Most people are capable of catching a ball. I'd hazard to say that the laws, or some mathematical approximation, are hard-wired into the human nervous system.
However, most people can't render a decent image of a lit box -- not just the outline of a box, but an image of the light that the box reflects. I think it would be fair to say that Van Gogh probably spent a long time looking at, studying, and rendering these turbulent systems. In short, he taught himself the laws.
I think that I have plenty of imagination, and a strong sense of realism. I would implore you to use your imagination to envision the sheer diversity of raw material that we have almost right in our hands here on Earth, and then think of the paucity of material in space. There is a reason we call it space, you know. That's practially all there is out there.
First of all, not everything is made out of metal. Space technology isn't a 50s sci-fi film where every space vehicle is basically a tin can. I doubt that the space shuttles are made out of nickel, iron, silicon oxygen, and methane. What do we use in modern life that is metal, beside the panels of cars and frames for buildings? Just think of all the things we use today that are made out of plastic. Plastic is derived from oil. That means that a great amount of the raw material of daily life is a result of billions of years or organic life.
The main problem with space mining and manufactuing is the tremendous cost in terms of fuel and time to transport stuff around. I just had a look and found a website that says that the moon is 42% oxygen, 21% silicon, 13% iron, 8% calcium, 7% aluminum. If that were all you need, that would be great. However, if you need something that's not found on the moon, you have to go through the expense of sending a vehicle that can carry a crew and cargo with enough fuel to escape the moon, travel to the resource while supporting the crew, land on the resource, support the crew during mining/gathering, escape the resource's gravity, and return to the colony. Repeat for each different raw material you might need.
As far as 'processing', have you ever looked at a factory or any environment where they build something? There's a lot more going on than simple heating, which is what you would get if you slignshot a payload around the sun.
Sure, it might not be to expensive to escape Earth's gravity in the future, but how expensive would it be to escape Mars' gravity, given the relativy scarcity (and therefore value) of fuel on the Martian colony? This is why I say that any space colony will be totally dependant on Earth for everything. There's practially nothing out there, anywhere you look.
It would quickly become way too expensive to build anything in space. And then to support human life, you need a wide array of chemicals to grow food. Space is an empty, barren wasteland. The bodies in space are seperated by vast distance that are expensive to traverse, and even more so with any kind of crew and payload. Individual bodies in space are very limited in terms of the variety of material you would find in them.
Like I said, Earth is a cornucopia of incredible resources, and it's all practically right in front of us.
Regardless of whatever energy , warfare, disease, or environmental catastrophe happens in the next 100 years, I think people will definately *survive* at least somewhere, if not small, scattered pockets.
I think what Hawking is asking is, how can we get through the next 100 years without massive population loss, another dark ages, massive poverty, loss of knowledge, etc.
The human race can certainly survive in a slave/lord social arrangement. That's been the story ever since we stopped hunting and gathering and started massive farming operations, up until the last couple of hundred years. However, fuedalism doesn't really help human learning or advancement -- it's just a system for keeping the top 10% wealthy, and every one else living in mud huts. What we really need to maintain the current golden age is democracy, civil and political freedom, freedom of information, and social mobility. Also we probably need to to move to renewable energy and less toxic materials.
There is no hope in space. The fact that we haven't found anything out there that would justify the cost of sending a mining/grathering expedition tells you we can't make a living out there. Despite the wide variety of raw material that is consumed in the modern market, there is still *not a single batch of stuff out there* that would justify us bringing it down to us. Not one thing, out of the hundreds or thousands of different types of raw materials we need to keep our civilization going. Any space colony will be *totally* dependant on earth for *all* of its' needs, unless it is set up on another earth-like planet.
"As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area."
Space is not the only requirement for human life. You also need an extremely small temperature window, oxygen, water, some companionship, and a wide enough range to keep from going mad.
We live in a virtual paradise, a cornucopia of vast amounts of various chemicals and elements. Time was, people could make a living just by consuming what they happened to find while wandering around tails in the woods.
