for me, it's going to take more experimentation to show that the mind is simple emergence from a flock of nerves.
Hell one of them, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is even produced naturally in the human brain. This is the most powerful hallucinogen known to exist
Actually, that title goes to lsd, with salvinorin-a coming in a close second.
By what measure does LSD come in first? The LD50? Isn't that just a measure of how poisonous a chemical is, and therefore not a good measure of how hallucinogenic a substance is?
I read in Srassman's _The Spirit Molecule_ about how DMT ingestion can cause people to have a total sensory experience of another reality -- not just out of body, but being completely in another dimension. I've read the same about Salvia online. Can LSD cause such perceptions in users?
Imagine ripping DVDs being illegal unless you're only going to make a mashup video for youtube? Sure that's part of fair-use, but if that's all you ask for, and that's what they grant, then we're all retarded. What the hell are these people thinking?
I think it would be nice to be able to do a mash-up with DVDs that you own, and if you share the mash-up Edit Decision List with another person who has already bought the DVDs, they could watch your mash-up. In fact, I think that would spur sales of DVDs.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't explain attraction to gold, jewelry, ornate decorations, sunsets, pretty birds, etc. None of these seem to have any immediate survival value, but people spend a lot of time decorating, even the poorest of people.
Humans have been doing genetic engineering as long as we've been civilized.
This is a myth. People haven't been doing genetic engineering like what we're talking about today. No Aztec or Babylonian farmer cross-bred fireflies and rabbits to create a glow in the dark rabbit or cross bred flounder with tomatoes and got tomatoes that have anti-freeze proteins in them.
So no, this is something *radically different* than what people have been doing in the past.
I haven't RTFA, but I'm guessing it has do to with the current shitty economy?
I don't think we do, quite honestly, judging by the multiple scandals that have gone seemingly unpunished during the Bush administration.
That's no different from the multiple scandals that plagued the Clinton administration, the difference between that the media actively covered it up back then.
Unless I misunderstand you, I think it is quite different. During the Clinton era, we had attack dogs in congress spending millions of dollars investigating petty bullshit like Christmas Card lists and the firing of a travel agent.
Just to name one of the uninvestigated crimes of the Bush administration, we had the attorney firings scandal, where the administration fired dozens of federal prosecutors, who wouldn't play ball and pursue crimeless political cases. Or how about Bush's multiple meetings with Jeff Gannon, the gay male hooker who was posing as a member of the press, whose exit and entries logs in the whitehouse were deleted by the secret service? Or the outing of Valerie Plame! Argh, don't get me started!
The media was "covering it up"? All *I* remember from that time was something about Clinton being up to neck in scandals that didn't really seem all that scandalous. I remember Clinton firing missiles into Syria and Sudan to destroy Osama Bin Laden's suspected chemical weapons labs, and the next day the Republicans shouting "Wag the dog" and starting up the Lewinski bullshit. And it was minor, petty bullshit compared to what Bush has gotten away with.
While writing this post, I tried to look up references to Clinton's missle attacks on OBL. The wikipedia page doesn't mention it *at all* -- the wikipedia article on his presidency is mostly a list of scandals. What story has won the day?
Dr. John Sarno's _Healing Back Pain_ pretty much helped me rid my self of cluster headaches ( If you don't know what a cluster headache is, think of it as migraine's hyper-active type-A twin ).
Sarno's theory is that cluster headache is a stress symptom from people suppressing rage and frustration in order to be a civil member of society. Basically as adults we stop acting like kids -- we never shout, throw our toys, or hit other people when we become upset. He notes that highly-motivated, successful, and well-composed people suffer migraines and cluster headaches more frequently.
