"A surplus of a particular good will end up being eliminated by market forces."
That's true if there is only free trade between all vendors -- if there is a single, united free marketplace.
However, political borders create seperate markets through which goods cannot freely traverse. So simple single-market theories cannot fully explain international trade and the strategies that rational agents employ to profit in segmented markets.
"Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can the real thing for a bit more? "
You're paying for size and convience, not computing power. People use PDAs because you can carry one around in your pocket and use it standing up, holding it in one hand. People prefer digital over paper because you have 1. infinite editability and 2. perfect copy-ability for sharing with your other apps and with other people's digital devices.
Which would you rather carry -- a calender/address book the size of a notepad, or one the size of an 8x10 book that you can only use if you set it on a table or on your lap?
The Nokia 770 fits your first criteria. However the battery life is only 3 hours.
I've seen it at CompUSA, and it is very sleek! It is horizontally oriented and sits comfortably into my hand.
The only problem is that it lacks apps. I think partly because it was designed as a web browsing device, and partly because Nokia thought it would fail, there were no apps built for it. However, since it runs the somewhat open-source Maemo platform, there is a lot of opportunity for community development.
You know, you are right. NASA can never swallow their pride enough to use Soviet-engineered Soyuz capsules, especially when the whole space race was just competition with the Ruskies.
But if NASA designs its own capsule, that's a home run. There is new investment, public excitement, and safer spaceflight.
If the losses of the Challenger and the Columbia were due to human error, I would say that goes to the claim that the shuttle is too complicated to fly. There are too many features that humans need to tend too. It's the fault of the shuttle design if it is not resilient enough to human error. No human team can be perfect, so the design *has* to have some tolerance to human error. Unless both shuttles' losses were due to gross negligence, and not just simple errors, then the shuttles are not safe to fly under human management.
The reason I say this is because the comparably favorable track record of the Soyuz capsules. If the shuttles failed due to human errors, how come the Soyuz capsules haven't suffered similar fates when overseen by smiliarly trained humans?
I'm not saying give up spaceflight. I'm saying give up the shuttle, and use Soyuz.
Let me repeat: I am not arguing against spaceflight. I am arguing against the shuttle. It you want to send people up into space, use Soyuz capsules.
I would argue that because space flight can be safer, it is negligent to let them go up in the shuttle.
It would be as if firefighters were sent out in lousy equipment if better equipment were available. Firefighting is necessary to save more lives and make us safer. It is not optional, like racing cars, nor a scientific investment for the future, like space flight. Although firefighters are funded and operated at the local level, my guess would be that most fire fighters have the latest and best equipment. However, NASA astronauts are using lousy, dangerous equipment when there is a well-known alternative with a better safety track record.
As far as race car drivers, it is the driver who is responsible for the car decides to get into the car. That driver knows quite a bit abou the car. In NASA's case, it is management that has decided to continue to use the shuttles and send people up in them. No astronaut can make NASA use Soyuz. Only NASA management can make the decision to use Soyuz, so it is NASA's fault in exposing the austronauts to unnecessary danger by continuing to use the shuttle.
These are not risks inherent to space travel; they are risks inherent to flying in the space shuttle. By contrast, they Soyuz capsule has not had a single death since 1971. 35 years a good track record.
The butt of the joke is NASA -- and NASA quite deserves it. The space shuttle design is not re-entry worthy. NASA is taking unnecessary risks sending up these brave people in these space coffins. You want to put Americans into space? Swallow your pride and send them up in Soyuz. You want the jokes to stop? Then establish a track record of successful flights (You'll have to retire the shuttles to do so).
The emperor has no clothes. I hope your pride and support of the Astronauts following their dreams does not blind you to the unnecessary deadly risks NASA is exposing them to when they send them up in a shuttle. It is negligent, plain and simple.
If the joke needs to die, then NASA needs to stop killing astronauts. Ridicule is bar none the best behavior modification technique out there.
It's outrageous that the United States cannot launch shuttles without destroying the vessel and killing the crew. The shuttle designed is obviously flawed and deadly. No one is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.
By contrast, the last soyuz capsule related deaths were in 1971 on Soyuz 11.
When space tourists go up, why do they use Soyuz capsules? Because people don't die in them.