Space is mostly just that -- space. There's nothing out there that we need. The fact that we haven't justified the cost of space expeditions by mining or retreiving tells you something about the value of raw materials out there. Even if there were, say, a pocket of mineral in some asteriod, one mineral does not satisfy the various material needs of human civilization.
To successfully colonize space without the colony being totally dependant on Earth, we would need to find a planet that has some 3 billion years of evolutionary history that created a wide array of raw materials. We can build cities out of hydrogen, sulfur, or nickel.
"Not sure where to look for the last one, we often omit words when they can be assumed (hey, look, I just did, twice), but I'm sure it's in there somewhere."
I mean, I don't have anything against Britain. I like Guiness and Monty Python; I don't care to hear how we're corrupting the English language or that our culture is boorish, but other than that, I care as much about GB as I do Sweden.
I think the "special relationship" is more of a strategic and diplomatic alliance of our governments, than any brotherly feeling between the citizens. For some reason, the US and the UK 'trust' each other a little more than a normal international alliance would allow.
Now that I have your ear, do you have any hope that Bush and Co. could be brought to justice by the EU, the Hague, or any other international organization? If the democrats don't win at least one house of congress this fall, I fear we are in for a long dark road.
I'm curious about this now that you bring it up. I checked out its description on amazon, and it seems to cover only prescriptivist grammar. In that case, it could hardly be considered complete.
For instance, does it mention the rule that "if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old ones, like -ism) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the sentence, like plural -s), [such as English] then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the word stem than the inflectional ones"? In other words, "in English one can say Darwinisms (derivational -ism closer to the stem than inflectional -s) but not Darwinsism." ( 'Darwinsism' being "the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus)". the text I am quoting from is here.
Here's a classic example from Pinker:
"The baby seems sleeping."
What rule does this sentence violate? I'm not asking for a corrected version of the sentence; all I'm asking for is the general grammatical rule that it does not conform to ( or rather, to which it does not conform ). I'll be very impressed if you find the rule in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
How do any of "tempo, volume, tone, stresses, visual cues, filler sounds, etc" tell you whether I hit the ball with a thick wooden stick or a flying mammal?
"Ah, but verbing the "right" words is important. To express that you were staring at a computer monitor all day, you could not say you were "monitoring" all day."
No, but you can say that you were eye-ing it all day.
I think you're building a strawman. In theory, this might be a problem, but I'd like to see evidence of it. I don't think it's your English instinct that tells you what nouns you can verb; rather it's your understanding of reality. When you use a rake, the thing doing the work is the rake, so you are raking. When you are reading or using a monitor, your eye is the thing doing the work, so you are 'watching' or eye-ing it.
I've spent extended time in Finland, speaking English with people whose first language, Finnish, belongs to a language family other than Indo-European. I was suprised at how accurate they were with parts-of-speech conversion and how creative, clever, and useful some of them were. I think it's actually easy for people to do.
You might ask, "How does the foreigner know which object is doing the work?" I answer, the same way the English speaker knows. The rule is actually pretty simple. The name of the object doing the work can be verb. The verb is doing the work, so it can be verbed.
"Hard to master" might be true for a lot of languages, not just English. I don't know the answer to the example you cite, but I suppose you could find similiar questions which confound native speakers of any language.
Are you a native English speaker? It's very difficult to get a native speaker to consciously, explicitly state their rules of their grammar. It's something that speakers use intuitively, but are consciously unaware of. It takes a very smart grammarian to figure out the rules that people are using without awareness.
So I can't say what the rule is, nor why it holds, but then again, I couldn't elucidate most of the English grammar rules that I use in everyday language. Neither can anybody else. However, I am able to explain grammar rules of Finnish (the ones that I still remember) and usually better than a Native Finnish speaker. When I ask, they can tell me whether it's wrong, and if it is wrong, what the correct way to say it is. However, they can't state the abstract rule.
I guess that is a regionalism then. Here in Ohio, people generally follow the rule I listed above.
