The government don't have to make a monetary return on the investment, but it's good that it's set up that way. I don't begrudge the investment, but I could also see (say) "drought proofing" the Murry-Darling basin as a worthy investment for a "future fund". I just think the NBN idea came from nowhere and the opposition were asleep on the job as usual. Their job (as advertised in the democracy prospectus) is to come up with worthy alternatives or constructive criticism to what the government proposes/implements, but all we got was just more of the same old temper tantrums.
Yep scientists are humans, however I've noticed that humans like Ball who habitually resort to dogma, scream the loudest about resorting to dogma. The only reason anyone has ever heard of Ball is that his sponser buys him an opinion column in the MSM.
Yep they are aiming at small business. All our (humungous corporate) offices have been using VOIP for several years now, it has some handy features such as integration with email, etc. Of course there's nothing stopping small businesses using VOIP now, I imagine Optus of Telstra would be happy to sell them one of their existing "small business solutions". The NBN is about future communications capacity, politically it's a hard sell so they have to try and point to more immediate benefits, problem is there really aren't that many immediate benefits.
Thanks, the "blow out" thing struck me as strange too. The $37B figure is the cheapest quote I've heard so far. There are probably better things we could be doing with the nations nest egg but at least the NBN is useful and does offer tangible benefits to all Aussies. It's also much more sensible use of labour and capital than the stupid race the telco's had in the 90's that saw two separate sets of cables being hooked up to homes in the suburbs.
That you can sue doesn't mean you should. This is the same fundementaly amoral behaviour used by the MAFIAA when suing people in the US for imaginary damages to imaginary property. Attempting to hurt them with the same tatic isn't going to help anyone, it just legitimises the legal crap shoot. Barring any disputed service level agreement Hugo signed up for, the only reason I can see for Hugo to sue would be for the publicity, and they already have as much of that as they will ever get over this issue.
Speaking of Dr Who, the ABC/BBC have a common sense solution to a 21st century problem. I was one of those who watched it on iView, I hope other Aussie fans will do likewise and put their eyballs where their mouth is. For those Aussies on a capped ISP line, most ISP don't meter iView but best to check first.
I think it's disgusting how many people have made that a dogmatic if not wholly political ideology that doesn't even resemble the open, questioning spirit of real science...blah,blah,climategate,blah.
PS: That's Ball's straw-man argument, not yours. And I make that claim as a skeptic who has applied self-skepticism to his claim before posting it.
Dr. Timothy Ball or whomever disagrees, they're just denialists!
Ball is not a denier, he's a shill, he's not just wrong, he's paid to lie.
Meat from the link:
- "Dr. Ball was a former professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg between 1988 to 1996. The University of Winnipeg never had a climatology department.".
- Statement of Defence by the Calgary Herald [in Ball vs Johnson] - “The Plantiff (Dr. Ball) is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist.”
So he's not a trained climatologist but can point to Tasmania on a map, and the people who publish his propaganda claim under oath that he is a FF shill. At least the Herald had the decency to be honest about cash for comment (when under the threat of legal punishment), after all, cash for comment has been a pillar of the MSM's business model since day one.
Influential people deny AGW for the same reasons influential people denied, pea-soup fog, acid rain and the health effects of smoking and astbestos. It's an existential threat to their economic and political power. The problem with denying reality is that sooner or later it is forced upon you. Coal fired generators are replaced every 30-40 years, but what would the entire coal industry be worth in 10yrs time if every time a generator was scheduled to be replaced, it was replaced with something that didn't burn coal? The economy would not collapse, the coal industry would, people would simply shift their investments to the clean energy market and leave the Luddites in the coal industry where they belong, in the past. The coal industry are fighting a hearts and minds campaign against climate science, they are fighting for their corporate lives and reality is starting to overwhelm them, it would be a mistake to expect them to be intellectually reasonable and reinvest their riches.
However, the level of philosophical importance that is being attached to the company is bordering on ridiculous.
They're a US company making money hand over fist, therefore in the US they are held up as the "American dream", the "light on the hill", etc, etc. Politicians will point to them and say stuff like "you too could be a billionaire if you work hard enough". Never, ever, do such people question the desirability of having billionaires in the first place.