"The majority of my taxes go towards causes, programs, or institutions whose services I neither need nor want, and a handful to which I have serious ethical and/or moral objections. But there's no recourse"
There certainly is recourse. Travel to the jungles of South America, Africa, or Papua New Guinea. Go deep enough in, far beyond roads. You will find people who live there without taxes, education or police. The average age of men in those societies is 35 -- due to being killed in revenge cycles. Hey, if you're tough enough, you might be able to steal a wife from her family and live to see grandchildren. Otherwise they will just avenge your death.
You will find how sorely you need public education to keep young men running around, forming gangs, and terrorizing everyone. I love how these civil libertarians say nobody needs taxes, yet they stay far clear of headhunter tribes or civil war zones. Hey, why aren't libertarians flocking to these regions? There's no taxes (just protection money paid to tough guys and warlords). There's no intrusive government laws -- there aren't any laws at all! If you don't like what someone does, hit him. Make sure you hit him real hard, so he doesn't hit you back.
You live in the lap of luxury, plainly due to the fact of taxes and our civil institutions, yet you naively believe you don't need or want them. You could easily live in one of these places for the price of about a $1000 plane ticket, yet you haven't migrated to any one of these lawless, taxless paradises. Interesting.
In college I took a lot of comparative studies classes where a lot of professors were enamored with postmodernism.
One in particular kept harping on how little these technologies are 'critically examined' before they are rolled out. I think this is stupid. You can't predict the future. Nobody knows what the fallout, good or bad, will be, until afterwards. One example is the use of the phone message machines as call screening devices.
And furthermore, if some 'critical examiner' finds some theoretical issue with some new tech, what are we going to do? Keep the product from rolling out? Now we are going to have a committee or central planning board that decides what products should be rolled out? No. We have a free market. The worries and hand-wringings off these critical examiners will be bourne out as often as Dvoarks' predictions.
I think the first problem is selection. You have to decide what is important, and what isn't. Even with 24 hours, you still can't cover *everything*.
By deciding what goes in and what stays out, you are implementing a bias. There is simply no objective standard to decide what is important and what isn't.
Perhaps on this board you are talking about, they can reach a broad consensus on what should be reported on. Even then, it's still a bias, even if it's a broad-reaching and well-agreed upon one.
Sure, if you're not doing anything wrong, let's put a camera in your house. First up, Cheif of Police. Why should he worry? Of course, *he* isn't doing anything wrong. What would he have to hide?
"Hell, why not just a regular wiki anyway? I figure 90-95% of all the spreadsheets I see don't do any calculations, they're just used as a way to put things in columns."
Do regular wikis have column and cell editing features? Most of what I'm familiar with work like line editors.
Well, if you go with the theory of the church running marriage, remember that the seperation of church and state is a relatively recent idea, and it started (I think) in the United States. For example, in many European states, there is an official religion. To this day, in Finland, when a baby is born, it is Lutheran by default, unless the parents specifically ask that it not be. There is also a Church tax that many people choose to pay. It was only voluntary recently.
So when I say that marriage was invented and sanctioned by the state, I'm including the church with that. That's kind of an assumption built into these anthropological arguments, because pluralism and the separation of church and state is a relatively recent development. So it was my mistake for not making that clear. Up until, say, some 400 years ago, the church and state were in lock step, if not two branches of the same organization.
Wikipedia says marriage licenses were issued *since* the middle ages -- that doesn't mean that they *started* then. We know that they go back farther because Rabbis have been marrying people for thousands of years in the Jewish religion. And when there was the first Jewish state, thousands of years ago, the state and religion were the same thing. The 10 commandments were a legal code, not a moral code.
The marriage license itself, as in a piece of paper, is not really what I am talking about. I'm talking about needing permission and co-operation from the government that rules you. Basically what I am saying that if some stranger who is not necessarily a relative and has some position of authority is the only one who can say that "you two are now married", that is the state having a monopoly on marriage. Whether the official is a priest, a judge, a general, or bureaucrat, it's the Powers that Be Running marriage instead of the individuals or their families making decisions.
"I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities
Is there any actual evidence that a group of people got together in a back room and actually consciously invented lifelong monogamy? Because the idea seems to me just a little bit far fetched. I don't think that people are quite that insightful and forward-thinking."
Archaelologists have uncovered a room in ancient Egypt that has *heavy* cigar smoke residue on the walls.
No, but seriously, why does it seem far fetched? Governments are making crazy rules all the time. Kings were regularly ordering exterminations of local unpopular minorities, and planning wars and strategies far into the future.