If you pay attention, you will probably find that there is a rule that you follow when you choose to say thee or thuh -- even if it's something like saying 'thee' in more formal situations. We use thousands of rules that we are unaware of when we speak.
Yes, but any attempts to restrict thought by impoverishing the vocabulary are doomed before the start. The reason is that language is creative. You can make a sentence or utterance that is brand-new -- one that nobody has ever heard before.
Does Newspeak have a negation word like "not" or even "no"? If so, then you can say "Ingsoc NOT doubleplusgood!" How's that for a revolutionary slogan?
Let's say that Newspeak managed to get rid of "no" somehow. How could you express your dissatisfaction with English Socialism? Simply put two opposite words together, like Ingsoc Thoughtcrime. WHAT?! English socialism itself is *thought crime*? Why, this changes everything?
For Newspeak to really limit thought as Orwell portrayed, you would just have to stop people from conversing in general, and only allow them to parrot slogans. Problem is, people couldn't actually communicate then.
I think what you are talking about is actually a simple rule. You say "thuh" when the following word begins with a consonant sound, e.g. "Thuh car", and you say "thee" when the following word begins with a vowel sound, e.g. "Thee eagle".
I had a conversation with a native Chinese speaker and a native Slovenian speaker. Both agreed that English was *incredibly* easy to learn, mostly because it has comparatively rules. The Slovenian speaker had learned German, Slovakian, and Italian. I'm not sure what other languages the Chinese speaker learned.
We don't have noun genders like other European languages, and we don't have too many verb conjugations. It's also easy to transform words into other parts of speech, e.g. verbing nouns, or making verbs nounish or noun-y, so it's pretty easy to re-use words you already know.
So just learn a few rules, learn the vocab, and the few exceptions, and you're set.
"For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them."
Actually, to clarify, you will find them. They don't occur between words, however, but they are consonants. That's right -- consonant sounds are actually silences, stoppages of sound.
Try this simple experiment: say the following sentence as slowly as you can: "I'm going to the store." You will find that you actually cut off vibrations *only* at the 'g' in 'going' and the 't's in 'to' and 'store'. (Technically your voice box isn't vibrating with 'th' in 'the', but your tounge is asperating on your teeth, which creates sound. )
For more detail, see Pinker's _The Language Instinct_, specifically the chapter 6, "The Sounds of Silence".
Also interesting to note, some researchers think that dolphins may have complex language like humans -- their clicks and whistles might be analogous to our consonants and vowels. It is theorized that the silence is what allowed human language to become the arbitrary, abstract communication system, whereas other animals make simple harmonic calls, that indicate emotion or a small repertoire of signals, such as 'danger' and 'all clear'.
Are you telling me that you drive a stagecoach, or simply hike everywhere you go? I doubt that you do. When we make an improvement, we take advantage of it. Goodbye abacus and slide rule, hello calculator. It's not a matter of laziness, but a matter of increased productivity.
Using an outdated, quiriky, does *not* exercise your brain. It's simply a frustrating, antiquated, byzantine system that turns people of from learning. They think that all there is is long, boring arbitrary lists and endless gotchas.
If we had a more phonetic alphabet, we could spend *more* time teaching kids useful, applicable skills like math and science, instead of having them memorize dozens of rule-breaking spellings. They would actually be using their mind to formulate questions, investigate, and arrive at creative new knowledge and solutions, instead of treating the amazing human mind as a great big look-up table.
I think people are calling this justice in the cosmic sense, like karma. It was wrong, he knew it was wrong, he did it anyways, and the stress from the guilt and shame was too much for the ol' ticker.
He may not have directly killed anyone, but he certainly *totally* ruined many people's lives and and put tremendous burden on those individuals, their friends, families, the whole community. I wouldn't be surprised if suicides and similar deaths resulted from Enron's collapse.
I think most people are concerned about the government performing domestic telephone wiretaps, which *was not* the status quo just a few short years ago. And they're not even using some brand new high-tech technology to do so; just plain old phone tapping technology. So your 'status quo == ever greater surveillance technology' rings absurd to most people. They are talking about the domain of wiretapping, which has had a status quo in past decades that excluded domestic citizens.