I'm not saying billionaires don't work hard and I certainly do think hard work should be rewarded. However my 40yrs experience in the workforce tells me the harder the job the less the reward. It's not that cleaning toilets is intellectually or physically demanding (except for the strong stomach requirement), but here's a simple thought experiment on what "hard" work actually means; if the CEO's pay was slightly lower than the Cleaner's then I'm pretty sure most CEO's would still not want to trade places.
I have good enough karma to "disable advertising", but I don't do that.
Ditto, I live in Australia, I'm careful about my private email address, I don't get much spam in my 15yo private account. However somehow the Obama campaign did get hold of it and sent me convention spam signed by various dignitaries, the pattern of "senders" was interesting, it went something like...
Michelle
Michelle
Obama
3-4 Mayor's in quick succession.
A "last chance" mail from the organizer of the conference.
I find it kind of comical but would still like to know where they scraped my email from. The lack of a corresponding increase in other spam does seem to indicate they don't "share" the mailing list I'm on.
PS: I know, bad form to cut in at the top of the thread, but most of the posts below are OT "us vs them" arguments.
Is it unfathomable that maybe slight variations in the gravitational force...
Yes, the gravitational force is 30+ orders of magnitude weaker than the force it is trying to overpower, the effect is comparable to a mosquito trying to tow the Moon away. Dark matter/energy are really only names for new and puzzling phenomena that we have recently observed, this could fall in the same category and is certainly worth deeper investigation.
Let these industries fall by the wayside so we can build something better and make real progress.
The GP's point is that tearing the patent system down before you have some idea about what to replace it with is moronic, same is true for democratic governments. ie: "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". Sure cavemen didn't have any concept of intellectual property, but they also shat in the woods and didn't have a global economy that was already heavily dependent on IP.
The problem is not the idea of IP but the implementations of it is so broad as to make it meaningless. A 20yr global monopoly on "one click shopping" does not balance the befits to society and the "inventor". It creates a legal gold mine for trolls and a legal mine field for innovators. Abandoning it altogether is the satisfying, easy answer, especially if you think it won't impact you personally.
However, he owns a patent. This is an obvious conflict of interest. This would be something like a person who owns and profits from copyright sitting on the jury in a case where someone was being sued for copyright infringement.
If you watch his interview, it's apparent he's factually mistaken horribly in regards to most things patent related. He's also under this Apple-fanboi-esque assumption....
So drivers who have driving licenses should not be on the jury of a hit run case?
By your own description the foreman has a very similar view of patents as the two corporations, ergo - they were judged by their peers, end of story on the bias of the foreman. The time to attack a juror's worldview is during selection, attacking the juror after deliberations is no better than attacking the messenger. The fundamental injustice in all this is that the patent office is enabling (some would say encouraging) these kinds of "Gulliver's travels" court cases to tie up the courts and bankrupt business with this utter nonsense, in the end the consumers and taxpayers (ie society) are the mugs paying for all this.
The patent system is a punch line, unless you happen to be involved in a billion dollar court case. Patents are the best way we have for rewarding inventors and inventors should be rewarded both financially and socially, but if someone can claim 'round corners' as an invention then patents become meaningless since everything is now an invention. Sure if you were the first ape like creature to chisel the corners off something your idea was novel and worth a few bananas to society, but it's the fucking 21st century, "round corners" on something is no more than personal taste.
I sure as hell expect to see large portions modern science overturned in a generation or two
I don't, I expect fantastic technologies and new science, but well established science will remain well established. Mankind's knowledge has evolved and grown enormously in the last few centuries, in the beginning of the modern scientific era there were huge leaps as people grabbed the "low hanging fruit" using simple tools, those leaps have become less frequent but have enabled us to build new and better tools (such as the LHC and Hubble) that allow us to try and find things we think are there (Higgs), or don't even know about (Dark Matter). The second category is where today's fruit is hiding and it's a hell of a lot more expensive to get at than Newton's prisms and marbles.