I'm not saying that there was one meeting of all the world kings and priests that in a single room that decided once and for all that there would be life-time monogamy, but that over and over, rulers who were interested in building a larger and more powerful state would have seen the benefit of having men not have to worry about women so much. Especially if other Kingdoms had monogomy, and the local King had to worry about competing with them.
Here's the best evidence I have: marriage license. Why do you need a marriage license? How about the state just let people do what they want and marry whomever? Why do they have to get their nose in it?
"At any rate, just to support what you said about serial monogamy, there is strong evidence that it was (subconsciously) an invention of women. Men, I think, would be happy roaming about like nomads, and just mating (forcibly if necessary) with any female they happen to meet. Monogamy was like a contract that women made with men. "I will stop resisting and you'll actually have more and better sex IF you agree to stick around and help with the kids." And then once the kids had aged five or six years, the contract stopped serving its purpose and both parties moved on to their next contract."
Well, I don't think so. What you say makes it seem like women are totally disinterested in sex, and only interested in child-rearing. I think if you look at the evolutionary psychology evidence, specifically in Pinkerson's _How the Mind Works_, men are very interested in a particular woman for about two years -- just about enough time to pop the kid out and get it walking and talking on its own.
"
I think that lifelong monogamy just evolved out of that, as the contract term kept getting longer and longer. The more complex the civilization, the *more* support that children need. Now you've got to buy them clothes, you've got to put them through school, you've got to teach them the complex behaviors that will allow them to fit into this civilization. That takes more than just a few years."
OK, sure, but why does a husband fill that role the best? Why not the mom's parents or her brothers? Neither the husband nor the husband's family can really be sure that the kid(s) are theirs. If it was just about child-rearing, the woman's family would put in the most effort, because they are the only relatives that can be certain that the kid really is related to them. I think it's much better explained by freeing up a young man's time and effort to work for the state.
"I just think this is a better explanation for lifelong monogamy than the idea that it was invented for a purpose. I think it evolved."
What do you mean evolved here? You mean like DNA and natural selection evolved? Because it sure has a spotty record for an inherited trait. Do you mean developed over time in socities? I think you and I would agree on that point. Where we disagree, if I can sum up, is that you would say it is driven by women, where I would say that it is driven by those in charge of running the state. But I don't argue that it was decided at one time, once and for all. It developed over time, in fits and starts, in various places.
OK, but what about if we are *exactly* smart enough to understand the brain?
That might seem snarky, but let me make a serious point. What you have said makes it seem like intelligence is a linear scale -- say, humans have a 'brain ability' of 50, but it takes a score of, say, 100 to understand a human brain. So anything understandable has some kind of ranking, so understanding dogs is lower on the scale than understanding people.
But what about qualitative intelligence, where instead of a numeric scale, there are different 'types' of understanding. So, in order to understanding, say, cloud formation, instead of having 'enough' intelligence, you just have to have the fluid dynamics module -- just as an example. You either understand it or you don't.
So if you buy the theory of qualitative intelligence, then it is possible that we are capable of understanding the human mind, so long as we have that capability.
Funny you mentioned that. That was the first thing I thought of when gp said the depth of the novel couldn't be filmed. There was so much visual stuff loaded into that film, it's like a honeycomb. I've seen it 10 times, and each time I see something new. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, but it's like you have to see it five times to understand the things you will see on the sixth time.
I would also think that David Lynch would be good for this type of adaptation.
If you look at people around the world and throughout time, monogamy for life is the exception, rather than the rule. People have what anthropologists call "serial monogamy" -- they are monogamous for a time, and then break up and get new partners. They have sexual relationships with several people during their lifetime, but they are monogamous with each partner when they are with them.
I have a degree in anthropology and we spent a lot of time talking about the development of the state. Time was (about 6000 years ago), that there were no kings or any authority that could definitively tell another man what to do. Certainly, there were influential elders and other people who would make their voices heard, but ultimately men and women were free to do what they wanted. There was no judge or president that had ultimate authority to decide someone's fate. If someone wronged you, you could take revenge, and people might even agree with you, but it was ultimately your decision.
Then, at various times around the world, states develop, where there is someone who can ultimately force someone to do something -- on pain of imprisonment or death. It seems to be driven by the 'domestication' of a food crop as a farm staple (wheat, rice, corn), which can be stored, paid as tax, and then redistributed to men bulding pyramids.
