Honestly, this is getting crazy. It reminds me of Stallman's short story/essay, "Right to Read" where you have to have a license to read a book you borrowed from the library or from a friend.
Music has always been something that was freely exchanged throughout human history. Songs belonged in the public domain, even if no one thought of it and framed it in those terms. There were just songs that people had always sang or played, and had no apparent author.
Now we are entering a period where the RIAA seems to think they should get a dollar from you if you whistle a tune when you walk down the sidewalk. Has the hookers and cocaine money train really slowed down that much for them? They must be a bunch of paranoid, power-mad f*cks with an extreme sense of entitlement.
I was trying to explain the experience from his perception, as a sufferer of PTSD. I'm not talking about objective reality, but subjective reality, or what he perceived to be objective reality.
Do you know what 'reality' means? Can you prove that it exists without an observer? I've never heard a convincing proof. For all I know, reality vanishes when I die, and I have no way of proving to myself otherwise, from a totally rational perspective. I believe that it will, and that it existed before I became aware of it, but I really can't prove that it did exist or will continue. It's an assumption or leap of faith.
It doesn't really have anything to do with physics. I was just replying to the guy who thought multiverses had something to do with his brushes with death.
I had a friend and former roommate who was in an apartment fire. He was sleeping in bed when his cat woke him up by clawing at his face. He startled awake and saw that the ceiling was covered in flames. He escaped, certain that he was moments away from death.
Luckily he made it out alive. But he suffered severe PTSD for a few years afterwards. He would just be walking to the grocery store and be suddenly struck with the terrifying reality that he wasn't walking to the store at all -- this was the final hallucination of his mind moments before he perished in the apartment fire. Instead of his past flashing before his eyes, this was his mind's final, desperate attempt to comfort itself, by creating a reality where he lived out the rest of his life.
I try not to think about it because it's creepy. If I really start to think about it I get terrified.
It seems to me that we are hitting the limit of what we can understand through measurement. At a small enough scale, measurement seems to break down, and then we get probabilities, and phenomena that are open to mathematical interpretation.
So, being 'inside' the universe and taking its measurements from the inside only gets us so far. Beyond that, we have theories about the nature of the universe, but they can't be shown to be true or untrue. There are theories that are certainly untrue, but there are also competing theories that can be shown to be more real than any other. So we might be in a universe, or we might be in a multiverse, but there's no way to say for certain by measuring from inside our percieved 'universe'.
This is a paradigm shift in modern western science. The empiricists of Europe positied that the universe was orderly, governed by laws, and deterministic. There wasn't uncontrolled chaos anywhere in the universe. Anything seemingly chaotic was actually following complex rules. Furthermore, these laws were 'knowable'. By using logic, we could break down the rules into simpler parts and understand them. Eventually, if we understood enough of the rules, we could arrive at a Theory of Everything -- some equation or some kind of math that would describe the entire universe. This was an idea that they inherited from the Greek philosophers. So not only was the universe totally orderly, but we were smart enough, or the logic that human intelligence has in inherently capable of understanding the universe in its entirety.
Now it seems like the project of the Theory of Everything will never come to fruition. Our measurements only take us so far; after that, it's ambiguous. Not that we have to do more measuring; the measuring itself breaks down at a certain scale. So now it seems like we live in a bubble of measureability, surrounded by ambiguity.
So, what can we say about that ambiguity? Was there anything before the big bang? Are we universe in a multi-verse? Since science has seemingly broken down, we now seem to fall back on whatever cosmology we inherited from our culture. As westerners, who got the idea of a single Grand Unified Universe from the Greeks, we say, "Well, we can't really know what's outside of our universe; but there's no reason to go off the deep end and say there's multiverses. The universe theory isn't any more provable than the multiverse theory. We'll just stick with what we always assumed, but now know that we can't actually prove." However, if western science developed from, say, a Buddhist culture, it would be backwards -- if we got to the end of measurement, we would assume that there were multiverses, because that's the idea we inherited from our culture, instead of a single universe.
I haven't RTFA, but they could be saying that it's one of those creatures from a lineage 'in between' squids and octopuses. Not that it's a descendant of a squid/octopus mating, but rather is a descendant from a common ancestor of squids and octopuses, one that happens to look like an octopus/squid mash-up.
I'm all against corruption and paybacks, but I honestly wonder if voting out incumbents would actually be a good idea.
I think it might only be those who have been in there long enough to build their own personal power base who actually that some manuever room to make decisions that benefit their constituents, or, God forbid, the good of the nation as a whole.
I would think that junior legislators are more beholden to their special interests -- remember, it's not the voter that got them in the gate; the voter just allowed them to clear the last hurdle. What really allowed them to run and have a chance of winning the popular vote were the elder statesmen who supported their candidacy, and the special interests that financed their campaign. Those ties are already in place once the race begins in earnest. So if they actually do get elected, it's payback time for everyone who got them in the race -- and the constituents take a backseat.