Multiplication tables are a short cut for repeated addition - there now you understand it. A deeper understanding would tell you there is no other way to learn your multiplication tables other than by memory. One of the great science teachers of our time Carl Sagan said; "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking". Note the word "more" implies that knowledge is both the foundation and goal of science. Take away that existing body knowledge and the thought processes have nothing but their navels to think about. Teaching everything by discovery or by rote is nonsensical, the two methods complement each other and no scientist succeeds without both.
But perhaps there is an impenetrable barrier on September 30 that requires a bounce.
It trips over the barrier about week earlier (the equinox), so I'd expect the timing of low point would have a similar consistency when noise is removed. I picture the ice extent as a sine wave that is being distorted and dragged downward on the graph in TFA, however the frequency of the wave remains unchanged since it represents the climate "forcing" causing the change (ie: Earth's orbit). The same phenomena is behind the "Pluto is warming" canard, summer solstice had just passed on Pluto but the atmosphere continued to warm due to thermal inertia.
Aussie here, middle of winter in Melbourne, I live 300 meters from the beach and I have absolutely no intention of even walking on it until spring. The actual water temp in the bay only varies by 2-3degC all year. However the city lies on the top edge of the "roaring forties", a trip to the beach in winter is like being sprayed with a cold sand blaster, mid-summer it's too hot to walk on bare foot and the north wind is like a blast furnace.
The mathematics of thermal runaway on those old designs is nearly identical to the albedo-loss calculations of our ice caps.
I'd be brave enough to guess that they are the same equations with different constants and variables. When "thermal runaway" happens to a planet it's called a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus is to Earth as the fused transistor is to a working transistor. We're very unlikely to trigger such an effect here on Earth* but it's fairly well established science that Earth's ultimate fate is to look like a lot like Venus, ( in about 500Myrs from now). There are also -ve feedbacks, eg: expanding deserts tend to put dust in the air which has a cooling effect, as do sulfur emissions (which unfortunately also cause acid rain). When you add up all the +ve/-ve forcings and feedbacks you get a number called climate sensitivity
Once the planet has undergone "thermal runaway" it's "fused", the oceans are gone forever, the hydrogen in the water vapor is split off in the upper atmosphere by radiation and over time leaks off into space due to it being the lightest element, carbon is now bound to the oxygen from the H2o to form more CO2, the process also makes the atmosphere denser since C is heaver than H. Earth is losing Hydrogen from the same process, it just taking a lot longer than it did for Mars and Venus (probably due to Earth's strong magnetic field.
* - James Hansen and other climatologists at the top of their field have warned that burning ALL known reserves of FF (coal/oil/gas/tar sands) would be more than enough forcing to trigger a RGH, sadly it's exactly what most industrial nations are planning to do over the next 250yrs or so (politicians can and do think long term when they want to). I say a RGH is unlikely since there are major signs that political will is growing to make the simplest and most cost effective adaptation we can to avert such an apocalyptic scenario, namely rebuilding the energy infrastructure ('a stitch in time' and all that). It's really not a huge drama when spread over 40-50yrs, on that time scale every nuke/coal generator on the planet has been planned, built and/or rebuilt, since I was born. We have to replace every one of them again in the next half century anyway. The only thing holding us up is a shrinking group of corporate Luddites such as Peabody coal who have not yet accepted their business model is as dead as the dinosaurs they are burning. If they hold on to coal for too long then bankruptcy will be a self-fulfilling prophecy as renewables take over and coal mines become virtually worthless.
I was 10, the day they landed I was so absorbed with the TV I sat on a plate of spaghetti and meat balls. It's hard to describe how important the TV was to people that day, the only other event I can think of that has come close to gluing that many people that strongly to a TV is 911. Every boy at my school wanted to be an astronaut in the same way we all wanted to be Superman, I think one Aussie eventually made a trip on the shuttle, still no sign of Superman. I do think it inspired millions of kids but it also set expectation too high and by the end of the 70's kids my age had worked out they were not going to be an astronaut and many of them lost interest, rather than being glued to their TV on the last moon shot they were calling the entire Apollo project a waste of money, nothing more than cold war saber rattling.