We encounter a lot of frustrations in our life, and deal with a lot of idiots, but if you want to keep your job and stay out of jail, you can never tell someone off or give them a piece of your mind. You have to intercept that impulse to raise your voice, say "that's stupid", or slam your keyboard into the monitor. Sarno says that as a result of this self-calming, our bodies de-oxygenate our blood, which leads to spasm and contraction in the spinal muscles, which causes backache, shoulder and neck pain, and also headaches and migraines. It's not quite a calming, but an arresting of the body's gearing up to shout, throw or hit. Imagine all the tension of your Mr. Hide tied up in a straight-jacket, while your Dr. Jekyll says, "Yes, Boss, we'll get started on that change right away. Sorry the product is late."
It sounded like a bunch of hooey to me, but people swore by it, so I read it, did the exercises, and stuck to it. It's almost an anger management program -- almost. But it really does work.
As a good Democrat he is all for the government programs that provide a basic "safety net" out of taxes, but he doesn't give anything to charity. Check the statistics on charitable giving to see what I mean.
Doesn't give anything? You are quite mistaken, sir. They give *less*, and it does reveal a difference in the views of the organization of society. Republicans believe that we should get by on Nobless Oblige, and Democrats believe that you have to pay dues in order to play in the clubhouse of civilized society... or else.
The truth is that labor relations and labor LAWS had been changing for a good 50 years by the time unions arrived on the scene.
This is just plain untrue. It was the labor movement ( read: unions ) who *got* those labor laws passed, by organizing the workers and supporting candidates who would pass those laws. You think that politicians passed those laws for the heck of it? The labor movement really started in the 1850s, and it wasn't until the 1900s that labor laws really started existing and being enforced.
And if your workplace or boss is ignoring labor laws, who do you complain to? The government? They don't give a shit. It's the union who does.
The lack of a union is why Walmart can get away with lock illegal workers in a store overnight, or deduct hours from paychecks.
Times change, economic realities change and we now have institutions like OSHA. If all unions were to disappear tomorrow, we will not return to The Jungle.
Why in the world would you believe this? American companies have no problems subcontracting work to countries that practice slave or servitude labor. They have no problems having American prisoners do work. Without union protections, if one kind-hearted company refuses to employ slaves, then meaner, greedier companies will come along and eat their lunch. Welcome to the real wold.
Social structure and reproduction
Naked mole rat is one of the two species of mammals that exhibit eusociality. They have a complex social structure in which only one female (the queen) and one to three males reproduce, while the rest of the members of the colony function as workers. As in certain bee species, the workers are divided along a continuum of different worker-caste behaviors instead of discrete groups.[2] Some function primarily as tunnellers, expanding the large network of tunnels within the burrow system, and some primarily as soldiers, protecting the group from outside predators.
This eusocial organisation social structure, similar to that found in ants, termites, and some bees and wasps, is very rare among mammals. The Damaraland Mole Rat (Coetomys damarensis) is the only other eusocial mammal currently known.
The relationships between the queen and the breeding males may last for many years. A behaviour called reproductive suppression is believed to be the reason why the other females do not reproduce, meaning that the infertility in the working females is only temporary, and not genetic. Queens live from 13 to 18 years, and are extremely hostile to other females behaving like queens, or producing hormones for becoming queens. When the queen dies, another female takes her place, sometimes after a violent struggle with her competitors.
Males and females are able to breed at one year of age. Gestation is about 70 days. A litter typically ranges from three to twelve pups, but may be as large as 28. The average litter size is 11.[3] In the wild, naked mole-rats usually breed once a year, if the litter survives. In captivity, they breed all year long. The young are born blind and weigh about 2 g. The queen nurses them for the first month; after which the other members of the colony feed them feces until they are old enough to eat solid food.
So it doesn't say if the workers are infertile, or if they are even all female, like social insects.
My favorite example is the Naked Mole Rat. It lives in Africa in underground, and it is a kind of rat. However, as far as mammals go, it's very weird.
First of all, it's completely cold blooded. It cannot regulate its temperature at all. It's also blind and hairless. They have a queen that gives birth , and the others are workers in various castes, such as tunnel-maintainers, guards, or nurses.
So convergent evolution also happens in social structures, not just physiology.