Do you remember Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness proposal that came out shortly after 9/11? A gigantic database that aggregated all available electronic information on US citizens -- financial and credit card records, grocery store shopper cards, movie rentals, library books, maybe even medical records? And how people raised such a stink that congress cut off funding for it?
What advice do you have for someone trying to get into voice acting?
Have a recording studio do a professional demo tape of straight reads and character voices. They usually have all the stuff for you work with on your demo. Always consider critiques of your performances. You take the demo and try to get an interview with a commercial talent agency for them to listen to. Try everywhere. I started in radio and got a job doing VO's in 1980 after the star of the morning show heard it. I worked for free at first and then it turned into a paying part-time job. Try stations to see if any of the shows need a good voice person. Radio shows are most likely to use a person that can do political figures or celebrities. They mostly rely on their on-air talent to read the straight stuff or let the production director do it. It's a good idea to think about re-locating to where the industry is, namely New York or LA, even though it's frightening.
When I left my hometown there were a few guys that called me after they heard me in a cartoon or saw me on TV or in a commercial doing voices. "Wow man, what's it like to have a job like that? Must be nothin' but tits and ice cream!" All I said was "Hey, I took the risks you guys never did. You got married too early and had kids and got steady jobs and took the safe path of least resistance. I had the balls to get in in a business of 90unemployment and bet on myself. I did real well but there were no guarantees of even a small success. I was a gunslinger that wouldn't listen to advice and got lucky. But so could you.
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Most people are capable of catching a ball. I'd hazard to say that the laws, or some mathematical approximation, are hard-wired into the human nervous system.
However, most people can't render a decent image of a lit box -- not just the outline of a box, but an image of the light that the box reflects. I think it would be fair to say that Van Gogh probably spent a long time looking at, studying, and rendering these turbulent systems. In short, he taught himself the laws.
Why should we trust you on this? What do you know that we don't? How did you come to know this?
I think that I have plenty of imagination, and a strong sense of realism. I would implore you to use your imagination to envision the sheer diversity of raw material that we have almost right in our hands here on Earth, and then think of the paucity of material in space. There is a reason we call it space, you know. That's practially all there is out there.
First of all, not everything is made out of metal. Space technology isn't a 50s sci-fi film where every space vehicle is basically a tin can. I doubt that the space shuttles are made out of nickel, iron, silicon oxygen, and methane. What do we use in modern life that is metal, beside the panels of cars and frames for buildings? Just think of all the things we use today that are made out of plastic. Plastic is derived from oil. That means that a great amount of the raw material of daily life is a result of billions of years or organic life.
The main problem with space mining and manufactuing is the tremendous cost in terms of fuel and time to transport stuff around. I just had a look and found a website that says that the moon is 42% oxygen, 21% silicon, 13% iron, 8% calcium, 7% aluminum. If that were all you need, that would be great. However, if you need something that's not found on the moon, you have to go through the expense of sending a vehicle that can carry a crew and cargo with enough fuel to escape the moon, travel to the resource while supporting the crew, land on the resource, support the crew during mining/gathering, escape the resource's gravity, and return to the colony. Repeat for each different raw material you might need.
As far as 'processing', have you ever looked at a factory or any environment where they build something? There's a lot more going on than simple heating, which is what you would get if you slignshot a payload around the sun.
Sure, it might not be to expensive to escape Earth's gravity in the future, but how expensive would it be to escape Mars' gravity, given the relativy scarcity (and therefore value) of fuel on the Martian colony? This is why I say that any space colony will be totally dependant on Earth for everything. There's practially nothing out there, anywhere you look.
It would quickly become way too expensive to build anything in space. And then to support human life, you need a wide array of chemicals to grow food. Space is an empty, barren wasteland. The bodies in space are seperated by vast distance that are expensive to traverse, and even more so with any kind of crew and payload. Individual bodies in space are very limited in terms of the variety of material you would find in them.
