"Natural resources" is not the same thing as fossil fuels. We are running out of more stuff than just fossil fuels - metals, minerals, farmland and, not in the last place, wilderness.
In any event, this doom and gloom is pointless. We're not at an "irreversible tipping point". If we can "accidentally" fuck up the earth within a few decades, we can certainly fix it if we are actually trying.
Really? What makes you think so? What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago? To the deforestation of Europe? To the desertification of many places in the world today? To the thousands of species of plants and animals that become extinct every yeaer? We have not fixed anything, we have, in some small circumstances, begun destroying less, but that has made practically no change in the general trend.
If we wanted to invest the money, we could have colonies on mars, and terraforming it within a generation. But we don't want to invest the money.
Wishful thinking. We don't have anything that would allow us to even approach the question of terraforming. Asking for "investing" is fine, how about a back-of-the envelope calculation of what kind of money are we talking about?
We're only at a "tipping point" if we assume that we won't do anything to change our behavior, ever. And I don't see that as likely.
We're at a tipping point, because very soon there won't be enough biosphere left for it to be able to sustain itself, and us. Once most wildlife is gone because we eat up its habitat to build, farm, produce natural gas, grow biofuel or whatever, it isn't coming back. And there is no indication that we're about to change our behaviour as a species. We will eat until we drown in our own excrement.
It seems? How does it seem? There are no working thorium reactors in the wild that can recover their costs of operation. And no, I don't know how this "cloning" thing is going to help with biodiversity. Species are disappearing at the rate of tens a day. What cloning facility has the capacity to successfully clone tens of a animals a day?
The problem is that there are no "smart solutions" on the horizon to the energy problem, to the global warming problem or to the biodiversity problem. We are also running out of most finite natural resources, and we have no viable replacement options. You can dream all you want about thorium reactors, fusion power plants or asteroid mining, but none of these will be a realistic option for the next two or three generations that are a topic of the article.
The parallels with the English industrial revolution ignore the worldwide plundering that has gone on since then and has brought the world to where we are now. Also, the fact that there is not much left to plunder.
US white population has positive growth rate, there are about 2.4 kids per family. You need 2.1 to stay constant. Also, the party that sets out to reduce populations doesn't need a majority, just a comparative advantage in ability to unleash violence.
Well, if you choose to describe something in the most generic terms possible, you can find apparent similarities between any two things. Since you want the "statistics" angle, the difference between what science does and what nature does is in the large numbers. Nature wins (or loses) by a brute force approach. Science is seldom done that way.
, intuition excels at ferreting out subtle patterns from incomplete data, while our conscious minds generally do not
Intuition only "works" in simple circumstances when you already have the mental faculties to solve the problem. If you're solving a complex problem, then only careful analysis, based on thorough understanding of what's going on works.
For example, for a few years in the beginning of space age, all landing capsules would burn up. They were made to look like pencils, and come into the atmosphere with the sharp end pointing down. Intuitively, engineers were trying to expose as little as possible of the aircraft to the heat, generated by the friction in the air. The solution of the problem was completely unintuitive. Someone analyzed the problem from a different, theoretical angle, realized the problem is not the heat, but its dissipation. So, he changed the design to the bell-shape we know now, and made the capsule re-enter with the wide end down. It worked.
Gambling is another example. If intuition "worked" like science, nobody would go into a casino, because the odds there are stacked heavily against the player.
example of trial and error in science: much modern chemistry and pharmaceutical work is moving towards automated systems - make a few hundred variations of compound X and test all of them against whatever it is you're trying to kill/catalyze/etc. T
Nobody is arguing that serendipity has no place in science. What is important in this rare case is, however, having the faculties to observe and identify a phenomenon as such. This is what is being automated.
As for motivation - I don't remember *any* 8-12 year olds that were meaningfully motivated by eventual wealth
You still misunderstand the motivation problem. Most children don't understand money precisely, but they can "read" the attitudes of their parents and peers, and make conclusion about what is desirable or not.
we don't need to worry too much about rigor, focusing on that makes the subject complicated and dull
What makes the "subject dull" is the hard work required to gain understanding. If you deprive the children of that, you deprive them of the emotional understanding of what science is. Incidentally, this is what modern school is doing, and why it is failing.
we don't have to teach kids how to do science, every single one of us does it naturally at a near-optimal level long before we can talk.
