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The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. And don't think the future will be much different.
You know, cultural relativism is all well and good, but I think raping 9 year old girls is a good place to draw the line between "thats just their culture" and "what the fuck, someone shoot this asshole."
Does the hammer know why it hammers? No, and even the carpenter only sees the plans put in front of them. Even the architect only sees a piece of the whole. You can build a building and the only person who ever needs to know what it is really for is you.
I know you'll try to attack specifics in my analogy, because thats what people do, but try and see past it to the meaning that is encoded inside it. Or maybe you'll laugh it off, because surely those with power would never put plans in place to expand, protect, and propegate that power. And surely they would never take risks to that power. Nope. Nothing to see. Make a tin foil hat joke and move on.
The best part is, the joke isn't on you. Its on everyone.
Who is more wretched than the man who toils unthanked and unnoticed in the street to keep the rich men in their palaces?
Dyson may not be climatologist, but he has earned the right to be critical of other scientists. He's got the credentials to know when an issue is being driven by more by politics rather than by science.
I hope it is evident to others how intellectually dishonest and blatantly contradictory your assertions are. You come right out and say that the man has no qualifications to speak as to the credibility of climate science, but then say he does anyway because you say so. This issue wasn't political until the Republican party seized on it as part of their longstanding war on science and rational thought, a movement directly motivated by their desire to keep people ignorant, divided, and more easily controlled. People like yourself.
As far as your actualy point, just because you've shown that you can do science in one field does not mean that you have the knowledge, expertise, or experience to do so with any real meaning. Being good at physics does not qualify you to speak with authority or credibility about the details of climate science. To say otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand what science is and how it works. So far, almost every post I've read in this discussion that supports Dyson's position has done so based on appeal to authority, but only based on authority in an unrelated subject. Somewhere in this thread a poster used the example along the lines of asking a car mechanic to perform dental surgery on you, because hey both of those guys are professionals and they both use tools, right?
I like to think of myself as a "have a little more than I need to live comfortably." My ultimate goal is to maintain, for as long as possible, my ability to live happily while at the same time leaving the planet a better place when I die than when I was born. Practically this means continuing with my work and studies in my chosen field while playing video games and having lots of stimulating discussion and enjoyable sex with my significant other. Anyone who threatens that by being a lazy minded willfully ignorant twit who likes to advocate against someone based solely on some sort of idiotic tribalist definition of "the other" deserves as much scorn and ridicule as I feel I can spare the time for. After all, a vital part of a functioning marketplace of ideas is the active scorn and derision of those who fail to argue in good faith. Like global warming deniers and anyone who uses the word "Liberal" as a pejorative.
I think my personal favorite is going to be the sea level rise. One thing people haven't given much thought to is the combination of, say, 1-2 feet of sea level rise with a hurricane storm surge.
Storm surge is, historically, the biggest cause of death in hurricanes (though in the past 30 years the balance is shifting toward inland flooding due to better land use regulation and increased construction of sea walls and other similar efforts). When you add two feet to a 20 foot storm surge, the amount of destruction you'll see won't increase in a linear fashion. With the more frequent and more powerful storms we're already seeing (Katrina, Rita, Ike), you add a few feet to those storm surges and the levees that are barely holding now are going to be overtopped. Once you overtop a leveee they'll often quickly fail as the water flow creates turbulence and pressure dynamics that can't be survived.
Katrina was just a preview kids. Stay seated for the feature presentation.
While I could't think less of his daughter (hi Estie!) I couldn't think more of Freeman. And if you look at the times he's been wrong before (oh, there aren't any) and think about what he says in terms of the context of actual life dynamics you'll see he's not wrong this time.
This doesn't mean we should be free to pollute but as pointed out in Jurassic Park "life finds a way".
Why do so many people think that knowing a lot and being really good with one field of science in any way qualifies you to speak with credability about another field of science?
You lack the ability to properly judge the credability of a claim at a fundamental level. You are what is called "credulous." You believe something because 1) it agrees with your current opinion and 2) because the person making the claim is respected, even if they aren't respected in relation to the claim they're making.
Strip the name Freeman Dyson off the article and see if it is worthy based solely on the claims made and arguments presented. If you can't manage to do that, you should immidiately stop voting and sterilize yourself.