Electing a new crop of fresh young faces just would create a feeding frenzy for special interest groups and corporate contributors who can find a new guy to support and get in office, for their own special interests. Trying to buy the influence of a politician who has been in their for years or decades is a much harder challenge -- you have to compete against their already-established power base.
I don't think it's about hiring foreigners and paying them nothing; it's more about increasing competition in the labor pool, which will drive down the cost of labor. So they are hiring the BH-1 visa people at good salaries, but another 5-10 years of the competition of influx of HB-1 visa guys into the American-born labor pool will drive down salaries across the board. It's a long-term strategy.
When you're talking about maintaining a standard of living for the US population at large, and having your children better off or the same as you are, it's not about who's better. It's about maintaining control of the supply of labor. When labor is plentiful, it gets cheap. When it's not as plentiful, the workers benefit.
The more and more I read, it looks like the software developer is the new steel worker. Sure, you need a four year education, but you as a worker are replaceable commodity. You'll be having to move to Canada, India, or the Czech Republic to get a decent paying job, or deal with substandard wages and an abusive work schedule that your unionized buddies don't have to put up with.
Yeah, I don't really see this as "swarm intelligence" so much as a system with self optimizing behavior. I think the reason people are talking about this is that it goes against the sort of inborn intuition about where intelligence lies in living organism.
Without critical study, we seem to have the inborn idea that the individual mull-cellular organism is intelligent. Humans are intelligent, dogs less so, plants, not really at all. If a group of organisms is acting intelligently, we assume that each one of them has to be pretty smart, or else the whole group couldn't be smart. In the case of swarms that exhibit intelligence, none of the organisms seem to be that smart -- or at least, they don't have the complete set of smarts that is shown in the group behavior. In fact, they are pretty simple when it comes to interacting with groups.
So when studying ant colony behavior, there was kind of a conundrum in the field for a while. If individual ants are dumb, why does the colony behave so intelligently? People where then looking for the hidden smarts inside each individual ant. Or, another possibility is that colony behavior really isn't that smart, despite it seeming so to us.
But it turns out colonies really are smart, *but* there are no hidden smarts in the ant. The ant really is dumb. It's only when you combine their simple behavior in the swarm that you find intelligence. It's not in the ant; it's in the colony.
This is a paradigm shift in the understanding of complex behavior of multicellular organisms. We have had good evidence of individual organisms acting smart, that was never in question. But until now, we have never had good scientific, mathematical evidence of intelligence at the group level. People may have suspected it, but now they have evidence to convince skeptics.
I don't fault Wolfram's idea in general, but I think the main criticism is that he makes associations that are unwarranted. Combine that with the tome he wrote over a number of years in almost complete isolation, claiming that it would totally revolutionize science, it makes him come off as a little crazy. If it weren't for the fact that he is a genius, and he has contributed immensely to various fields, I think people would dismiss him as a total nut. But even productive geniuses can go insane, or have an 'episode' where they go off on the wrong track for a while.
Basically he takes the patterns you can get from the game of life mathematics, and says it can describe almost anything, and then shows how, as one example, patterns in sea shells look similar to output from a game of life checkerboard.
Not that game-of-life examples can't be used to describe things, but to jump to the conclusion that it can describe everything, and the implication that it *is* the fundamental function of the universe... well, time will tell!;)
Just because he's a bit of a kook doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong. I never said anything about anyone being wrong OR a kook for that matter... who are you talking about, Wolfram or the grandparent, anyway?;)
I was just making a joke. Grandparent seems to subscribe to the same set of beliefs that Wolfram does -- all observable phenomenon can be reduced to a simple set of rules.
But, really - if the search for a theory of everything isn't an expression of the belief that the universe can be distilled down to (comparatively, at least) simple rules, I don't know what would be. That sounds about right to me.
Which, in turn, just makes this another facet of the belief that the entire universe is an emergent phenomenon of a vast set of simple items following simple rules. Stephen Wolfram, is that you?
That reminds me of the sketch Jimmy Fallon did on SNL where he was the web-casting dorm guy.
Jarret: Now give it up for my best friend and my roommate Goby.
(Goby walks in and places his face in front of the camera)
Goby: Domo we already got the weed smoking robot. Domo (turns head toward Jarret) Domo, Domo, Domo.
(Laughs while he sits down)
Jarret: What a minute; weed-smoking robot. What are you talking about?
Goby: I'm talking about my masterpiece. I've invented the world's first weed smoking robot. I give you Smoketron 3000.
... Robot smokes weed and starts freaking out...
Smoketron 3000: Dude check this out this will freak your beans, what if I'm the human and you are the robot.
Jarret, Skyler and Goby: (Enthusiastcly) Wooaa
Smoketron 3000: Oh man I'm freaking out. I think this stuff was laced; I've gotta get outta here.
Goby: Robot, cool out.
(Smoketron 3000 begins going out of control as he begins rolling toward the window. A window cracking his heard.)
Smoketron 3000: (Said as he is falling out of the window.) I REGRET NOTHING!!!