I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities in order to get men working on pyramids instead of going hunting all the time and fighting over women. Remember, it's the state who marries people. In olden days, if someone slept with your wife, it was considered theft. So, the state was in charge of women and sexuality which freed up men's time and effort, so they could be sent off to construction camps or to fight in foreign lands.
So, the bottom line of this circular story is that Kings wanted as many young chlidren as possible so they could raise armies and conquer other kings, and have plenty of labor to build pyramids and other structures proclaiming their greatness. If you have farming and state intervention in re-production, this assists greatly in fertility.
If you look at hunter/gatherers, their reproduction patterns are like modern nuclear families. A woman might have 3-4 children. The 10-12 children was a part of the farming social structure.
"Instead of emoticons, use complete, structured thoughts and sentences, and know how to read them. Learn when and how to use word variants and punctuation to pace your sentences. Understand the difference between passive and active voice, and know when and why to use which. All of this seems to be a far more solid approach than emoticons."
Could you tell us all the precise rules that let us know which grammar structures indicate which tone or emotion? Because otherwise, a smiley or mean face is dead-on and hard to misunderstand. We're talking emotion here, not information.
"If you read my post you will see that I wrote, and I quote, "Now it may be that there are more than five senses, but the answer is not here...". What you should have been able to ascertain from this is that
1. I am open to revising my conceptions regarding the senses."
If you would have ready my post that you were responding to, you would have read that
So I gave you information on sense that aren't included in your Aristotelian Five Senses, and you either didn't read it, or you are purposefully ignoring them to keep harping on your point. Conrary to your claims, you are not open to revising your conceptions, because there the information is, and you haven't yet accepted it. You should have encountered that information in pyschology 101, like I did, or maybe some physiology course. I don't know why you are so resistant to it now.
So maybe I was wrong about the C02 sensors. I remember something from my education. However, I cannot find any link. But I have provided links to back up my other claims, while you have provided none. You are a troll.
"There's only one answer to this... You must be new here."
Thank you, paving-slab(823290). Now I understand you are one of the new breed of trolls that have recently infestested slashdot. Sorry I confused you with grandparent. Back in my day, posting were about Facts, not people, dammit! Facts! Back in the old days, people used to post comments to make deeper understandings. They would present evidence, historical and otherwise to create deeper understanding.
If you are trying to learn, you have to question everything. The five senses you keep defending are handy for everyday life. In day-to-day conversation, it's handy to talk about smell, sight, taste, etc. You would never need to refer to
But since the advent of modern physics and science, we have much more accurate understanding of the human senses. If we look at the classic idea of the five sense with this in mind, we find that some senses are a combination of several system in the body -- for instance touch being the pressure, temperature, and pain nerves in the body. These are all seperate nerves in the body, and they are handled by different parts of the brain. From a purely physiological perspective, there is no reason to group them together under a single sense.
Also, it turns out there are perception systems in the body that are unaccounted for, such as propitiation and orientation.
So now we understand that the five senses really are a messy categorization of phenomena that really don't belong together, and one that also omits senses. So where did we get such a system from?
The first thing you should ask yourself is "where did I learn the five senses from?" Probably grade school, I would guess. The next thing you should ask, is where did grade school get this from? Chances are, it goes back to Aristotle, if you were educated in the west. That's just a fact. Ideas don't come out of nowhere; they have a history behind them. People don't talk about the five senses because they are natural and obvious. They talk about them because they were taught that, and there parents were taught that, all the way back to whatever historical egghead thought the theory up.
As another example, if you had grown up in India, you would have learned about the Six Senses, because thousands of years ago, some egghead Hindu scholar thought that Six senses were natural and obvious, and he wrote them down, and it's been taught ever since. So the reason that I keep bringing up Aristotle is because that's where you got this idea from.
Aristotle didn't have any access to instruments that could show infrared. People also didn't have microscopes back then, nor did they disect human bodies in order to learn. So now that we have those tools available to us, it becomes obvious that the common wisdom is outdated, and we need to revise the theory.
Slashdot Mirror
"A surplus of a particular good will end up being eliminated by market forces."
That's true if there is only free trade between all vendors -- if there is a single, united free marketplace.
However, political borders create seperate markets through which goods cannot freely traverse. So simple single-market theories cannot fully explain international trade and the strategies that rational agents employ to profit in segmented markets.