Bravo Freeman! It's about time a scientist of this stature declared that the emperor has no clothes. This is an issue that has NOT been driven by science, but driven by control freaks in government and fearmongers in the press.
Paris Hilton is even MORE famous than Freeman Dyson, knows just as much about climate change, and is therefore, by your measure, even more qualified to criticize climate science. Or physics too for that matter.
...and human-caused, Dyson has far more credibility with me than Gore does.
All you've done here is publicly advertise your lack of judgement. Thanks for pointing out you have a big blind spot in your ability to rationally think.
Al Gore has been studying and working on climate issues for decades, and consults with some of the most respected scientists in the field. He is a spokesman, but one who knows his stuff. His critics are generally anti-intellectuals who oppose him because he's been declared "the other" by the leaders of their tribe, and in order to curry favor and rise within the ranks of that tribe they must at least give lip service to hating "the other."
It would be sad if it wasn't threatening human civilization.
And yes, most likely some people will survive. But civilization, everything that billions of people have fought and bled and sweat and died for, will not.
But then, I guess thats what the denier tribe wants. They want everything to be clear cut, black and white, us and them, WBush vs Algore, whatever. Its fucking pathetic and if we continue to coddle these idiots we're going to let them drag us all down with them.
The preacher pulls out a cross and begins praying and then replies, "If God had wanted you to know he would have put the answer in the bible. Some things Man was not meant to know."
One time, I was driving from Texas to Florida, it was the middle of the night, and we were somewhere deep in the dark swamps of Louisiana. This was before MP3 players and I didn't have a CD player in my car, and all I could find on the FM dial was country music, so I was running a scan on the AM band when I heard someone talking. Starved for entertainment after hours in the car, I tuned in to hear this preacher talking about evolution.
So I start listening to this guy talk about how evolution was a bunch of crap because of the Bible and all the usual stuff, and then he gets all serious for a minute and he's starts telling his listeners that not only does the bible disprove evolution, but so do SCIENTISTS!
Yes, thats right, all kinds of famous SCIENTISTS think evolution is just wrong! These are highly regarded, credible SCIENTISTS! He then starts naming names.
My response, naturally, was to laugh uncontrolably as he starts running down a list including such legendary biologists as Sigmund Frued, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Galileo, and a whole raft of other people, many of whom were born and died before Darwin and none of whom were biologists. Not even one.
This is just that again. An appeal based on the credability of a SCIENTIST that is inherently a fallacy because there are different types of SCIENTIST, and specialization in one field has nothing to do with competence in another.
Al Gore, through virtue of reading and studying the subject for decades, knows more about climate science and is vastly more qualified to talk about it than Freeman Dyson. This whole thing is just more propaganda from climate change deniers who, I am beggining to suspect, are having their puppet strings pulled by some seriously malthusian ultra-rich people who think the planet would be nicer if it didn't have quite so many messy people on it.
Its all about control and taxation. Taking from the haves and giving it to HAVE NOTS by force. SUN SPOT cycles have more control over our environment than all humans combined. The Earth has had COLD and WARM cycles centuries before the SUV was created.
I know that thinking is hard, but can you please come up with some new lies to support your incorrect assertions? Re-using the ones we've already debunked is just lazy trolling.
We've killed God around here so people need some fiction to replace it. The people around here, for instance, have global warming. (And when that's not enough, someone always starts up a conversation about superior programming styles or paradigms, which is far more religious than any tent revival I've ever seen.)
For sufficiently secular values of the world religious, yes.
Well, the one thing you can take as given is that you can replicate all of the computing ability of a human brain in a box that is less than 1.5 feet cubed.
It's a nitpicky point, of course, but the whole point of many of the Asimov robot books was how poorly those laws held up in reality. I, for one, wouldn't trust any 3-laws robot for anything.
In fact, if you read the foundation novels too you'll see that ultimately even a modified 3 laws with the additional 0th law was a failure, and ended up doing a lot of damage to humanity in the long term.
Not to mention the fleet of robot warships they sent out into the galaxy to destroy every alien civilization and pulverize every planet down, what was it, 20 feet? I especially like how he called it "tilling."
Southern culture is just as strong as military culture. When Dad is being draggged out of his house because of his gun collection and a bunch of yankee fucks are groping mom and little sis, do you really think Johnny Reb is going to stay on station in Seattle, or is he going to get his buddies together, say "fuck this, the south is rising again, blah blah dixie blah blah states rights" and drive his tank him to blow up the motherfuckers who are screwing with his family?