Big science is bigger than ever these days, and with the internet it's cheaper and faster. It just does things more quietly, more of of background hum than a climatic touchdown. A Higgs bosun here, an MRI machine there, an internet everywhere. Some amazing space pics, some dire warnings, and all but forgotten smallpox. I agree we could do with a lot more of it, but it's how we use it that counts.
In your example the ant's nest is intelligent but the neuron is not, and I find this view peculiar.
It's peculiar because the word "intelligence" is meaningless without context, things behave in a certain way, some predictable, others not, most somewhere in between. It becomes intelligent behaviour in the same way art becomes art, it's a subjective human judgement. The main point is complex behavior emerges from simple rules, consciousness emerges from complex behavior. The whole is more that the sum, in the same way as porn is more than pixels - context. The concept of something being alive is also a subjective categorization of behavior into the living and the non-living. Life is just chemistry and the human brain is just an elaborate state machine, that we are also conscious is something we instinctively know but are still struggling to understand. Sagan's - "We are made of stardust, we are a way for the universe to know itself" is the closest I come to spiritualism and religion.
Yes, Obama is financially conservative and socially liberal and rarely strays far from the center. The reason you think he's a socialist is because you are way out on the right wing, the left wing is over your horizon and it's difficult for you to even see the center.
I am not an American, I was born in the former USSR. Unfortunately for me I actually had to read Marx and Lenin too
We've crossed paths before, I believe you are sincere and passionate but it comes across as ignorance and arrogance, unfortunately you routinely believe the most outlandish propaganda and then repeat it as truth. You grew up in a land and time where intense state propaganda was the norm and motivated the behavior of the adults around you. Pravda and Fox are two faces of the same evil, I hope that one day you can get past resenting the adults from your childhood and realize that you've been fighting dragons for so long that you have become one.
Slashdot Mirror
The government don't have to make a monetary return on the investment, but it's good that it's set up that way. I don't begrudge the investment, but I could also see (say) "drought proofing" the Murry-Darling basin as a worthy investment for a "future fund". I just think the NBN idea came from nowhere and the opposition were asleep on the job as usual. Their job (as advertised in the democracy prospectus) is to come up with worthy alternatives or constructive criticism to what the government proposes/implements, but all we got was just more of the same old temper tantrums.
Yep scientists are humans, however I've noticed that humans like Ball who habitually resort to dogma, scream the loudest about resorting to dogma. The only reason anyone has ever heard of Ball is that his sponser buys him an opinion column in the MSM.
Yep they are aiming at small business. All our (humungous corporate) offices have been using VOIP for several years now, it has some handy features such as integration with email, etc. Of course there's nothing stopping small businesses using VOIP now, I imagine Optus of Telstra would be happy to sell them one of their existing "small business solutions". The NBN is about future communications capacity, politically it's a hard sell so they have to try and point to more immediate benefits, problem is there really aren't that many immediate benefits.
Thanks, the "blow out" thing struck me as strange too. The $37B figure is the cheapest quote I've heard so far. There are probably better things we could be doing with the nations nest egg but at least the NBN is useful and does offer tangible benefits to all Aussies. It's also much more sensible use of labour and capital than the stupid race the telco's had in the 90's that saw two separate sets of cables being hooked up to homes in the suburbs.
That you can sue doesn't mean you should. This is the same fundementaly amoral behaviour used by the MAFIAA when suing people in the US for imaginary damages to imaginary property. Attempting to hurt them with the same tatic isn't going to help anyone, it just legitimises the legal crap shoot. Barring any disputed service level agreement Hugo signed up for, the only reason I can see for Hugo to sue would be for the publicity, and they already have as much of that as they will ever get over this issue.
Speaking of Dr Who, the ABC/BBC have a common sense solution to a 21st century problem. I was one of those who watched it on iView, I hope other Aussie fans will do likewise and put their eyballs where their mouth is. For those Aussies on a capped ISP line, most ISP don't meter iView but best to check first.
I think it's disgusting how many people have made that a dogmatic if not wholly political ideology that doesn't even resemble the open, questioning spirit of real science...blah,blah,climategate,blah.
PS: That's Ball's straw-man argument, not yours. And I make that claim as a skeptic who has applied self-skepticism to his claim before posting it.