"Why bother buying an expensive gizmo if you can the real thing for a bit more? "
You're paying for size and convience, not computing power. People use PDAs because you can carry one around in your pocket and use it standing up, holding it in one hand. People prefer digital over paper because you have 1. infinite editability and 2. perfect copy-ability for sharing with your other apps and with other people's digital devices.
Which would you rather carry -- a calender/address book the size of a notepad, or one the size of an 8x10 book that you can only use if you set it on a table or on your lap?
I'm curious -- what do you use it for, and where do you use it?
There were a couple of things that I really want a tablet computer for -- an animation app, a calendar app, and a chinese character learning app.
The Nokia 770 fits your first criteria. However the battery life is only 3 hours.
I've seen it at CompUSA, and it is very sleek! It is horizontally oriented and sits comfortably into my hand.
The only problem is that it lacks apps. I think partly because it was designed as a web browsing device, and partly because Nokia thought it would fail, there were no apps built for it. However, since it runs the somewhat open-source Maemo platform, there is a lot of opportunity for community development.
Do you still think that some illegal recreational drugs should be legal, or do you now stand for the status quo?
You know, you are right. NASA can never swallow their pride enough to use Soviet-engineered Soyuz capsules, especially when the whole space race was just competition with the Ruskies.
But if NASA designs its own capsule, that's a home run. There is new investment, public excitement, and safer spaceflight.
If the losses of the Challenger and the Columbia were due to human error, I would say that goes to the claim that the shuttle is too complicated to fly. There are too many features that humans need to tend too. It's the fault of the shuttle design if it is not resilient enough to human error. No human team can be perfect, so the design *has* to have some tolerance to human error. Unless both shuttles' losses were due to gross negligence, and not just simple errors, then the shuttles are not safe to fly under human management.
The reason I say this is because the comparably favorable track record of the Soyuz capsules. If the shuttles failed due to human errors, how come the Soyuz capsules haven't suffered similar fates when overseen by smiliarly trained humans?
I'm not saying give up spaceflight. I'm saying give up the shuttle, and use Soyuz.
Let me repeat: I am not arguing against spaceflight. I am arguing against the shuttle. It you want to send people up into space, use Soyuz capsules.
I would argue that because space flight can be safer, it is negligent to let them go up in the shuttle.
It would be as if firefighters were sent out in lousy equipment if better equipment were available. Firefighting is necessary to save more lives and make us safer. It is not optional, like racing cars, nor a scientific investment for the future, like space flight. Although firefighters are funded and operated at the local level, my guess would be that most fire fighters have the latest and best equipment. However, NASA astronauts are using lousy, dangerous equipment when there is a well-known alternative with a better safety track record.
As far as race car drivers, it is the driver who is responsible for the car decides to get into the car. That driver knows quite a bit abou the car. In NASA's case, it is management that has decided to continue to use the shuttles and send people up in them. No astronaut can make NASA use Soyuz. Only NASA management can make the decision to use Soyuz, so it is NASA's fault in exposing the austronauts to unnecessary danger by continuing to use the shuttle.
These are not risks inherent to space travel; they are risks inherent to flying in the space shuttle. By contrast, they Soyuz capsule has not had a single death since 1971. 35 years a good track record.
The butt of the joke is NASA -- and NASA quite deserves it. The space shuttle design is not re-entry worthy. NASA is taking unnecessary risks sending up these brave people in these space coffins. You want to put Americans into space? Swallow your pride and send them up in Soyuz. You want the jokes to stop? Then establish a track record of successful flights (You'll have to retire the shuttles to do so).
The emperor has no clothes. I hope your pride and support of the Astronauts following their dreams does not blind you to the unnecessary deadly risks NASA is exposing them to when they send them up in a shuttle. It is negligent, plain and simple.
If the joke needs to die, then NASA needs to stop killing astronauts. Ridicule is bar none the best behavior modification technique out there.
It's outrageous that the United States cannot launch shuttles without destroying the vessel and killing the crew. The shuttle designed is obviously flawed and deadly. No one is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.
By contrast, the last soyuz capsule related deaths were in 1971 on Soyuz 11.
When space tourists go up, why do they use Soyuz capsules? Because people don't die in them.
What do you think the .cn TLD is?"
The letters 'c' and 'n' are from the Latin alphabet. They are not Chinese logograms. Thus, they are not a Chinese TLD.