For example, lots of people have a checking account, savings account, credit card, poersonal line of credit, HELOC, brokerage account, and more. I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
I don't want a single account. I don't want my bank or "Financial institution" fucking with my IRA or checking account if I'm a few days late on my credit card bill. I keep all my financial serviced housed with separate institutions.
Just get a couple of online rsync hosts. Two, in case one goes down. When you get a new system, just sync the data back to it.
Although, since you do want to store 500 GB, that could be a little expensive at this point. Maybe you can juggle external drives for now, and then do an online host when the price comes down.
I think it generally means "a big company". My impression is basically that it's so large, it's at a point where you have to share information amongst groups of people who cannot reasonably be expected to communicate in person or face-to-face everyday. Thus the need for departments, procedures, paperwork, etc. You have to be able to get the information to do your job without being able to ask someone questions at any moment.
:)
I've never worked at a big company. As a software person in a small company, it was typically my job to bring in some software package that was going to solve all the office communication problems. Inevitably, because you could just walk across the hall, or holler down into another office, people would never use the software ( or even bother to learn it ), and instead rely on their old habits of "just asking". And they wondered why the software didn't solve all the problems
I mean look at what happened to Slashdot when it got 24 million posts.
How does PostGres handle an integer column rollover? Isn't this a problem of table design, not necessarily MySQL?
Yeah, but we've been building things for 5,000 years or more. We've pretty much figured out how to build large things safely.
As far as computers, we're still in the wild west. It's only been relatively recently that garbage-collecting languages have become widespread. How many bugs has this in itself prevented? I imagine in 100 years or so, a lot of debates about kinds of programming and programming styles will have been more or less figured out. I think a lot of it will depend on how the human programmer interacts with the program -- what kinds of practices cause people to write bugs? -- rather than the abstract mechanics of the program itself. So then, you could look at a program and say "Look what they did here; this is a classic wrong way of doing things."
Do good mathematicians really have to visualize all the math they are capable of doing? Certainly some, if not most, can and do, but I always thought that some people were good at math because they could read equations like sentences.
I've always been terrible at math. From long division up to algebra and calculus, I was straight Cs -- except for geometry. As I took it in high school, it was almost an art class. Mostly drawing, very few numbers. No equations. A lot of proofs, which I excelled at. At the time, I thought, "Damn, if only the rest of math could be like this".
Anywho, I watch those physicists throw up equation after equation on the board, and I think, "Man, those guys can really read those things." -- and I mean read. Is it possible that there are some mathematicians who don't have to "convert to vision"? I can't imagine trying to explain or understand DeMorgan's Laws visually; it just seemed like pure reading to me.
And, say it were true that people do math by converting writing to vision, understanding it, and then converting it back to writing to communicate it. Why do we write math in a style like written language? Why couldn't we do more drawing?
We went to moon with engineers and scientists who did not have computers.
Yeah, but when they were in school, they were taught how to read, look up information, use the Dewey Decimal system -- all the things you would need to find information in the culture that they lived in.
Nowadays kids are growing up in an age with the internet, google, and wikipedia. Do you really want them *not knowing* how to use them? Of course, the wealthy kids will have them at home. But the poor kids, no. They could graduate high school never having sent an email. I know because I help get free computers to them. Will that really prepare them for college?
My mom grew up on a farm. She says she loved going to school because they had exciting books, posters, lessons, etc. I hated school for the those same books, posters, lessons, etc. They weren't half as cool as what I could get at home, on TV, or at the library.
I remember walking through Home Depot a while ago, looking for something I wasn't sure existed, and of course, I didn't know the name of it. I asked a few sales people, but of course, they weren't any help. I walked down the isle again for the 20th time, wondering if I would find my mystery object*, and suddenly I realized, "Of course! I'll google it!" Now, I've been online since the days of BBSes and FIDOnet. I'm fairly web savvy. But, I grew up in a time where there wasn't information ubiquity. It just wasn't part of the paradigm that my mind created for itself. Kids these days need never really waste time in the library, asking unhelpful sales people questions. They need to be comfortable expecting information and knowing how to find it. How redundant would school seem if the very institution of learning didn't have access to the greatest information resource created thus far?