This is a very tall order to claim. Figuring out how to use limbs, learning a language as a child, etc. has nothing to do with doing science. Every animal can do something similar, and the mechanism is mostly trial and error, not the scientific method.
The human brain may have the propensity to do science even at a very young age, but the faculties needed for science are learned, they don't come with your genetics. You can learn how to catch a falling ball, true, but there is a very, very large difference between learning to catch a ball and actually explaining the nature of the motion of the same falling ball.
I'm curious what research is claiming that people are natural-born scientists, care to provide a link?.
but very few personality types are significantly motivated by hypothetical rewards years in the future
I think you have a very narrow view of motivation. Motivation is created not only in the particular science class, but by the environment in which the pupils live and grow up, and it seems to me that in the past 30 years the appeal of science has gone down significantly within the society as a whole. People care about making money, not about making discoveries. Can't monetize your research? Well, you are not as smart as the Google founders. This is the motivation problem.
Actually, I zink you've hit ze nail on ze head. For a zuccessful zientific education, ze pupil must be pozzessed by a strong desire to learn, so zat he can zuffer zrough ze pains of scientific learning. Create zis emotional link to ze science, and you're 3/4 done as a teacher.
And the motivation you describe may work for many, even if it is modified to "only use other people's inventions oppress one's wife, kids and the ants and squirrels in one's yard".
It is obvious that you come from an environment, where scientific background is the norm. It is not like that everywhere.
science classes generally make no attempt to teach science, just scientific knowledge
I don't really see the difference between "science" and "scientific knowledge", but even assuming that you mean that kids should only be taught what is commonly referred to as "critical thinking skills" and the "scientific method", and then let on their own to "discover" the world by themselves, you still don't address the issue of motivation.
Even if the motivation was present, just applying your formula is not enough. The scientific method definition is simple, but applying it in practice is very tricky, and even learning the basic toolkit of math and statistics needed to use it effectively requires substantial effort. Learning how to apply it in the real world is even tougher. Considering that most people in school have trouble dealing with basic trigonometry, I don't think your approach will be more fruitful than the standard education.
Finally, your notion that over the course of several experiment a class of students can reach a "consensus" of any confidence on the way the world works is naive to the utmost. Without understanding the "scientific knowledge" behind them, most experiments that are needed to teach you about modern science in sufficient depth will seem mysterious to most kids that have only been exposed to the basic methodology. That is, the kids will just passively watch what is going on, or fulfill a recipe and try to be done with it quickly, not learning much from it.
No, sir, you're wrong, and science is hard precisely because it requires a non-trivial amount of work to build in your head a framework that will allow you to approach the world in the manner you describe. You're not putting the horse behind the cart, you're putting it way behind.
It is the same everywhere. I grew up in a rabidly atheist country, where rejecting religion was the norm, science was lauded at every opportunity and scientific education was (and still is, nominally) the norm in school. Guess what, you can observe the same lack of interest and ignorance.
When it comes to attitude towards modern science, three types of people develop:
- people who don't care (oh, I learned in school and I forgot about it)
- people who turn passively or rabidly superstitious (range is from "you must drink iodine in Europe to prevent radiation poisoning from Fukushima" to "GE should be banned forever")
- people who think they know all about "science" ("yes, I've studied 5 years of physics and I can tell you that HAARP concentrates solar energy by opening a hole in the atmosphere and causing changes in the Young modulus of the crust, which triggers earthquakes")
Sadly, most of the science teachers in schools gravitate towards the third group.
I guess there are two trends that collide to this sad outcome. One is, as I said above, the complexity and hardness of it all. The other is that politicians in modern democracies dislike educated population. Add to this the lack of motivation from a powerful adversary in the past 20 years or so, and the picture is really bad.
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
Not where I live. When it rains, it only makes them more vicious. And the hotter/wetter it gets, the worse they are. It is unbelievable, they fly in packs of five, four lift the blanket by the edges, one sucks. Then they change.