Dr. Timothy Ball or whomever disagrees, they're just denialists!
Ball is not a denier, he's a shill, he's not just wrong, he's paid to lie.
Meat from the link:
- "Dr. Ball was a former professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg between 1988 to 1996. The University of Winnipeg never had a climatology department.".
- Statement of Defence by the Calgary Herald [in Ball vs Johnson] - “The Plantiff (Dr. Ball) is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist.”
So he's not a trained climatologist but can point to Tasmania on a map, and the people who publish his propaganda claim under oath that he is a FF shill. At least the Herald had the decency to be honest about cash for comment (when under the threat of legal punishment), after all, cash for comment has been a pillar of the MSM's business model since day one.
Influential people deny AGW for the same reasons influential people denied, pea-soup fog, acid rain and the health effects of smoking and astbestos. It's an existential threat to their economic and political power. The problem with denying reality is that sooner or later it is forced upon you. Coal fired generators are replaced every 30-40 years, but what would the entire coal industry be worth in 10yrs time if every time a generator was scheduled to be replaced, it was replaced with something that didn't burn coal? The economy would not collapse, the coal industry would, people would simply shift their investments to the clean energy market and leave the Luddites in the coal industry where they belong, in the past. The coal industry are fighting a hearts and minds campaign against climate science, they are fighting for their corporate lives and reality is starting to overwhelm them, it would be a mistake to expect them to be intellectually reasonable and reinvest their riches.
However, the level of philosophical importance that is being attached to the company is bordering on ridiculous.
They're a US company making money hand over fist, therefore in the US they are held up as the "American dream", the "light on the hill", etc, etc. Politicians will point to them and say stuff like "you too could be a billionaire if you work hard enough". Never, ever, do such people question the desirability of having billionaires in the first place.
:)
I'm not saying billionaires don't work hard and I certainly do think hard work should be rewarded. However my 40yrs experience in the workforce tells me the harder the job the less the reward. It's not that cleaning toilets is intellectually or physically demanding (except for the strong stomach requirement), but here's a simple thought experiment on what "hard" work actually means; if the CEO's pay was slightly lower than the Cleaner's then I'm pretty sure most CEO's would still not want to trade places.
Heh, just noticed your sig, says it all really.
I have good enough karma to "disable advertising", but I don't do that.
Ditto, I live in Australia, I'm careful about my private email address, I don't get much spam in my 15yo private account. However somehow the Obama campaign did get hold of it and sent me convention spam signed by various dignitaries, the pattern of "senders" was interesting, it went something like...
Michelle
Michelle
Obama
3-4 Mayor's in quick succession.
A "last chance" mail from the organizer of the conference.
I find it kind of comical but would still like to know where they scraped my email from. The lack of a corresponding increase in other spam does seem to indicate they don't "share" the mailing list I'm on.
PS: I know, bad form to cut in at the top of the thread, but most of the posts below are OT "us vs them" arguments.
Is it unfathomable that maybe slight variations in the gravitational force...
Yes, the gravitational force is 30+ orders of magnitude weaker than the force it is trying to overpower, the effect is comparable to a mosquito trying to tow the Moon away. Dark matter/energy are really only names for new and puzzling phenomena that we have recently observed, this could fall in the same category and is certainly worth deeper investigation.
Let these industries fall by the wayside so we can build something better and make real progress.
The GP's point is that tearing the patent system down before you have some idea about what to replace it with is moronic, same is true for democratic governments. ie: "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". Sure cavemen didn't have any concept of intellectual property, but they also shat in the woods and didn't have a global economy that was already heavily dependent on IP.
The problem is not the idea of IP but the implementations of it is so broad as to make it meaningless. A 20yr global monopoly on "one click shopping" does not balance the befits to society and the "inventor". It creates a legal gold mine for trolls and a legal mine field for innovators. Abandoning it altogether is the satisfying, easy answer, especially if you think it won't impact you personally.
However, he owns a patent. This is an obvious conflict of interest. This would be something like a person who owns and profits from copyright sitting on the jury in a case where someone was being sued for copyright infringement.