We need to make school competitive for kids attention these days. If it isn't; they will spend their time texting each other about the latest you tube videos, etc. They will tune out from school, to their detriment, and to ours, as we will in turn rely on them to run society when we are old.
Think of Donald in Mathemamagic land, or any really great PBS series. That's what we need more of. Multi-media, multi-sensory learning situations. And they're fun and interesting, too! I love watching Donald in Mathemagic Land because it's a great cartoon.
Too lazy to eat?
I'm interested in really learning functional programming. Is clojure a real funcional language? What are some you would recommend?
It is laudable, but I wonder how much doubt there was going on at the time. For instance, the Greeks knew that the Earth was round, but there was common conception that the Earth was flat -- I'm not talking about what educated people thought, but what the commoners thought. European scholars studied classical literature ( back then it was just "literature" I guess ), and they were exposed to ideas from the Greeks and the Muslims, who helped transmit the Greek texts. So they got exposed to a lot of different ideas.
The official line of the church was that the heavens never changed and were perfect, and if you wanted to be in the good graces of the church, which was a good idea to a lot of people, they towed the line. Of course, to the common person, the sky was a round dome, because that's what it looks like, and that's what the priest tells him. But I think that the educated class might have been more open-minded.
Anywho I have a friend who claims that our perception of the universe is wrong -- we're basically looking at a big optical illusion that also affects gravity somehow. He doesn't claim to know what it should really look like, but he says what we are seeing is an optical illusion. I can kinda see his point -- all the instruments we have are earth based, and if there's some uniform membrane or something around the solar system, how could we tell? I don't know enough to prove him wrong, so whatever.
So how would anybody come to know her name? Does she just go by "the Lady"? So then fate is kind of predestination, a clock-work universe, and the Lady represents chance and possibility?
I don't know if it would be considered a "scientific" theory or not, but consciousness is often considered to be simply an emergent property of the complexity of the brain.
This might some dumb, but does this really say anything? Isn't it just adding the geek buzzword "emergent" to the idea that the mind is in the brain? Just a Web 2.0 saying that the brain creates mind? Like, is anyone really still considering that the mind is a soul, a ghost, or some being from another dimension that interfaces with the body?
Personally, I'm in favor of the cemi theory of consciousness. It holds that consciousness is the EM interference field generated by nervous systems.
An interesting illustration of the idea is presented in Verner Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, some dog-like creatures are individually incapable of coherent thought, but can join together in packs, and self-awareness and human-level intelligence emerges. Very interesting treatment.
This strikes me as modern-day homunculism. Instead of a homunculus that can do everything a person can do, it's a slightly dumber homunculus, and a whole group of them at that.
Yes, I'm aware that we've identified emergent behavior in certain flocking phenomena, like an ant colony, but for me, it's going to take more experimentation to show that the mind is simple emergence from a flock of nerves.
1. Who is "the Lady"?
2. Did you perform the sacrifices?
Hell one of them, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is even produced naturally in the human brain. This is the most powerful hallucinogen known to exist
Actually, that title goes to lsd, with salvinorin-a coming in a close second.
By what measure does LSD come in first? The LD50? Isn't that just a measure of how poisonous a chemical is, and therefore not a good measure of how hallucinogenic a substance is?
I read in Srassman's _The Spirit Molecule_ about how DMT ingestion can cause people to have a total sensory experience of another reality -- not just out of body, but being completely in another dimension. I've read the same about Salvia online. Can LSD cause such perceptions in users?
Imagine ripping DVDs being illegal unless you're only going to make a mashup video for youtube? Sure that's part of fair-use, but if that's all you ask for, and that's what they grant, then we're all retarded. What the hell are these people thinking?
I think it would be nice to be able to do a mash-up with DVDs that you own, and if you share the mash-up Edit Decision List with another person who has already bought the DVDs, they could watch your mash-up. In fact, I think that would spur sales of DVDs.