(An object falling on a car is heard as the alarm begins to sound. Jarret looks at Goby confused as Skyler laughs.)
Skyler: That robot just totally jumped out that window!
Jarret: Wow.
Goby: (In a sad voice) He was a good dude.
Jarret: No he wasn't a good dude he was a bad robot.
Goby: Yea, but still!
Jarret: Well that's our show DJ Feinsten take us out!
Does this mean that someone who is denied health insurance in any other state will be able to move to Massachusetts and be guaranteed to be approved for health insurance? Will high risk people who are denied in other states have higher insurance premiums to pay than "lower risk" insurees in Mass? I don't know the answer for sure, but probably yes.
The idea behind insurance is to spread the risk of a venture around a group of people. The cost of driving a car, the cost of owning a home, and the cost of living. It's not unlike the Amish coming together and helping out a family who has a sick member -- the cost of care is shouldered by the community.
However, insurance companies have taken that 'community support' -- the money people pay in -- and then *excluded* people from the insurance pool. So they've just taken they money, but have failed to provide the support. It's become a money-making scheme instead of an insurance scheme.
That goes against the whole idea of insurance. We want as many people as possible in the pool, to lessen the burden of each disease. Ideally, you would insure the whole population in a single pool. But what insurance companies have done is made two pools -- one for healthy people who pay in, but don't take as much out, which makes more money for the insurance company, and another for the unhealthy people. For the unhealthy people, they each individually might take out more on average than a healthy person -- driving the second pool bankrupt. We need both the healthy and the unhealthy people in the pool to make it work properly.
Well, good luck. Have you ever heard the saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" ? I don't agree with it , but there is a kernel of truth. You've probably had a professor who was a genius, and and expert in their field, but couldn't teach worth a damn. You've probably also learned from someone who was a good teacher, but didn't know their stuff, or didn't have the resources to teach it properly.
Finding someone who is an expert in the linux kernel, *and* who can teach, and has the time and willingness to teach you one-on-one, will be a rare find indeed. ( Are you willing to pay them what they're worth for their background and ability? )
I'm not saying that intelligent life can only be humanoid in shape. I'm arguing that it's not a projection of anthropomorphic thinking to say that intelligent life can be humanoid.
Random mutation creates myriads of body plans, but only a few are selected by the environment. Radial symmetry and single-celled life are a successful body plan; AFAIK, bacteria are far and away the most abundant species on Earth, in terms of biomass.
But my argument is that any intelligent life than can build things must have some kind of hand-like appendage. If they're coming here in ships, rather than just floating here in their bodies like space-faring jellyfish, they must have built those ships. Or maybe they 'grew' the ships by conscious or unconscious manipulation of DNA or bodies of other life forms... who knows? But if extra-terrestrial life developed on a rocky planet, or a gas giant, there's a good chance that it could be bilaterally symmetrical, with limbs, because that is a reproductively successful body plan in oceans or on land.
There could be strange intelligent life made out of dark matter, weird crystalline creatures in solid rock, jellyfish creatures in gas giants like Saturn... But what would intelligent creates look like? On Earth, trichordates happen to have died out, but that doesn't mean in another scenario they might be a dominant species in terms of biomass. We know that bilateral symmetry is a successful body plan. That means you get an even number of limbs -- 2, 4, 6, 8, even dozens in the case of centipedes. Heads also seemed to be highly selected as far as body plans.
If you have an animal that both walks on a limb and manipulates objects with it, you have a limb that's selected for cross-purposes. It's probably not a great manipulator nor a great runner. It's a jack of all trades. But, if you have dedicate object-manipulating limbs, like hands, then evolution can select for better and better manipulation, and then better and better intelligence to manipulate objects.
So then once you have a bilaterally-symmetrical animal that has a head and dedicated object manipulating limbs, i.e. hands, you basically have a humanoid. It probably wouldn't two-limbed, because you need at least one pair of limbs for locomotion, and other for object manipulation. It could be two-legged, like us, it could be four-legged, like a preying mantis, it could be 6-legged, like a handed spider, or multi-legged, like a centipede with hands. But it's not totally unreasonable to expect a life form to be humanoid.
All I'm saying is that it could be rational to believe it's a possibility that intelligent life could be humanoid, and not simply a projection of "Humans on Top" thinking. It would be an example of convergent evolution, like eyes, legs, and wings. It could be radially symmetric, like a jellyfish or plant, it could be a tri-chordate, like we used to have on Earth, and it could even be a humanoid. Rationally speaking, not just what works well in the sci-fi movie make-up department, or Freudian dreams.
I don't know who is a covert agent and who isn't. I'm gonna have to concede to the CIA on this one, when they sent a criminal referral ( scroll down a little on that article ) asking the Justice department to investigate the blowing of her cover.
Presumably the CIA would really know whether or not she was a covert agent.
I bet if Richard Stallman were dead by now (please note that I'm glad and happy that he's alive and kickin'!), there'd be a chance he'd be rotating in his grave at high speeds because of this. No, he would be rolling in his grave if GNU or some other GPL software were hijacked into this level of privacy invasion.