Two problems with that theory - a supernova close enough to cause a radiation spike would probably still be visible by the time the Sun moved out of the way, and in 775 someone would have noticed it. Even if it was far enough so it wasn't, the remains would still be very obvious -- it ought to have been much closer than the Crab Nebula remnant (6.5k light years, assploded in 1050 or 1060), and even I have seen that.
Over the years, the social contract between publishers and the society that has created the copyright monopoly has been abused to such extent, and has created such disproportionate amount of wealth for the few lawyers that run the business, that it is hard to see how they are going to accept a scheme that potentially cuts deep not only in their revenues, but in the justification of the existence of copyrights in their present form.
There are a ton of apps that do navigation and support offline maps, including OSM. I've been using one paid (Locus, Android) and one or two free ones (Androad being the best, obviously Android) with no issues at all. I admit that OSM is prety bad in poorer countries, but in the "developed" world and most of the former socialist countries, OSM is at least as good as any other offline map, and sometimes much better.
The motives are obvious, the critique is not very specific, everyone who is using OSM does realize their limitations, and anyone who is using mapping software and gets in trouble because they prioritize the mapping data over what they can see with their own eyes should not be on the road anyway.
Too bad for Tomtom, but they stopped to be relevant quite a few years ago.
Labeling food as GE if it is, indeed, GE, is no FUD campaign, it is providing the customer with useful information. The customer has a right to know what they are buying, and if the companies have qualms about labeling their product, they should feel free not to sell it. Food is labeled for all sort of reasons, from safety to cultural and religious preferences of the consumer. Neither Halal, nor Kosher, nor manufactured additives labels have broken the food industry. GE labels won't break it either.
Those your Internets, along with the www potocols are both result of public spending, and without their relatively patent-unencumbered existence, we've seen a lot less of Facebooks. Who knows i we'd have the microprocessor industry if there was no military need for computing and government money to research it. I'll go out even further on a limb and say that US would not have seen the affluence it has enjoyed, if the Roosevelt government hasn't played its cards so well during the WWII. And without this affluence you would not have seen the valuations FB enjoys. And so on.
You should grow up and come back to reality some day.
And if I were American, I'd feel quite offended by this kind of attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
"Natural resources" is not the same thing as fossil fuels. We are running out of more stuff than just fossil fuels - metals, minerals, farmland and, not in the last place, wilderness.
In any event, this doom and gloom is pointless. We're not at an "irreversible tipping point". If we can "accidentally" fuck up the earth within a few decades, we can certainly fix it if we are actually trying.
Really? What makes you think so? What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago? To the deforestation of Europe? To the desertification of many places in the world today? To the thousands of species of plants and animals that become extinct every yeaer? We have not fixed anything, we have, in some small circumstances, begun destroying less, but that has made practically no change in the general trend.
If we wanted to invest the money, we could have colonies on mars, and terraforming it within a generation. But we don't want to invest the money.
Wishful thinking. We don't have anything that would allow us to even approach the question of terraforming. Asking for "investing" is fine, how about a back-of-the envelope calculation of what kind of money are we talking about?
We're only at a "tipping point" if we assume that we won't do anything to change our behavior, ever. And I don't see that as likely.
We're at a tipping point, because very soon there won't be enough biosphere left for it to be able to sustain itself, and us. Once most wildlife is gone because we eat up its habitat to build, farm, produce natural gas, grow biofuel or whatever, it isn't coming back. And there is no indication that we're about to change our behaviour as a species. We will eat until we drown in our own excrement.
It seems? How does it seem? There are no working thorium reactors in the wild that can recover their costs of operation. And no, I don't know how this "cloning" thing is going to help with biodiversity. Species are disappearing at the rate of tens a day. What cloning facility has the capacity to successfully clone tens of a animals a day?
A few did, but at a cost that makes it prohibitive to repeat.
The problem is that there are no "smart solutions" on the horizon to the energy problem, to the global warming problem or to the biodiversity problem. We are also running out of most finite natural resources, and we have no viable replacement options. You can dream all you want about thorium reactors, fusion power plants or asteroid mining, but none of these will be a realistic option for the next two or three generations that are a topic of the article.
The parallels with the English industrial revolution ignore the worldwide plundering that has gone on since then and has brought the world to where we are now. Also, the fact that there is not much left to plunder.