In the case of 2nd ammendment issues specifically, if the government attacks the people, the people doing the attacking are extremely likely to be related to those they are shooting at.
While some will be ok with this, it only takes a few guys with SAWs to open fire on their own units before things go completely crazy.
Two things you have to answer, though, are the questions of culture and scale. From your comment I take it you are Polish. I can understand, then, your perspective, but you simply can't fathom just what its like here in the American south. Southern states, who produce a large amount of military people, are the ones most steeped in 2nd ammendment culture. While the soldiers we have here are just as, if not more, indoctrinated and reprogrammed as they are elsewhere, what you have to keep in mind is that for the average 19-21 year old soldier from the south, the 1-3 years of military conditioning has to compete with 18 years of conditioning from their parents and peers. A huge portion of these soldiers, if they saw the government confiscating guns or attacking gun owners on a large scale, would end up on the side of the gun owners. As to your point on the torture scandal, you have a different situation there. Most of the guards at places like Abu Gahrab were national guard and reserves, and they were in a highly isolated area with only their superior officers (who were handing down the orders to do the atrocities) to watch over them.
Just as a communist revolution couldn't take hold in the US, even during the worst years of the depression, the idea that a fight between the american government and its people would be a one sided mudhole stomp just doesn't work in the context of American politics and culture.
The rich people realize this, which is why instead of making themselves obvious royalty, as the rich in Europe did, they simply take their wealth and go live off by themselves in private enclaves, so that the little people can maintain the illusion that they aren't serfs.
Slashdot Mirror
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. And don't think the future will be much different.
You know, cultural relativism is all well and good, but I think raping 9 year old girls is a good place to draw the line between "thats just their culture" and "what the fuck, someone shoot this asshole."
Does the hammer know why it hammers? No, and even the carpenter only sees the plans put in front of them. Even the architect only sees a piece of the whole. You can build a building and the only person who ever needs to know what it is really for is you.
I know you'll try to attack specifics in my analogy, because thats what people do, but try and see past it to the meaning that is encoded inside it. Or maybe you'll laugh it off, because surely those with power would never put plans in place to expand, protect, and propegate that power. And surely they would never take risks to that power. Nope. Nothing to see. Make a tin foil hat joke and move on.
The best part is, the joke isn't on you. Its on everyone.
Who is more wretched than the man who toils unthanked and unnoticed in the street to keep the rich men in their palaces?
Dyson may not be climatologist, but he has earned the right to be critical of other scientists. He's got the credentials to know when an issue is being driven by more by politics rather than by science.
I hope it is evident to others how intellectually dishonest and blatantly contradictory your assertions are. You come right out and say that the man has no qualifications to speak as to the credibility of climate science, but then say he does anyway because you say so. This issue wasn't political until the Republican party seized on it as part of their longstanding war on science and rational thought, a movement directly motivated by their desire to keep people ignorant, divided, and more easily controlled. People like yourself.
Damn it, I always get credibility wrong.
As far as your actualy point, just because you've shown that you can do science in one field does not mean that you have the knowledge, expertise, or experience to do so with any real meaning. Being good at physics does not qualify you to speak with authority or credibility about the details of climate science. To say otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand what science is and how it works. So far, almost every post I've read in this discussion that supports Dyson's position has done so based on appeal to authority, but only based on authority in an unrelated subject. Somewhere in this thread a poster used the example along the lines of asking a car mechanic to perform dental surgery on you, because hey both of those guys are professionals and they both use tools, right?
I like to think of myself as a "have a little more than I need to live comfortably." My ultimate goal is to maintain, for as long as possible, my ability to live happily while at the same time leaving the planet a better place when I die than when I was born. Practically this means continuing with my work and studies in my chosen field while playing video games and having lots of stimulating discussion and enjoyable sex with my significant other. Anyone who threatens that by being a lazy minded willfully ignorant twit who likes to advocate against someone based solely on some sort of idiotic tribalist definition of "the other" deserves as much scorn and ridicule as I feel I can spare the time for. After all, a vital part of a functioning marketplace of ideas is the active scorn and derision of those who fail to argue in good faith. Like global warming deniers and anyone who uses the word "Liberal" as a pejorative.