If he were in his grave, he would be resting soundly, like a baby in a bilum, because the course of events are turning out just as he predicted -- non-open, unfree software is being used to limit the freedoms and access to information of the average computer user.
You are correct that you really don't get hard evidence for alien spacecraft visiting Earth from watching the Disclosure Project. However, if you take the evidence that people present, from radar evidence to fighter jet scrambles to cover-ups from high-up in the chain of command, you begin to see that the world's governments and militaries are putting a lot of effort and energy into making sure that the laypeople remain ignorant and unaware of *something* that is happening in the skies and space.
The most skeptical conclusion I can come to is that they don't really understand it -- it could be something weird like ball lightning that appears and acts like vessels -- but so far, it hasn't proved harmful or out of control enough to warrant the need to explain it to the public. The job of the military and government is to protect us. Actually, it's more than their job -- the psychological need of human beings to think that somebody is out there, protecting us from dangers, is what has allowed the institutions of military and government to exist since the dawn of humanity. People *need* the government and military, or else they would be out there all on their own in the Big Scary Universe, psychologically speaking. If the common person found out that there was some phenomenon out there that the government or military really didn't understand, but could be potentially dangerous, people would lose faith in our societal institutions. And the people in charge would fall out of power -- or at the very least, there would be a big shake up. This is why they're covering it up. Space aliens or ball lightning, it means they will have a hard time winning the next election.
why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?
How often have you seen a source document in a news article? Almost never. The audience tunes out; you lose readership. It's a waste of column space.
Someone posted the affidavit text on digg:
2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT
DATE: December 26, 2002
WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx
NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan
(1) My name is Walter G. Haut
(2) I was born on June 2, 1922
(3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203
(4) I am retired.
(5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town.
(6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate.
(7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more.
(8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris.
(9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished.
(10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch.
(11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out."
(12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg
Perhaps the CIA was testing LSD or an experimental new drug at that site at that time to see what it would do to young army officers. In fact that seems a lot more likely to me than aliens crashing in a desert. Well, that might make sense if you leave out the LSD part. You can't really control or have any influence on anybody's hallucinogen experience. And you certainly can't get two people to have the same trip, and definitely not more than two! There is no magic mind-control serum. Mass media is the best that we've got. Hallucinogens make you *less* susceptible to suggestion and propaganda, not more.
"Soldier, report to base. There's just been a crash of a UFO, and bodies have been recovered!" "Sir, why is your face growing leaves? I'm gonna bake a stew made of lizards, and offer it to the Sun God. Maybe those aliens are here to help humanity enlighten us. You should smell what they look like and get back to me. If you don't, it doesn't matter anyways. The octopuses will help us. Blankets, blankets, blankets. You know, my mom was a great book-- er, cook, but she loved my brother more than she loved me."
Even if you set up dummy props with a fake UFO and bodies, and get other officers to play along, somebody on LSD or mushrooms might be more concerned about the inherent, transcendent beauty of desert plants, figuring out their relationship with their parents, or terrified of an invisible chicken, rather than going along with your fake UFO scenario. In fact, I would say that introducing hallucinogens into the mix would make then *less* likely to go along with your fake scenario, because hallucinogens alter your experience of reality, leading you to question then foundations of perception, your paradigm, and the workings of society, collective consciousness, mass media, the hierarchical structure of the military, etc. etc. That's why hippies and other serious hallucinogen users have all kinds of weird ideas about reality and society. They question everything, and get all kinds of weird answers. You won't find them agreeing on *anything*.
A better way to try the experiment is set it all up and leave out the LSD. Then you don't have any soldiers or officers questioning reality, including this UFO crash.
I was watching a show where some biologists were in a helicopter, shooting grizzly bears with darts, and then tagging them to track them, and also drawing samples from them.
I realized that that bear would have what we would essentially describe as an abduction experience. The bear was just minding its own business, when a strange vehicle in the sky with humanoids appeared. Suddenly, it felt a pain in its rear, and everything seemed fuzzy and dreamlike. Then the humanoids performed a weird surgery on it, drawing blood and other tissue, and implanting a small device in it. When it woke up, it's memory was incomplete.
And what was the ultimate purpose of the humanoids? They wanted to see how it reproduced! Just like what those abduction people claim aliens are interested in us about. Performing weird experiments on our genitals, taking samples, and implanting small objects. Debunkers will say that this is evidence of the Freudian human subconscious creating the experience -- of course, it turns out to be about sex, because humans are dirty little creatures who are fantasizing all the time. Real aliens would be heavenly, like angels, and never think about such dirty, devilish things, only being interested in 'higher' things, like math, science, and art.