If you watch his interview, it's apparent he's factually mistaken horribly in regards to most things patent related. He's also under this Apple-fanboi-esque assumption....
So drivers who have driving licenses should not be on the jury of a hit run case?
By your own description the foreman has a very similar view of patents as the two corporations, ergo - they were judged by their peers, end of story on the bias of the foreman. The time to attack a juror's worldview is during selection, attacking the juror after deliberations is no better than attacking the messenger. The fundamental injustice in all this is that the patent office is enabling (some would say encouraging) these kinds of "Gulliver's travels" court cases to tie up the courts and bankrupt business with this utter nonsense, in the end the consumers and taxpayers (ie society) are the mugs paying for all this.
The patent system is a punch line, unless you happen to be involved in a billion dollar court case. Patents are the best way we have for rewarding inventors and inventors should be rewarded both financially and socially, but if someone can claim 'round corners' as an invention then patents become meaningless since everything is now an invention. Sure if you were the first ape like creature to chisel the corners off something your idea was novel and worth a few bananas to society, but it's the fucking 21st century, "round corners" on something is no more than personal taste.
who can claim that reason is better or more important than intuition?
Reasoning tells you how to investigate, intuition tells you what investigate. It's the difference between believing what feels true, and what is true.
I sure as hell expect to see large portions modern science overturned in a generation or two
I don't, I expect fantastic technologies and new science, but well established science will remain well established. Mankind's knowledge has evolved and grown enormously in the last few centuries, in the beginning of the modern scientific era there were huge leaps as people grabbed the "low hanging fruit" using simple tools, those leaps have become less frequent but have enabled us to build new and better tools (such as the LHC and Hubble) that allow us to try and find things we think are there (Higgs), or don't even know about (Dark Matter). The second category is where today's fruit is hiding and it's a hell of a lot more expensive to get at than Newton's prisms and marbles.
Multiplication tables are a short cut for repeated addition - there now you understand it. A deeper understanding would tell you there is no other way to learn your multiplication tables other than by memory. One of the great science teachers of our time Carl Sagan said; "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking". Note the word "more" implies that knowledge is both the foundation and goal of science. Take away that existing body knowledge and the thought processes have nothing but their navels to think about. Teaching everything by discovery or by rote is nonsensical, the two methods complement each other and no scientist succeeds without both.
But perhaps there is an impenetrable barrier on September 30 that requires a bounce.
It trips over the barrier about week earlier (the equinox), so I'd expect the timing of low point would have a similar consistency when noise is removed. I picture the ice extent as a sine wave that is being distorted and dragged downward on the graph in TFA, however the frequency of the wave remains unchanged since it represents the climate "forcing" causing the change (ie: Earth's orbit). The same phenomena is behind the "Pluto is warming" canard, summer solstice had just passed on Pluto but the atmosphere continued to warm due to thermal inertia.
Aussie here, middle of winter in Melbourne, I live 300 meters from the beach and I have absolutely no intention of even walking on it until spring. The actual water temp in the bay only varies by 2-3degC all year. However the city lies on the top edge of the "roaring forties", a trip to the beach in winter is like being sprayed with a cold sand blaster, mid-summer it's too hot to walk on bare foot and the north wind is like a blast furnace.
A volcano erupting under the ocean has about as much effect on water temperature as a lit match thrown into a swimming pool.
The mathematics of thermal runaway on those old designs is nearly identical to the albedo-loss calculations of our ice caps.
I'd be brave enough to guess that they are the same equations with different constants and variables. When "thermal runaway" happens to a planet it's called a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus is to Earth as the fused transistor is to a working transistor. We're very unlikely to trigger such an effect here on Earth* but it's fairly well established science that Earth's ultimate fate is to look like a lot like Venus, ( in about 500Myrs from now). There are also -ve feedbacks, eg: expanding deserts tend to put dust in the air which has a cooling effect, as do sulfur emissions (which unfortunately also cause acid rain). When you add up all the +ve/-ve forcings and feedbacks you get a number called climate sensitivity
Once the planet has undergone "thermal runaway" it's "fused", the oceans are gone forever, the hydrogen in the water vapor is split off in the upper atmosphere by radiation and over time leaks off into space due to it being the lightest element, carbon is now bound to the oxygen from the H2o to form more CO2, the process also makes the atmosphere denser since C is heaver than H. Earth is losing Hydrogen from the same process, it just taking a lot longer than it did for Mars and Venus (probably due to Earth's strong magnetic field.