I think my personal favorite is going to be the sea level rise. One thing people haven't given much thought to is the combination of, say, 1-2 feet of sea level rise with a hurricane storm surge.
Storm surge is, historically, the biggest cause of death in hurricanes (though in the past 30 years the balance is shifting toward inland flooding due to better land use regulation and increased construction of sea walls and other similar efforts). When you add two feet to a 20 foot storm surge, the amount of destruction you'll see won't increase in a linear fashion. With the more frequent and more powerful storms we're already seeing (Katrina, Rita, Ike), you add a few feet to those storm surges and the levees that are barely holding now are going to be overtopped. Once you overtop a leveee they'll often quickly fail as the water flow creates turbulence and pressure dynamics that can't be survived.
Katrina was just a preview kids. Stay seated for the feature presentation.
While I could't think less of his daughter (hi Estie!) I couldn't think more of Freeman. And if you look at the times he's been wrong before (oh, there aren't any) and think about what he says in terms of the context of actual life dynamics you'll see he's not wrong this time.
This doesn't mean we should be free to pollute but as pointed out in Jurassic Park "life finds a way".
Why do so many people think that knowing a lot and being really good with one field of science in any way qualifies you to speak with credability about another field of science?
You lack the ability to properly judge the credability of a claim at a fundamental level. You are what is called "credulous." You believe something because 1) it agrees with your current opinion and 2) because the person making the claim is respected, even if they aren't respected in relation to the claim they're making.
Strip the name Freeman Dyson off the article and see if it is worthy based solely on the claims made and arguments presented. If you can't manage to do that, you should immidiately stop voting and sterilize yourself.
Bravo Freeman! It's about time a scientist of this stature declared that the emperor has no clothes. This is an issue that has NOT been driven by science, but driven by control freaks in government and fearmongers in the press.
Paris Hilton is even MORE famous than Freeman Dyson, knows just as much about climate change, and is therefore, by your measure, even more qualified to criticize climate science. Or physics too for that matter.
...and human-caused, Dyson has far more credibility with me than Gore does.
All you've done here is publicly advertise your lack of judgement. Thanks for pointing out you have a big blind spot in your ability to rationally think.
Al Gore has been studying and working on climate issues for decades, and consults with some of the most respected scientists in the field. He is a spokesman, but one who knows his stuff. His critics are generally anti-intellectuals who oppose him because he's been declared "the other" by the leaders of their tribe, and in order to curry favor and rise within the ranks of that tribe they must at least give lip service to hating "the other."
It would be sad if it wasn't threatening human civilization.
And yes, most likely some people will survive. But civilization, everything that billions of people have fought and bled and sweat and died for, will not.
But then, I guess thats what the denier tribe wants. They want everything to be clear cut, black and white, us and them, WBush vs Algore, whatever. Its fucking pathetic and if we continue to coddle these idiots we're going to let them drag us all down with them.
The preacher pulls out a cross and begins praying and then replies, "If God had wanted you to know he would have put the answer in the bible. Some things Man was not meant to know."
Story time!
One time, I was driving from Texas to Florida, it was the middle of the night, and we were somewhere deep in the dark swamps of Louisiana. This was before MP3 players and I didn't have a CD player in my car, and all I could find on the FM dial was country music, so I was running a scan on the AM band when I heard someone talking. Starved for entertainment after hours in the car, I tuned in to hear this preacher talking about evolution.
So I start listening to this guy talk about how evolution was a bunch of crap because of the Bible and all the usual stuff, and then he gets all serious for a minute and he's starts telling his listeners that not only does the bible disprove evolution, but so do SCIENTISTS!
Yes, thats right, all kinds of famous SCIENTISTS think evolution is just wrong! These are highly regarded, credible SCIENTISTS! He then starts naming names.
My response, naturally, was to laugh uncontrolably as he starts running down a list including such legendary biologists as Sigmund Frued, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Galileo, and a whole raft of other people, many of whom were born and died before Darwin and none of whom were biologists. Not even one.
This is just that again. An appeal based on the credability of a SCIENTIST that is inherently a fallacy because there are different types of SCIENTIST, and specialization in one field has nothing to do with competence in another.