But wait! The whole 'project' of life is reproducing -- i.e. sex. To say that aliens would only be interested in mathematics, philosophy, sharing knowledge, and are some kind of celibate race, is looking at it from a Victorian sexually-repressed world-view. Living organisms, or Life itself, by definition, is all about reproduction. We should think that, from evidence, the first things aliens would want to know about us is how we reproduce, what our private parts look like, and how they work. Do we have male and female? Do we lay eggs? Do we take care of our young? Do we live in groups or alone? Are we in symbiosis with another organism? Everything else you would want to know about humans comes from that. Our reproductive biology is the basis of our existence.
But you also have convergent evolution. Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC. You mention the head, which has been a reproductively successful adaptation. What I'm saying is not that the first successful body-plan that happen to evolve was the head and thorax, so that's what all descendants got. What I'm saying is that the environment selects body-plans that are beneficial, which is why we observe example of convergent evolution, such as legs and wings in chordates and insects.
As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.
So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?
To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.
Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.
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Honestly, this is getting crazy. It reminds me of Stallman's short story/essay, "Right to Read" where you have to have a license to read a book you borrowed from the library or from a friend.
Music has always been something that was freely exchanged throughout human history. Songs belonged in the public domain, even if no one thought of it and framed it in those terms. There were just songs that people had always sang or played, and had no apparent author.
Now we are entering a period where the RIAA seems to think they should get a dollar from you if you whistle a tune when you walk down the sidewalk. Has the hookers and cocaine money train really slowed down that much for them? They must be a bunch of paranoid, power-mad f*cks with an extreme sense of entitlement.
I was trying to explain the experience from his perception, as a sufferer of PTSD. I'm not talking about objective reality, but subjective reality, or what he perceived to be objective reality.
Do you know what 'reality' means? Can you prove that it exists without an observer? I've never heard a convincing proof. For all I know, reality vanishes when I die, and I have no way of proving to myself otherwise, from a totally rational perspective. I believe that it will, and that it existed before I became aware of it, but I really can't prove that it did exist or will continue. It's an assumption or leap of faith.
It doesn't really have anything to do with physics. I was just replying to the guy who thought multiverses had something to do with his brushes with death.
I had a friend and former roommate who was in an apartment fire. He was sleeping in bed when his cat woke him up by clawing at his face. He startled awake and saw that the ceiling was covered in flames. He escaped, certain that he was moments away from death.
Luckily he made it out alive. But he suffered severe PTSD for a few years afterwards. He would just be walking to the grocery store and be suddenly struck with the terrifying reality that he wasn't walking to the store at all -- this was the final hallucination of his mind moments before he perished in the apartment fire. Instead of his past flashing before his eyes, this was his mind's final, desperate attempt to comfort itself, by creating a reality where he lived out the rest of his life.
I try not to think about it because it's creepy. If I really start to think about it I get terrified.
It seems to me that we are hitting the limit of what we can understand through measurement. At a small enough scale, measurement seems to break down, and then we get probabilities, and phenomena that are open to mathematical interpretation.
So, being 'inside' the universe and taking its measurements from the inside only gets us so far. Beyond that, we have theories about the nature of the universe, but they can't be shown to be true or untrue. There are theories that are certainly untrue, but there are also competing theories that can be shown to be more real than any other. So we might be in a universe, or we might be in a multiverse, but there's no way to say for certain by measuring from inside our percieved 'universe'.
This is a paradigm shift in modern western science. The empiricists of Europe positied that the universe was orderly, governed by laws, and deterministic. There wasn't uncontrolled chaos anywhere in the universe. Anything seemingly chaotic was actually following complex rules. Furthermore, these laws were 'knowable'. By using logic, we could break down the rules into simpler parts and understand them. Eventually, if we understood enough of the rules, we could arrive at a Theory of Everything -- some equation or some kind of math that would describe the entire universe. This was an idea that they inherited from the Greek philosophers. So not only was the universe totally orderly, but we were smart enough, or the logic that human intelligence has in inherently capable of understanding the universe in its entirety.
Now it seems like the project of the Theory of Everything will never come to fruition. Our measurements only take us so far; after that, it's ambiguous. Not that we have to do more measuring; the measuring itself breaks down at a certain scale. So now it seems like we live in a bubble of measureability, surrounded by ambiguity.
So, what can we say about that ambiguity? Was there anything before the big bang? Are we universe in a multi-verse? Since science has seemingly broken down, we now seem to fall back on whatever cosmology we inherited from our culture. As westerners, who got the idea of a single Grand Unified Universe from the Greeks, we say, "Well, we can't really know what's outside of our universe; but there's no reason to go off the deep end and say there's multiverses. The universe theory isn't any more provable than the multiverse theory. We'll just stick with what we always assumed, but now know that we can't actually prove." However, if western science developed from, say, a Buddhist culture, it would be backwards -- if we got to the end of measurement, we would assume that there were multiverses, because that's the idea we inherited from our culture, instead of a single universe.
I haven't RTFA, but they could be saying that it's one of those creatures from a lineage 'in between' squids and octopuses. Not that it's a descendant of a squid/octopus mating, but rather is a descendant from a common ancestor of squids and octopuses, one that happens to look like an octopus/squid mash-up.