* - James Hansen and other climatologists at the top of their field have warned that burning ALL known reserves of FF (coal/oil/gas/tar sands) would be more than enough forcing to trigger a RGH, sadly it's exactly what most industrial nations are planning to do over the next 250yrs or so (politicians can and do think long term when they want to). I say a RGH is unlikely since there are major signs that political will is growing to make the simplest and most cost effective adaptation we can to avert such an apocalyptic scenario, namely rebuilding the energy infrastructure ('a stitch in time' and all that). It's really not a huge drama when spread over 40-50yrs, on that time scale every nuke/coal generator on the planet has been planned, built and/or rebuilt, since I was born. We have to replace every one of them again in the next half century anyway. The only thing holding us up is a shrinking group of corporate Luddites such as Peabody coal who have not yet accepted their business model is as dead as the dinosaurs they are burning. If they hold on to coal for too long then bankruptcy will be a self-fulfilling prophecy as renewables take over and coal mines become virtually worthless.
uuh... what?
It's Judith Curry
I was 10, the day they landed I was so absorbed with the TV I sat on a plate of spaghetti and meat balls. It's hard to describe how important the TV was to people that day, the only other event I can think of that has come close to gluing that many people that strongly to a TV is 911. Every boy at my school wanted to be an astronaut in the same way we all wanted to be Superman, I think one Aussie eventually made a trip on the shuttle, still no sign of Superman. I do think it inspired millions of kids but it also set expectation too high and by the end of the 70's kids my age had worked out they were not going to be an astronaut and many of them lost interest, rather than being glued to their TV on the last moon shot they were calling the entire Apollo project a waste of money, nothing more than cold war saber rattling.
Big science is bigger than ever these days, and with the internet it's cheaper and faster. It just does things more quietly, more of of background hum than a climatic touchdown. A Higgs bosun here, an MRI machine there, an internet everywhere. Some amazing space pics, some dire warnings, and all but forgotten smallpox. I agree we could do with a lot more of it, but it's how we use it that counts.
Unfortunately, you sound like you are easily swayed by outside stimuli.
Yes, I'm startled by nearby car horns, but it was you who responded to the outside stimuli provided by me?
In both cases you feel a great sense of relief, it allows the mind to escape the recursive "Why?" question.
In your example the ant's nest is intelligent but the neuron is not, and I find this view peculiar.
It's peculiar because the word "intelligence" is meaningless without context, things behave in a certain way, some predictable, others not, most somewhere in between. It becomes intelligent behaviour in the same way art becomes art, it's a subjective human judgement. The main point is complex behavior emerges from simple rules, consciousness emerges from complex behavior. The whole is more that the sum, in the same way as porn is more than pixels - context. The concept of something being alive is also a subjective categorization of behavior into the living and the non-living. Life is just chemistry and the human brain is just an elaborate state machine, that we are also conscious is something we instinctively know but are still struggling to understand. Sagan's - "We are made of stardust, we are a way for the universe to know itself" is the closest I come to spiritualism and religion.
do you have an actual argument
Yes, Obama is financially conservative and socially liberal and rarely strays far from the center. The reason you think he's a socialist is because you are way out on the right wing, the left wing is over your horizon and it's difficult for you to even see the center.
I am not an American, I was born in the former USSR. Unfortunately for me I actually had to read Marx and Lenin too
We've crossed paths before, I believe you are sincere and passionate but it comes across as ignorance and arrogance, unfortunately you routinely believe the most outlandish propaganda and then repeat it as truth. You grew up in a land and time where intense state propaganda was the norm and motivated the behavior of the adults around you. Pravda and Fox are two faces of the same evil, I hope that one day you can get past resenting the adults from your childhood and realize that you've been fighting dragons for so long that you have become one.