Like I said, Earth is a cornucopia of incredible resources, and it's all practically right in front of us.
Regardless of whatever energy , warfare, disease, or environmental catastrophe happens in the next 100 years, I think people will definately *survive* at least somewhere, if not small, scattered pockets.
I think what Hawking is asking is, how can we get through the next 100 years without massive population loss, another dark ages, massive poverty, loss of knowledge, etc.
The human race can certainly survive in a slave/lord social arrangement. That's been the story ever since we stopped hunting and gathering and started massive farming operations, up until the last couple of hundred years. However, fuedalism doesn't really help human learning or advancement -- it's just a system for keeping the top 10% wealthy, and every one else living in mud huts. What we really need to maintain the current golden age is democracy, civil and political freedom, freedom of information, and social mobility. Also we probably need to to move to renewable energy and less toxic materials.
There is no hope in space. The fact that we haven't found anything out there that would justify the cost of sending a mining/grathering expedition tells you we can't make a living out there. Despite the wide variety of raw material that is consumed in the modern market, there is still *not a single batch of stuff out there* that would justify us bringing it down to us. Not one thing, out of the hundreds or thousands of different types of raw materials we need to keep our civilization going. Any space colony will be *totally* dependant on earth for *all* of its' needs, unless it is set up on another earth-like planet.
"As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area."
Space is not the only requirement for human life. You also need an extremely small temperature window, oxygen, water, some companionship, and a wide enough range to keep from going mad.
We live in a virtual paradise, a cornucopia of vast amounts of various chemicals and elements. Time was, people could make a living just by consuming what they happened to find while wandering around tails in the woods.
Space is mostly just that -- space. There's nothing out there that we need. The fact that we haven't justified the cost of space expeditions by mining or retreiving tells you something about the value of raw materials out there. Even if there were, say, a pocket of mineral in some asteriod, one mineral does not satisfy the various material needs of human civilization.
To successfully colonize space without the colony being totally dependant on Earth, we would need to find a planet that has some 3 billion years of evolutionary history that created a wide array of raw materials. We can build cities out of hydrogen, sulfur, or nickel.
"Not sure where to look for the last one, we often omit words when they can be assumed (hey, look, I just did, twice), but I'm sure it's in there somewhere."
I'm sure it is, too.
In all honesty, I fucking don't.
I mean, I don't have anything against Britain. I like Guiness and Monty Python; I don't care to hear how we're corrupting the English language or that our culture is boorish, but other than that, I care as much about GB as I do Sweden.
I think the "special relationship" is more of a strategic and diplomatic alliance of our governments, than any brotherly feeling between the citizens. For some reason, the US and the UK 'trust' each other a little more than a normal international alliance would allow.
Now that I have your ear, do you have any hope that Bush and Co. could be brought to justice by the EU, the Hague, or any other international organization? If the democrats don't win at least one house of congress this fall, I fear we are in for a long dark road.
I'm curious about this now that you bring it up. I checked out its description on amazon, and it seems to cover only prescriptivist grammar. In that case, it could hardly be considered complete.
For instance, does it mention the rule that "if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old ones, like -ism) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the sentence, like plural -s), [such as English] then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the word stem than the inflectional ones"? In other words, "in English one can say Darwinisms (derivational -ism closer to the stem than inflectional -s) but not Darwinsism." ( 'Darwinsism' being "the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus)". the text I am quoting from is here.
Here's a classic example from Pinker:
"The baby seems sleeping."
What rule does this sentence violate? I'm not asking for a corrected version of the sentence; all I'm asking for is the general grammatical rule that it does not conform to ( or rather, to which it does not conform ). I'll be very impressed if you find the rule in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
"I hit the ball with the bat."
How do any of "tempo, volume, tone, stresses, visual cues, filler sounds, etc" tell you whether I hit the ball with a thick wooden stick or a flying mammal?
Sorry, I call bullshit on your bullshit. It happened.
Anyway, what language do you feel was easiest?
"Ah, but verbing the "right" words is important. To express that you were staring at a computer monitor all day, you could not say you were "monitoring" all day."