US white population has positive growth rate, there are about 2.4 kids per family. You need 2.1 to stay constant. Also, the party that sets out to reduce populations doesn't need a majority, just a comparative advantage in ability to unleash violence.
Of course, the current situation is almost entirely due to the Western world development, and you have democracy there.
I'm ready to help. If you are too timid, just tell me your name below, and I'll do it for you.
Well, if you choose to describe something in the most generic terms possible, you can find apparent similarities between any two things. Since you want the "statistics" angle, the difference between what science does and what nature does is in the large numbers. Nature wins (or loses) by a brute force approach. Science is seldom done that way.
, intuition excels at ferreting out subtle patterns from incomplete data, while our conscious minds generally do not
Intuition only "works" in simple circumstances when you already have the mental faculties to solve the problem. If you're solving a complex problem, then only careful analysis, based on thorough understanding of what's going on works.
For example, for a few years in the beginning of space age, all landing capsules would burn up. They were made to look like pencils, and come into the atmosphere with the sharp end pointing down. Intuitively, engineers were trying to expose as little as possible of the aircraft to the heat, generated by the friction in the air. The solution of the problem was completely unintuitive. Someone analyzed the problem from a different, theoretical angle, realized the problem is not the heat, but its dissipation. So, he changed the design to the bell-shape we know now, and made the capsule re-enter with the wide end down. It worked.
Gambling is another example. If intuition "worked" like science, nobody would go into a casino, because the odds there are stacked heavily against the player.
example of trial and error in science: much modern chemistry and pharmaceutical work is moving towards automated systems - make a few hundred variations of compound X and test all of them against whatever it is you're trying to kill/catalyze/etc. T
Nobody is arguing that serendipity has no place in science. What is important in this rare case is, however, having the faculties to observe and identify a phenomenon as such. This is what is being automated.
As for motivation - I don't remember *any* 8-12 year olds that were meaningfully motivated by eventual wealth
You still misunderstand the motivation problem. Most children don't understand money precisely, but they can "read" the attitudes of their parents and peers, and make conclusion about what is desirable or not.
we don't need to worry too much about rigor, focusing on that makes the subject complicated and dull
What makes the "subject dull" is the hard work required to gain understanding. If you deprive the children of that, you deprive them of the emotional understanding of what science is. Incidentally, this is what modern school is doing, and why it is failing.
we don't have to teach kids how to do science, every single one of us does it naturally at a near-optimal level long before we can talk.
This is a very tall order to claim. Figuring out how to use limbs, learning a language as a child, etc. has nothing to do with doing science. Every animal can do something similar, and the mechanism is mostly trial and error, not the scientific method.
The human brain may have the propensity to do science even at a very young age, but the faculties needed for science are learned, they don't come with your genetics. You can learn how to catch a falling ball, true, but there is a very, very large difference between learning to catch a ball and actually explaining the nature of the motion of the same falling ball.
I'm curious what research is claiming that people are natural-born scientists, care to provide a link?.
but very few personality types are significantly motivated by hypothetical rewards years in the future
I think you have a very narrow view of motivation. Motivation is created not only in the particular science class, but by the environment in which the pupils live and grow up, and it seems to me that in the past 30 years the appeal of science has gone down significantly within the society as a whole. People care about making money, not about making discoveries. Can't monetize your research? Well, you are not as smart as the Google founders. This is the motivation problem.
Actually, I zink you've hit ze nail on ze head. For a zuccessful zientific education, ze pupil must be pozzessed by a strong desire to learn, so zat he can zuffer zrough ze pains of scientific learning. Create zis emotional link to ze science, and you're 3/4 done as a teacher.
And the motivation you describe may work for many, even if it is modified to "only use other people's inventions oppress one's wife, kids and the ants and squirrels in one's yard".
It is obvious that you come from an environment, where scientific background is the norm. It is not like that everywhere.
science classes generally make no attempt to teach science, just scientific knowledge
I don't really see the difference between "science" and "scientific knowledge", but even assuming that you mean that kids should only be taught what is commonly referred to as "critical thinking skills" and the "scientific method", and then let on their own to "discover" the world by themselves, you still don't address the issue of motivation.