"The majority of my taxes go towards causes, programs, or institutions whose services I neither need nor want, and a handful to which I have serious ethical and/or moral objections. But there's no recourse "
There certainly is recourse. Travel to the jungles of South America, Africa, or Papua New Guinea. Go deep enough in, far beyond roads. You will find people who live there without taxes, education or police. The average age of men in those societies is 35 -- due to being killed in revenge cycles. Hey, if you're tough enough, you might be able to steal a wife from her family and live to see grandchildren. Otherwise they will just avenge your death.
You will find how sorely you need public education to keep young men running around, forming gangs, and terrorizing everyone. I love how these civil libertarians say nobody needs taxes, yet they stay far clear of headhunter tribes or civil war zones. Hey, why aren't libertarians flocking to these regions? There's no taxes (just protection money paid to tough guys and warlords). There's no intrusive government laws -- there aren't any laws at all! If you don't like what someone does, hit him. Make sure you hit him real hard, so he doesn't hit you back.
You live in the lap of luxury, plainly due to the fact of taxes and our civil institutions, yet you naively believe you don't need or want them. You could easily live in one of these places for the price of about a $1000 plane ticket, yet you haven't migrated to any one of these lawless, taxless paradises. Interesting.
In college I took a lot of comparative studies classes where a lot of professors were enamored with postmodernism.
One in particular kept harping on how little these technologies are 'critically examined' before they are rolled out. I think this is stupid. You can't predict the future. Nobody knows what the fallout, good or bad, will be, until afterwards. One example is the use of the phone message machines as call screening devices.
And furthermore, if some 'critical examiner' finds some theoretical issue with some new tech, what are we going to do? Keep the product from rolling out? Now we are going to have a committee or central planning board that decides what products should be rolled out? No. We have a free market. The worries and hand-wringings off these critical examiners will be bourne out as often as Dvoarks' predictions.
I can listen to podcasts while I work. I cannot watch TV while I work. Therefore, audio entertainment is more valuable to me.
I think the first problem is selection. You have to decide what is important, and what isn't. Even with 24 hours, you still can't cover *everything*.
By deciding what goes in and what stays out, you are implementing a bias. There is simply no objective standard to decide what is important and what isn't.
Perhaps on this board you are talking about, they can reach a broad consensus on what should be reported on. Even then, it's still a bias, even if it's a broad-reaching and well-agreed upon one.
Sure, if you're not doing anything wrong, let's put a camera in your house. First up, Cheif of Police. Why should he worry? Of course, *he* isn't doing anything wrong. What would he have to hide?
"Hell, why not just a regular wiki anyway? I figure 90-95% of all the spreadsheets I see don't do any calculations, they're just used as a way to put things in columns."
Do regular wikis have column and cell editing features? Most of what I'm familiar with work like line editors.
Well, if you go with the theory of the church running marriage, remember that the seperation of church and state is a relatively recent idea, and it started (I think) in the United States. For example, in many European states, there is an official religion. To this day, in Finland, when a baby is born, it is Lutheran by default, unless the parents specifically ask that it not be. There is also a Church tax that many people choose to pay. It was only voluntary recently.
So when I say that marriage was invented and sanctioned by the state, I'm including the church with that. That's kind of an assumption built into these anthropological arguments, because pluralism and the separation of church and state is a relatively recent development. So it was my mistake for not making that clear. Up until, say, some 400 years ago, the church and state were in lock step, if not two branches of the same organization.
Wikipedia says marriage licenses were issued *since* the middle ages -- that doesn't mean that they *started* then. We know that they go back farther because Rabbis have been marrying people for thousands of years in the Jewish religion. And when there was the first Jewish state, thousands of years ago, the state and religion were the same thing. The 10 commandments were a legal code, not a moral code.
The marriage license itself, as in a piece of paper, is not really what I am talking about. I'm talking about needing permission and co-operation from the government that rules you. Basically what I am saying that if some stranger who is not necessarily a relative and has some position of authority is the only one who can say that "you two are now married", that is the state having a monopoly on marriage. Whether the official is a priest, a judge, a general, or bureaucrat, it's the Powers that Be Running marriage instead of the individuals or their families making decisions.
"I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities
Is there any actual evidence that a group of people got together in a back room and actually consciously invented lifelong monogamy? Because the idea seems to me just a little bit far fetched. I don't think that people are quite that insightful and forward-thinking."
Archaelologists have uncovered a room in ancient Egypt that has *heavy* cigar smoke residue on the walls.
No, but seriously, why does it seem far fetched? Governments are making crazy rules all the time. Kings were regularly ordering exterminations of local unpopular minorities, and planning wars and strategies far into the future.