Al Gore, through virtue of reading and studying the subject for decades, knows more about climate science and is vastly more qualified to talk about it than Freeman Dyson. This whole thing is just more propaganda from climate change deniers who, I am beggining to suspect, are having their puppet strings pulled by some seriously malthusian ultra-rich people who think the planet would be nicer if it didn't have quite so many messy people on it.
Its all about control and taxation. Taking from the haves and giving it to HAVE NOTS by force. SUN SPOT cycles have more control over our environment than all humans combined. The Earth has had COLD and WARM cycles centuries before the SUV was created.
I know that thinking is hard, but can you please come up with some new lies to support your incorrect assertions? Re-using the ones we've already debunked is just lazy trolling.
world^word
We've killed God around here so people need some fiction to replace it. The people around here, for instance, have global warming. (And when that's not enough, someone always starts up a conversation about superior programming styles or paradigms, which is far more religious than any tent revival I've ever seen.)
For sufficiently secular values of the world religious, yes.
And you sure as hell don't sit on your ass crying, mourning the end of civilization and your X-box points.
Obligatory "dude you're forgetting, this is slashdotters we're talking about."
If it was 200 light years away you would be dead.
An electron *IS* infinitely small...it has zero ( mathematically zero ) size...its a point particle.
Statements like that are why normal language shouldn't be used to coummunicate physics concepts that exist entirely in the realm of mathmatics.
Not to mention I always felt like this is most likely an artifact of the use of real numbers where integers and fractions would really serve better.
Well, the one thing you can take as given is that you can replicate all of the computing ability of a human brain in a box that is less than 1.5 feet cubed.
A digital system can never perfectly replicate an analog system, and a clock-driven system can never perfectly replicate an asynchronous system.
And real number maths will never have the precision of integer based fractional maths.
Or the first guy who falls in love with an AI and rubs his dick on it, thus giving us the first true clusterfuck.
It's a nitpicky point, of course, but the whole point of many of the Asimov robot books was how poorly those laws held up in reality. I, for one, wouldn't trust any 3-laws robot for anything.
In fact, if you read the foundation novels too you'll see that ultimately even a modified 3 laws with the additional 0th law was a failure, and ended up doing a lot of damage to humanity in the long term.
Not to mention the fleet of robot warships they sent out into the galaxy to destroy every alien civilization and pulverize every planet down, what was it, 20 feet? I especially like how he called it "tilling."
Southern culture is just as strong as military culture. When Dad is being draggged out of his house because of his gun collection and a bunch of yankee fucks are groping mom and little sis, do you really think Johnny Reb is going to stay on station in Seattle, or is he going to get his buddies together, say "fuck this, the south is rising again, blah blah dixie blah blah states rights" and drive his tank him to blow up the motherfuckers who are screwing with his family?
In the case of 2nd ammendment issues specifically, if the government attacks the people, the people doing the attacking are extremely likely to be related to those they are shooting at.
While some will be ok with this, it only takes a few guys with SAWs to open fire on their own units before things go completely crazy.
Two things you have to answer, though, are the questions of culture and scale. From your comment I take it you are Polish. I can understand, then, your perspective, but you simply can't fathom just what its like here in the American south. Southern states, who produce a large amount of military people, are the ones most steeped in 2nd ammendment culture. While the soldiers we have here are just as, if not more, indoctrinated and reprogrammed as they are elsewhere, what you have to keep in mind is that for the average 19-21 year old soldier from the south, the 1-3 years of military conditioning has to compete with 18 years of conditioning from their parents and peers. A huge portion of these soldiers, if they saw the government confiscating guns or attacking gun owners on a large scale, would end up on the side of the gun owners. As to your point on the torture scandal, you have a different situation there. Most of the guards at places like Abu Gahrab were national guard and reserves, and they were in a highly isolated area with only their superior officers (who were handing down the orders to do the atrocities) to watch over them.
Just as a communist revolution couldn't take hold in the US, even during the worst years of the depression, the idea that a fight between the american government and its people would be a one sided mudhole stomp just doesn't work in the context of American politics and culture.
The rich people realize this, which is why instead of making themselves obvious royalty, as the rich in Europe did, they simply take their wealth and go live off by themselves in private enclaves, so that the little people can maintain the illusion that they aren't serfs.
The law in the USA is a complete joke.
You provided your own answer.