Even if the motivation was present, just applying your formula is not enough. The scientific method definition is simple, but applying it in practice is very tricky, and even learning the basic toolkit of math and statistics needed to use it effectively requires substantial effort. Learning how to apply it in the real world is even tougher. Considering that most people in school have trouble dealing with basic trigonometry, I don't think your approach will be more fruitful than the standard education.
Finally, your notion that over the course of several experiment a class of students can reach a "consensus" of any confidence on the way the world works is naive to the utmost. Without understanding the "scientific knowledge" behind them, most experiments that are needed to teach you about modern science in sufficient depth will seem mysterious to most kids that have only been exposed to the basic methodology. That is, the kids will just passively watch what is going on, or fulfill a recipe and try to be done with it quickly, not learning much from it.
No, sir, you're wrong, and science is hard precisely because it requires a non-trivial amount of work to build in your head a framework that will allow you to approach the world in the manner you describe. You're not putting the horse behind the cart, you're putting it way behind.
When it comes to attitude towards modern science, three types of people develop:
Sadly, most of the science teachers in schools gravitate towards the third group.
I guess there are two trends that collide to this sad outcome. One is, as I said above, the complexity and hardness of it all. The other is that politicians in modern democracies dislike educated population. Add to this the lack of motivation from a powerful adversary in the past 20 years or so, and the picture is really bad.
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
Joke's on you, I've been spamming people from your cgi script since 2002.
So 'payload' means bomb? Since when?
Since the Bulgarians invented aerial bombardment, I suppose.
If you really don't want it captured by the Iranians you could simply not fly it over Iran.
Not where I live. When it rains, it only makes them more vicious. And the hotter/wetter it gets, the worse they are. It is unbelievable, they fly in packs of five, four lift the blanket by the edges, one sucks. Then they change.
Two problems with that theory - a supernova close enough to cause a radiation spike would probably still be visible by the time the Sun moved out of the way, and in 775 someone would have noticed it. Even if it was far enough so it wasn't, the remains would still be very obvious -- it ought to have been much closer than the Crab Nebula remnant (6.5k light years, assploded in 1050 or 1060), and even I have seen that.
Over the years, the social contract between publishers and the society that has created the copyright monopoly has been abused to such extent, and has created such disproportionate amount of wealth for the few lawyers that run the business, that it is hard to see how they are going to accept a scheme that potentially cuts deep not only in their revenues, but in the justification of the existence of copyrights in their present form.
There are a ton of apps that do navigation and support offline maps, including OSM. I've been using one paid (Locus, Android) and one or two free ones (Androad being the best, obviously Android) with no issues at all. I admit that OSM is prety bad in poorer countries, but in the "developed" world and most of the former socialist countries, OSM is at least as good as any other offline map, and sometimes much better.
The motives are obvious, the critique is not very specific, everyone who is using OSM does realize their limitations, and anyone who is using mapping software and gets in trouble because they prioritize the mapping data over what they can see with their own eyes should not be on the road anyway.
Too bad for Tomtom, but they stopped to be relevant quite a few years ago.
Labeling food as GE if it is, indeed, GE, is no FUD campaign, it is providing the customer with useful information. The customer has a right to know what they are buying, and if the companies have qualms about labeling their product, they should feel free not to sell it. Food is labeled for all sort of reasons, from safety to cultural and religious preferences of the consumer. Neither Halal, nor Kosher, nor manufactured additives labels have broken the food industry. GE labels won't break it either.
Bread needs only flour, salt and water. you can usually get the yeast and bacteria to raise it from your environment.
Those your Internets, along with the www potocols are both result of public spending, and without their relatively patent-unencumbered existence, we've seen a lot less of Facebooks. Who knows i we'd have the microprocessor industry if there was no military need for computing and government money to research it. I'll go out even further on a limb and say that US would not have seen the affluence it has enjoyed, if the Roosevelt government hasn't played its cards so well during the WWII. And without this affluence you would not have seen the valuations FB enjoys. And so on.
You should grow up and come back to reality some day.
And if I were American, I'd feel quite offended by this kind of attitude.
Haven't you seen the documentary yet, they are selling first row tickets right now, for 1.5 billion euros each, inflation indexed.