I'm all against corruption and paybacks, but I honestly wonder if voting out incumbents would actually be a good idea.
I think it might only be those who have been in there long enough to build their own personal power base who actually that some manuever room to make decisions that benefit their constituents, or, God forbid, the good of the nation as a whole.
I would think that junior legislators are more beholden to their special interests -- remember, it's not the voter that got them in the gate; the voter just allowed them to clear the last hurdle. What really allowed them to run and have a chance of winning the popular vote were the elder statesmen who supported their candidacy, and the special interests that financed their campaign. Those ties are already in place once the race begins in earnest. So if they actually do get elected, it's payback time for everyone who got them in the race -- and the constituents take a backseat.
Electing a new crop of fresh young faces just would create a feeding frenzy for special interest groups and corporate contributors who can find a new guy to support and get in office, for their own special interests. Trying to buy the influence of a politician who has been in their for years or decades is a much harder challenge -- you have to compete against their already-established power base.
I don't think it's about hiring foreigners and paying them nothing; it's more about increasing competition in the labor pool, which will drive down the cost of labor. So they are hiring the BH-1 visa people at good salaries, but another 5-10 years of the competition of influx of HB-1 visa guys into the American-born labor pool will drive down salaries across the board. It's a long-term strategy.
When you're talking about maintaining a standard of living for the US population at large, and having your children better off or the same as you are, it's not about who's better. It's about maintaining control of the supply of labor. When labor is plentiful, it gets cheap. When it's not as plentiful, the workers benefit.
Hey sounds better than Finland, where a suicide story is an anecdote!
The more and more I read, it looks like the software developer is the new steel worker. Sure, you need a four year education, but you as a worker are replaceable commodity. You'll be having to move to Canada, India, or the Czech Republic to get a decent paying job, or deal with substandard wages and an abusive work schedule that your unionized buddies don't have to put up with.
Without critical study, we seem to have the inborn idea that the individual mull-cellular organism is intelligent. Humans are intelligent, dogs less so, plants, not really at all. If a group of organisms is acting intelligently, we assume that each one of them has to be pretty smart, or else the whole group couldn't be smart. In the case of swarms that exhibit intelligence, none of the organisms seem to be that smart -- or at least, they don't have the complete set of smarts that is shown in the group behavior. In fact, they are pretty simple when it comes to interacting with groups.
So when studying ant colony behavior, there was kind of a conundrum in the field for a while. If individual ants are dumb, why does the colony behave so intelligently? People where then looking for the hidden smarts inside each individual ant. Or, another possibility is that colony behavior really isn't that smart, despite it seeming so to us.
But it turns out colonies really are smart, *but* there are no hidden smarts in the ant. The ant really is dumb. It's only when you combine their simple behavior in the swarm that you find intelligence. It's not in the ant; it's in the colony.
This is a paradigm shift in the understanding of complex behavior of multicellular organisms. We have had good evidence of individual organisms acting smart, that was never in question. But until now, we have never had good scientific, mathematical evidence of intelligence at the group level. People may have suspected it, but now they have evidence to convince skeptics.
You're you're own parent? Woah... ;)
;)
I don't fault Wolfram's idea in general, but I think the main criticism is that he makes associations that are unwarranted. Combine that with the tome he wrote over a number of years in almost complete isolation, claiming that it would totally revolutionize science, it makes him come off as a little crazy. If it weren't for the fact that he is a genius, and he has contributed immensely to various fields, I think people would dismiss him as a total nut. But even productive geniuses can go insane, or have an 'episode' where they go off on the wrong track for a while.
Basically he takes the patterns you can get from the game of life mathematics, and says it can describe almost anything, and then shows how, as one example, patterns in sea shells look similar to output from a game of life checkerboard.
Not that game-of-life examples can't be used to describe things, but to jump to the conclusion that it can describe everything, and the implication that it *is* the fundamental function of the universe... well, time will tell!
I was just making a joke. Grandparent seems to subscribe to the same set of beliefs that Wolfram does -- all observable phenomenon can be reduced to a simple set of rules. But, really - if the search for a theory of everything isn't an expression of the belief that the universe can be distilled down to (comparatively, at least) simple rules, I don't know what would be. That sounds about right to me.
That reminds me of the sketch Jimmy Fallon did on SNL where he was the web-casting dorm guy.
Jarret: Now give it up for my best friend and my roommate Goby.
(Goby walks in and places his face in front of the camera)
Goby: Domo we already got the weed smoking robot. Domo (turns head toward Jarret) Domo, Domo, Domo.
(Laughs while he sits down)
Jarret: What a minute; weed-smoking robot. What are you talking about?
Goby: I'm talking about my masterpiece. I've invented the world's first weed smoking robot. I give you Smoketron 3000.
... Robot smokes weed and starts freaking out... Smoketron 3000: Dude check this out this will freak your beans, what if I'm the human and you are the robot.
Jarret, Skyler and Goby: (Enthusiastcly) Wooaa
Smoketron 3000: Oh man I'm freaking out. I think this stuff was laced; I've gotta get outta here.