I'm not saying that there was one meeting of all the world kings and priests that in a single room that decided once and for all that there would be life-time monogamy, but that over and over, rulers who were interested in building a larger and more powerful state would have seen the benefit of having men not have to worry about women so much. Especially if other Kingdoms had monogomy, and the local King had to worry about competing with them.
Here's the best evidence I have: marriage license. Why do you need a marriage license? How about the state just let people do what they want and marry whomever? Why do they have to get their nose in it?
"At any rate, just to support what you said about serial monogamy, there is strong evidence that it was (subconsciously) an invention of women. Men, I think, would be happy roaming about like nomads, and just mating (forcibly if necessary) with any female they happen to meet. Monogamy was like a contract that women made with men. "I will stop resisting and you'll actually have more and better sex IF you agree to stick around and help with the kids." And then once the kids had aged five or six years, the contract stopped serving its purpose and both parties moved on to their next contract."
Well, I don't think so. What you say makes it seem like women are totally disinterested in sex, and only interested in child-rearing. I think if you look at the evolutionary psychology evidence, specifically in Pinkerson's _How the Mind Works_, men are very interested in a particular woman for about two years -- just about enough time to pop the kid out and get it walking and talking on its own.
" I think that lifelong monogamy just evolved out of that, as the contract term kept getting longer and longer. The more complex the civilization, the *more* support that children need. Now you've got to buy them clothes, you've got to put them through school, you've got to teach them the complex behaviors that will allow them to fit into this civilization. That takes more than just a few years."
OK, sure, but why does a husband fill that role the best? Why not the mom's parents or her brothers? Neither the husband nor the husband's family can really be sure that the kid(s) are theirs. If it was just about child-rearing, the woman's family would put in the most effort, because they are the only relatives that can be certain that the kid really is related to them. I think it's much better explained by freeing up a young man's time and effort to work for the state.
"I just think this is a better explanation for lifelong monogamy than the idea that it was invented for a purpose. I think it evolved."
What do you mean evolved here? You mean like DNA and natural selection evolved? Because it sure has a spotty record for an inherited trait. Do you mean developed over time in socities? I think you and I would agree on that point. Where we disagree, if I can sum up, is that you would say it is driven by women, where I would say that it is driven by those in charge of running the state. But I don't argue that it was decided at one time, once and for all. It developed over time, in fits and starts, in various places.
OK, but what about if we are *exactly* smart enough to understand the brain?
That might seem snarky, but let me make a serious point. What you have said makes it seem like intelligence is a linear scale -- say, humans have a 'brain ability' of 50, but it takes a score of, say, 100 to understand a human brain. So anything understandable has some kind of ranking, so understanding dogs is lower on the scale than understanding people.
But what about qualitative intelligence, where instead of a numeric scale, there are different 'types' of understanding. So, in order to understanding, say, cloud formation, instead of having 'enough' intelligence, you just have to have the fluid dynamics module -- just as an example. You either understand it or you don't.
So if you buy the theory of qualitative intelligence, then it is possible that we are capable of understanding the human mind, so long as we have that capability.
Funny you mentioned that. That was the first thing I thought of when gp said the depth of the novel couldn't be filmed. There was so much visual stuff loaded into that film, it's like a honeycomb. I've seen it 10 times, and each time I see something new. It's not that I wasn't paying attention, but it's like you have to see it five times to understand the things you will see on the sixth time.
I would also think that David Lynch would be good for this type of adaptation.
If you look at people around the world and throughout time, monogamy for life is the exception, rather than the rule. People have what anthropologists call "serial monogamy" -- they are monogamous for a time, and then break up and get new partners. They have sexual relationships with several people during their lifetime, but they are monogamous with each partner when they are with them.
I have a degree in anthropology and we spent a lot of time talking about the development of the state. Time was (about 6000 years ago), that there were no kings or any authority that could definitively tell another man what to do. Certainly, there were influential elders and other people who would make their voices heard, but ultimately men and women were free to do what they wanted. There was no judge or president that had ultimate authority to decide someone's fate. If someone wronged you, you could take revenge, and people might even agree with you, but it was ultimately your decision.
Then, at various times around the world, states develop, where there is someone who can ultimately force someone to do something -- on pain of imprisonment or death. It seems to be driven by the 'domestication' of a food crop as a farm staple (wheat, rice, corn), which can be stored, paid as tax, and then redistributed to men bulding pyramids.