No, but you can say that you were eye-ing it all day.
I think you're building a strawman. In theory, this might be a problem, but I'd like to see evidence of it. I don't think it's your English instinct that tells you what nouns you can verb; rather it's your understanding of reality. When you use a rake, the thing doing the work is the rake, so you are raking. When you are reading or using a monitor, your eye is the thing doing the work, so you are 'watching' or eye-ing it.
I've spent extended time in Finland, speaking English with people whose first language, Finnish, belongs to a language family other than Indo-European. I was suprised at how accurate they were with parts-of-speech conversion and how creative, clever, and useful some of them were. I think it's actually easy for people to do.
You might ask, "How does the foreigner know which object is doing the work?" I answer, the same way the English speaker knows. The rule is actually pretty simple. The name of the object doing the work can be verb. The verb is doing the work, so it can be verbed.
"Hard to master" might be true for a lot of languages, not just English. I don't know the answer to the example you cite, but I suppose you could find similiar questions which confound native speakers of any language.
Are you a native English speaker? It's very difficult to get a native speaker to consciously, explicitly state their rules of their grammar. It's something that speakers use intuitively, but are consciously unaware of. It takes a very smart grammarian to figure out the rules that people are using without awareness.
So I can't say what the rule is, nor why it holds, but then again, I couldn't elucidate most of the English grammar rules that I use in everyday language. Neither can anybody else. However, I am able to explain grammar rules of Finnish (the ones that I still remember) and usually better than a Native Finnish speaker. When I ask, they can tell me whether it's wrong, and if it is wrong, what the correct way to say it is. However, they can't state the abstract rule.
There is a hum in the 'g' sound, but there also is a silence. If there were no silence, you would be making the 'n' or 'ng' sound.
Thanks for clarifying about the 'th'. My mistake!
I guess that is a regionalism then. Here in Ohio, people generally follow the rule I listed above.
If you pay attention, you will probably find that there is a rule that you follow when you choose to say thee or thuh -- even if it's something like saying 'thee' in more formal situations. We use thousands of rules that we are unaware of when we speak.
Yes, but any attempts to restrict thought by impoverishing the vocabulary are doomed before the start. The reason is that language is creative. You can make a sentence or utterance that is brand-new -- one that nobody has ever heard before.
Does Newspeak have a negation word like "not" or even "no"? If so, then you can say "Ingsoc NOT doubleplusgood!" How's that for a revolutionary slogan?
Let's say that Newspeak managed to get rid of "no" somehow. How could you express your dissatisfaction with English Socialism? Simply put two opposite words together, like Ingsoc Thoughtcrime. WHAT?! English socialism itself is *thought crime*? Why, this changes everything?
For Newspeak to really limit thought as Orwell portrayed, you would just have to stop people from conversing in general, and only allow them to parrot slogans. Problem is, people couldn't actually communicate then.
I think what you are talking about is actually a simple rule. You say "thuh" when the following word begins with a consonant sound, e.g. "Thuh car", and you say "thee" when the following word begins with a vowel sound, e.g. "Thee eagle".
"In English, since there are so many words which are homonyms, information is actually transmitted by the spelling of the word. "
If that were true, how would we ever understand spoken English? It's just a mad, ambiguous mess of homophones!
A: The context tells us what the word means.
I had a conversation with a native Chinese speaker and a native Slovenian speaker. Both agreed that English was *incredibly* easy to learn, mostly because it has comparatively rules. The Slovenian speaker had learned German, Slovakian, and Italian. I'm not sure what other languages the Chinese speaker learned.
We don't have noun genders like other European languages, and we don't have too many verb conjugations. It's also easy to transform words into other parts of speech, e.g. verbing nouns, or making verbs nounish or noun-y, so it's pretty easy to re-use words you already know.
So just learn a few rules, learn the vocab, and the few exceptions, and you're set.
"For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them."
Actually, to clarify, you will find them. They don't occur between words, however, but they are consonants. That's right -- consonant sounds are actually silences, stoppages of sound.