Goby: Robot, cool out.
(Smoketron 3000 begins going out of control as he begins rolling toward the window. A window cracking his heard.)
Smoketron 3000: (Said as he is falling out of the window.) I REGRET NOTHING!!!
(An object falling on a car is heard as the alarm begins to sound. Jarret looks at Goby confused as Skyler laughs.)
Skyler: That robot just totally jumped out that window!
Jarret: Wow.
Goby: (In a sad voice) He was a good dude.
Jarret: No he wasn't a good dude he was a bad robot.
Goby: Yea, but still!
Jarret: Well that's our show DJ Feinsten take us out!
The idea behind insurance is to spread the risk of a venture around a group of people. The cost of driving a car, the cost of owning a home, and the cost of living. It's not unlike the Amish coming together and helping out a family who has a sick member -- the cost of care is shouldered by the community.
However, insurance companies have taken that 'community support' -- the money people pay in -- and then *excluded* people from the insurance pool. So they've just taken they money, but have failed to provide the support. It's become a money-making scheme instead of an insurance scheme.
That goes against the whole idea of insurance. We want as many people as possible in the pool, to lessen the burden of each disease. Ideally, you would insure the whole population in a single pool. But what insurance companies have done is made two pools -- one for healthy people who pay in, but don't take as much out, which makes more money for the insurance company, and another for the unhealthy people. For the unhealthy people, they each individually might take out more on average than a healthy person -- driving the second pool bankrupt. We need both the healthy and the unhealthy people in the pool to make it work properly.
Well, good luck. Have you ever heard the saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" ? I don't agree with it , but there is a kernel of truth. You've probably had a professor who was a genius, and and expert in their field, but couldn't teach worth a damn. You've probably also learned from someone who was a good teacher, but didn't know their stuff, or didn't have the resources to teach it properly.
Finding someone who is an expert in the linux kernel, *and* who can teach, and has the time and willingness to teach you one-on-one, will be a rare find indeed. ( Are you willing to pay them what they're worth for their background and ability? )
That person has probably already written a book.
I'm not saying that intelligent life can only be humanoid in shape. I'm arguing that it's not a projection of anthropomorphic thinking to say that intelligent life can be humanoid.
Random mutation creates myriads of body plans, but only a few are selected by the environment. Radial symmetry and single-celled life are a successful body plan; AFAIK, bacteria are far and away the most abundant species on Earth, in terms of biomass.
But my argument is that any intelligent life than can build things must have some kind of hand-like appendage. If they're coming here in ships, rather than just floating here in their bodies like space-faring jellyfish, they must have built those ships. Or maybe they 'grew' the ships by conscious or unconscious manipulation of DNA or bodies of other life forms... who knows? But if extra-terrestrial life developed on a rocky planet, or a gas giant, there's a good chance that it could be bilaterally symmetrical, with limbs, because that is a reproductively successful body plan in oceans or on land.
There could be strange intelligent life made out of dark matter, weird crystalline creatures in solid rock, jellyfish creatures in gas giants like Saturn... But what would intelligent creates look like? On Earth, trichordates happen to have died out, but that doesn't mean in another scenario they might be a dominant species in terms of biomass. We know that bilateral symmetry is a successful body plan. That means you get an even number of limbs -- 2, 4, 6, 8, even dozens in the case of centipedes. Heads also seemed to be highly selected as far as body plans.
If you have an animal that both walks on a limb and manipulates objects with it, you have a limb that's selected for cross-purposes. It's probably not a great manipulator nor a great runner. It's a jack of all trades. But, if you have dedicate object-manipulating limbs, like hands, then evolution can select for better and better manipulation, and then better and better intelligence to manipulate objects.
So then once you have a bilaterally-symmetrical animal that has a head and dedicated object manipulating limbs, i.e. hands, you basically have a humanoid. It probably wouldn't two-limbed, because you need at least one pair of limbs for locomotion, and other for object manipulation. It could be two-legged, like us, it could be four-legged, like a preying mantis, it could be 6-legged, like a handed spider, or multi-legged, like a centipede with hands. But it's not totally unreasonable to expect a life form to be humanoid.
All I'm saying is that it could be rational to believe it's a possibility that intelligent life could be humanoid, and not simply a projection of "Humans on Top" thinking. It would be an example of convergent evolution, like eyes, legs, and wings. It could be radially symmetric, like a jellyfish or plant, it could be a tri-chordate, like we used to have on Earth, and it could even be a humanoid. Rationally speaking, not just what works well in the sci-fi movie make-up department, or Freudian dreams.
I don't know who is a covert agent and who isn't. I'm gonna have to concede to the CIA on this one, when they sent a criminal referral ( scroll down a little on that article ) asking the Justice department to investigate the blowing of her cover.
Presumably the CIA would really know whether or not she was a covert agent.
If he were in his grave, he would be resting soundly, like a baby in a bilum, because the course of events are turning out just as he predicted -- non-open, unfree software is being used to limit the freedoms and access to information of the average computer user.