I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities in order to get men working on pyramids instead of going hunting all the time and fighting over women. Remember, it's the state who marries people. In olden days, if someone slept with your wife, it was considered theft. So, the state was in charge of women and sexuality which freed up men's time and effort, so they could be sent off to construction camps or to fight in foreign lands.
So, the bottom line of this circular story is that Kings wanted as many young chlidren as possible so they could raise armies and conquer other kings, and have plenty of labor to build pyramids and other structures proclaiming their greatness. If you have farming and state intervention in re-production, this assists greatly in fertility.
If you look at hunter/gatherers, their reproduction patterns are like modern nuclear families. A woman might have 3-4 children. The 10-12 children was a part of the farming social structure.
"Instead of emoticons, use complete, structured thoughts and sentences, and know how to read them. Learn when and how to use word variants and punctuation to pace your sentences. Understand the difference between passive and active voice, and know when and why to use which. All of this seems to be a far more solid approach than emoticons."
Could you tell us all the precise rules that let us know which grammar structures indicate which tone or emotion? Because otherwise, a smiley or mean face is dead-on and hard to misunderstand. We're talking emotion here, not information.
"If you read my post you will see that I wrote, and I quote, "Now it may be that there are more than five senses, but the answer is not here...". What you should have been able to ascertain from this is that
1. I am open to revising my conceptions regarding the senses."
If you would have ready my post that you were responding to, you would have read that
[There] is another wikipedia aricle [wikipedia.org] to help you out. Here are a few select headings from the article: The Somatic senses [wikipedia.org], which include Touch [wikipedia.org], Thermoception [wikipedia.org], and Nociception. The article also lists Equilibrioception [wikipedia.org] and Proprioception [wikipedia.org].
So I gave you information on sense that aren't included in your Aristotelian Five Senses, and you either didn't read it, or you are purposefully ignoring them to keep harping on your point. Conrary to your claims, you are not open to revising your conceptions, because there the information is, and you haven't yet accepted it. You should have encountered that information in pyschology 101, like I did, or maybe some physiology course. I don't know why you are so resistant to it now.
So maybe I was wrong about the C02 sensors. I remember something from my education. However, I cannot find any link. But I have provided links to back up my other claims, while you have provided none. You are a troll.
"There's only one answer to this... You must be new here."
Thank you, paving-slab(823290). Now I understand you are one of the new breed of trolls that have recently infestested slashdot. Sorry I confused you with grandparent. Back in my day, posting were about Facts, not people, dammit! Facts! Back in the old days, people used to post comments to make deeper understandings. They would present evidence, historical and otherwise to create deeper understanding.
If you are trying to learn, you have to question everything. The five senses you keep defending are handy for everyday life. In day-to-day conversation, it's handy to talk about smell, sight, taste, etc. You would never need to refer to
But since the advent of modern physics and science, we have much more accurate understanding of the human senses. If we look at the classic idea of the five sense with this in mind, we find that some senses are a combination of several system in the body -- for instance touch being the pressure, temperature, and pain nerves in the body. These are all seperate nerves in the body, and they are handled by different parts of the brain. From a purely physiological perspective, there is no reason to group them together under a single sense. Also, it turns out there are perception systems in the body that are unaccounted for, such as propitiation and orientation.
So now we understand that the five senses really are a messy categorization of phenomena that really don't belong together, and one that also omits senses. So where did we get such a system from?
The first thing you should ask yourself is "where did I learn the five senses from?" Probably grade school, I would guess. The next thing you should ask, is where did grade school get this from? Chances are, it goes back to Aristotle, if you were educated in the west. That's just a fact. Ideas don't come out of nowhere; they have a history behind them. People don't talk about the five senses because they are natural and obvious. They talk about them because they were taught that, and there parents were taught that, all the way back to whatever historical egghead thought the theory up.
As another example, if you had grown up in India, you would have learned about the Six Senses, because thousands of years ago, some egghead Hindu scholar thought that Six senses were natural and obvious, and he wrote them down, and it's been taught ever since. So the reason that I keep bringing up Aristotle is because that's where you got this idea from.
Aristotle didn't have any access to instruments that could show infrared. People also didn't have microscopes back then, nor did they disect human bodies in order to learn. So now that we have those tools available to us, it becomes obvious that the common wisdom is outdated, and we need to revise the theory.