Try this simple experiment: say the following sentence as slowly as you can: "I'm going to the store." You will find that you actually cut off vibrations *only* at the 'g' in 'going' and the 't's in 'to' and 'store'. (Technically your voice box isn't vibrating with 'th' in 'the', but your tounge is asperating on your teeth, which creates sound. )
For more detail, see Pinker's _The Language Instinct_, specifically the chapter 6, "The Sounds of Silence".
Also interesting to note, some researchers think that dolphins may have complex language like humans -- their clicks and whistles might be analogous to our consonants and vowels. It is theorized that the silence is what allowed human language to become the arbitrary, abstract communication system, whereas other animals make simple harmonic calls, that indicate emotion or a small repertoire of signals, such as 'danger' and 'all clear'.
Are you telling me that you drive a stagecoach, or simply hike everywhere you go? I doubt that you do. When we make an improvement, we take advantage of it. Goodbye abacus and slide rule, hello calculator. It's not a matter of laziness, but a matter of increased productivity.
Using an outdated, quiriky, does *not* exercise your brain. It's simply a frustrating, antiquated, byzantine system that turns people of from learning. They think that all there is is long, boring arbitrary lists and endless gotchas.
If we had a more phonetic alphabet, we could spend *more* time teaching kids useful, applicable skills like math and science, instead of having them memorize dozens of rule-breaking spellings. They would actually be using their mind to formulate questions, investigate, and arrive at creative new knowledge and solutions, instead of treating the amazing human mind as a great big look-up table.
I think people are calling this justice in the cosmic sense, like karma. It was wrong, he knew it was wrong, he did it anyways, and the stress from the guilt and shame was too much for the ol' ticker. He may not have directly killed anyone, but he certainly *totally* ruined many people's lives and and put tremendous burden on those individuals, their friends, families, the whole community. I wouldn't be surprised if suicides and similar deaths resulted from Enron's collapse.
"The wages of sin is death..." Romans 6:23.
I think most people are concerned about the government performing domestic telephone wiretaps, which *was not* the status quo just a few short years ago. And they're not even using some brand new high-tech technology to do so; just plain old phone tapping technology. So your 'status quo == ever greater surveillance technology' rings absurd to most people. They are talking about the domain of wiretapping, which has had a status quo in past decades that excluded domestic citizens.
"He" == GWB, and unless we are all mistaken, domestic wiretapping was not part of the status quo before the millenium.
Do you remember Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness proposal that came out shortly after 9/11? A gigantic database that aggregated all available electronic information on US citizens -- financial and credit card records, grocery store shopper cards, movie rentals, library books, maybe even medical records? And how people raised such a stink that congress cut off funding for it?
Well, guess what. It's still up and running.. It simply moved over to the pentagon, that's all.
This from his website:
What advice do you have for someone trying to get into voice acting?
Have a recording studio do a professional demo tape of straight reads and character voices. They usually have all the stuff for you work with on your demo. Always consider critiques of your performances. You take the demo and try to get an interview with a commercial talent agency for them to listen to. Try everywhere. I started in radio and got a job doing VO's in 1980 after the star of the morning show heard it. I worked for free at first and then it turned into a paying part-time job. Try stations to see if any of the shows need a good voice person. Radio shows are most likely to use a person that can do political figures or celebrities. They mostly rely on their on-air talent to read the straight stuff or let the production director do it. It's a good idea to think about re-locating to where the industry is, namely New York or LA, even though it's frightening.
When I left my hometown there were a few guys that called me after they heard me in a cartoon or saw me on TV or in a commercial doing voices. "Wow man, what's it like to have a job like that? Must be nothin' but tits and ice cream!" All I said was "Hey, I took the risks you guys never did. You got married too early and had kids and got steady jobs and took the safe path of least resistance. I had the balls to get in in a business of 90unemployment and bet on myself. I did real well but there were no guarantees of even a small success. I was a gunslinger that wouldn't listen to advice and got lucky. But so could you.