You are correct that you really don't get hard evidence for alien spacecraft visiting Earth from watching the Disclosure Project. However, if you take the evidence that people present, from radar evidence to fighter jet scrambles to cover-ups from high-up in the chain of command, you begin to see that the world's governments and militaries are putting a lot of effort and energy into making sure that the laypeople remain ignorant and unaware of *something* that is happening in the skies and space.
The most skeptical conclusion I can come to is that they don't really understand it -- it could be something weird like ball lightning that appears and acts like vessels -- but so far, it hasn't proved harmful or out of control enough to warrant the need to explain it to the public. The job of the military and government is to protect us. Actually, it's more than their job -- the psychological need of human beings to think that somebody is out there, protecting us from dangers, is what has allowed the institutions of military and government to exist since the dawn of humanity. People *need* the government and military, or else they would be out there all on their own in the Big Scary Universe, psychologically speaking. If the common person found out that there was some phenomenon out there that the government or military really didn't understand, but could be potentially dangerous, people would lose faith in our societal institutions. And the people in charge would fall out of power -- or at the very least, there would be a big shake up. This is why they're covering it up. Space aliens or ball lightning, it means they will have a hard time winning the next election.
why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?
How often have you seen a source document in a news article? Almost never. The audience tunes out; you lose readership. It's a waste of column space.
Someone posted the affidavit text on digg:
2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT
DATE: December 26, 2002
WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx
NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan
(1) My name is Walter G. Haut
(2) I was born on June 2, 1922
(3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203
(4) I am retired.
(5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town.
(6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate.
(7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more.
(8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris.
(9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished.
(10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch.
(11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out."
(12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg
"Soldier, report to base. There's just been a crash of a UFO, and bodies have been recovered!"
"Sir, why is your face growing leaves? I'm gonna bake a stew made of lizards, and offer it to the Sun God. Maybe those aliens are here to help humanity enlighten us. You should smell what they look like and get back to me. If you don't, it doesn't matter anyways. The octopuses will help us. Blankets, blankets, blankets. You know, my mom was a great book-- er, cook, but she loved my brother more than she loved me."
Even if you set up dummy props with a fake UFO and bodies, and get other officers to play along, somebody on LSD or mushrooms might be more concerned about the inherent, transcendent beauty of desert plants, figuring out their relationship with their parents, or terrified of an invisible chicken, rather than going along with your fake UFO scenario. In fact, I would say that introducing hallucinogens into the mix would make then *less* likely to go along with your fake scenario, because hallucinogens alter your experience of reality, leading you to question then foundations of perception, your paradigm, and the workings of society, collective consciousness, mass media, the hierarchical structure of the military, etc. etc. That's why hippies and other serious hallucinogen users have all kinds of weird ideas about reality and society. They question everything, and get all kinds of weird answers. You won't find them agreeing on *anything*.
A better way to try the experiment is set it all up and leave out the LSD. Then you don't have any soldiers or officers questioning reality, including this UFO crash.
I was watching a show where some biologists were in a helicopter, shooting grizzly bears with darts, and then tagging them to track them, and also drawing samples from them.
I realized that that bear would have what we would essentially describe as an abduction experience. The bear was just minding its own business, when a strange vehicle in the sky with humanoids appeared. Suddenly, it felt a pain in its rear, and everything seemed fuzzy and dreamlike. Then the humanoids performed a weird surgery on it, drawing blood and other tissue, and implanting a small device in it. When it woke up, it's memory was incomplete.
And what was the ultimate purpose of the humanoids? They wanted to see how it reproduced! Just like what those abduction people claim aliens are interested in us about. Performing weird experiments on our genitals, taking samples, and implanting small objects. Debunkers will say that this is evidence of the Freudian human subconscious creating the experience -- of course, it turns out to be about sex, because humans are dirty little creatures who are fantasizing all the time. Real aliens would be heavenly, like angels, and never think about such dirty, devilish things, only being interested in 'higher' things, like math, science, and art.
But wait! The whole 'project' of life is reproducing -- i.e. sex. To say that aliens would only be interested in mathematics, philosophy, sharing knowledge, and are some kind of celibate race, is looking at it from a Victorian sexually-repressed world-view. Living organisms, or Life itself, by definition, is all about reproduction. We should think that, from evidence, the first things aliens would want to know about us is how we reproduce, what our private parts look like, and how they work. Do we have male and female? Do we lay eggs? Do we take care of our young? Do we live in groups or alone? Are we in symbiosis with another organism? Everything else you would want to know about humans comes from that. Our reproductive biology is the basis of our existence.
But you also have convergent evolution. Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC. You mention the head, which has been a reproductively successful adaptation. What I'm saying is not that the first successful body-plan that happen to evolve was the head and thorax, so that's what all descendants got. What I'm saying is that the environment selects body-plans that are beneficial, which is why we observe example of convergent evolution, such as legs and wings in chordates and insects.
As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.
So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?
To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.
Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.