"What I can't accept is your assertion that my belief is false, when there is in fact no scientific evidence to support either viewpoint."
It is trivial to show that god is not here.
Just call out and see that there is no answer besides statistical noise.
But then the believers say that god somehow works in more mysterious ways.
You cannot simply call out, that would be too easy, right?
But that is just running away, isn't it?
By now the basic stance of most religious people is that god is there where science cannot see.
It used to be that gods lived on moutains and in clouds.
The problem is of course that science now has a pretty good look of what is around and the only places left for religious people to hide their god is:
A) somewhere beyond quantum mechanics
B) somewhere outside the big bang/universe
C) inside their heads (seems to be your position)
These are all places where science has not illuminated stuff and it is here where concepts of god have to be reduced to.
Don't count on god smiting you down with lightning from his cloud because we know he is not there and that lightning is a natural phenomenon.
God is now mostly a personal experience simply because science cannot read your mind very well and so the concept of your god is safe inside your brain.
Which makes me wonder.
How does this tie in with the upcoming policy change at google?
I mean, if your google blog gets censored, all google services on that account would be aware of that.
Is this new policy change introduced just to ease the work of the censors?
It is increasingly becoming clear that google has no other goals than keeping their pockets filled and mottos like "Do no evil" become meaningless flutter.
"So some fucking cunt can harass fellow photographers over a fucking picture most people won't even see?"
Did you even read the story or the judgement?
It's about one company making a photoshop.
Then another wants to use it for their own brand but doesn't want to pay licensing fees.
Then this second companie goes on to make a somewhat different photoshop that looks a lot like the original just to circumvent paying these fees.
The story has very little to do with everyday fellow photographers.
And it is, in fact, not about photographs.
It is about photoshops and companies using them.
'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.'
'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'
Also, the rest of the article explains most of the things that suck about D3D.
Note the last sentence, according to him D3D does damage to innovation.
So your comment about microsoft providing functionality as demand rises is nonsense.
There is demand, yet no solution from microsoft.
"On the way out, so it's being replaced by....what? Don't pretty much all best selling PC/Xbox games use DirectX?"
On the way out as in game devs dedicating more time to circumvent D3D to achieve new types of visuals.
"Never mind efficiency; MS is efficient, and would provide missing functionality if there's a market demand for it."
dictating a standard != providing missing functionality And microsoft is not a nimble little fairy that magically implements everything gamedevs ever wanted and more, lol.
Besides, it's not about providing missing functionality. It's about their 3D framework being designed for old graphics hardware and system specs at the core. nVidia and AMD have to keep implementing stupid and ridiculous stuff in their drivers to satisfy direct3d while at the same time d3d prevents the full use of modern gpu architecture. That is why we have stuff like CUDA that sidestep the graphics pipeline alltogether and use the GPU in a different way. I mean, you could not do a real time ray tracing thing with D3D, but the GPU wouldn't mind chewing on those calculations. It simply is a very limited api if you care to look at what the hardware is capable of. You can only do games efficiently if they look like D3D
And they know it to. You mention xbox, but on that platform (as on any other console) it becomes essential to circumvent provided apis as much as possible to be able to deliver new experiences. It is impossible to talk to the hadware directly without going through a mile of abstraction layer in D3D. If people would purely use D3D on the 360 then we would see games with worse graphics than a 5 year old pc game. That's because 5 years ago pc hardware was about as powerfull as that of an 360. Surprise surprise, the 360 does way cooler things now graphically than pc games did 5 years ago. Why? Because on the pc it's totaly impractical to optimize around D3D (unless you use newer versions of opengl, and even then). And that is why pc games look way crappier running on a pc then on similar hardware but on consoles.
"Also, DirectX targets the GPU, as I understand it. Games say `needs DirectX 10` or whatever and you get a graphics card with a GPU which also supports it, so I'm not sure what you mean."
Because a cards driver can process D3D things doesn't mean it is limited to D3D or that D3D can realize everything the hardware is capable of. The cards do not process D3D directly, the driver translates D3D to more native commands. Problem is, of course, that the native commands in the driver change depending on the GPU architecture. So the only real use for D3D is hardware abstraction. But i think they have taken it too far and now they are dictating what a card should be capable of instead of providing a real interface to the cards capabilities.
"DirectX rules the gaming world, and doesn't need to add `vital features` as it already has them."
Direct3d is on the way out. The platform is not designed to keep up with the flexibility of modern gpu designs and the increased bandwith between gpu and cpu. There are bits of directx that put gigantic overhead on doing things in other ways than dictated by direct3d.
Very little effort is put into making it future-proof and directx already cannot expose more than 15% (guestimate, in reality propably lower) of a modern GPU's capabilities. That's right, pc gamers have been pissing their moneys away because directx wants things done in a certain way. GPU these days are pretty potent calculators and the directx api is severily limiting what you can do with that power. A direct3d game cannot efficiently do things that directx cannot do, even if the card or the drivers can do much much more fancy things. It's inefficient bloaty overly complex crapware that manages to produce some compatibility. But that means the high end suffers for being limited.
In fact, much harder than YOU think, apparently. The above article states the issue as a volume problem, which is not the case. It is in fact a loudness problem, which is the perception of volume or the energy present in the signal. And the problem with this energy is that we can artificially enhance it by using clever loudness optimization algorithms without affecting the amplitude. This effectively means that for the same volume (amplitude) you get more loudness (energy). So althou the commercials are peaking at the same amplitude as normal material they sound a lot louder. (that besides the practice of just running the commercials at a louder volume than the programs).
Thankfully we can now measure the perceived loudness of a programme and adjust the volume accordingly. And with laws backing this up tv audio will be a little better again.
"I bought a 560 Ti just a month ago and now this? FFFFFFfffffffffff..."
Don't worry. There won't be games that will use you cards full power for at least 2 or 3 years. Current game developers produce art that fits the consoles and PC gamers are stuck with sub-par graphics that run great on 2 year old hardware.
"His deep insight that true chaos devolves from ordered deterministic processes (e.g. cellular automatia) across all of nature is nothing short of astounding."
Then i must be at least as much a genius as he is since this was the first thought i had when i saw CA's for the first time as a teenager... In fact, my thought was that CA's can cover the whole spectrum between order and chaos and chaos was nothing more than very complicated order.
You're incorrect. It would be a collection of muscle cells. Meat is something different. Meat is those cells but then trained for years, drenched in the animals blood, supplemented with the animals fat. Meat is a combination of the cells with other factors and grown in a very specific environment (hint: not a petri dish).
I've seen a program about this some months ago on the dutch telly. The main problem, the scientists claimed, was that it doesn't taste like meat. They are now in a process of trying tomake the cells do a work-out. This involves electrical stimulation of the tissue. A problem with this is that it costs energy and still does not make 'meat'. Another problem is texture. The cells do not arrange themselfs into muscle fibers by themselfs. All they have now is these gelatinous plaques of cells.
So this is nothing like the thing we know as meat. It is just part of meat, but misses most of the noticeable properties.
That's not a good description of the pancake flipping problem. The pancakes are not numbered, they can be in either of 2 states, 0 or 1. So you have a stack like this: [0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
You can sort a stack of n pancakes in at most n times by fliping the stack (starting with the top on) so that its state matches the next one, then include the next one in the stack.
So you get:
[0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]*
[0,0,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0]*
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0]
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]*
If you are alowed to peek at the states of the remaining pancakes without flipping you can leave out the flips with an asterisk.
That's nonsense and only holds if you choose the word in which you express the pattern sufficiently small. The examples you give limit themselfs to just two descripting elements, red and blue. If one were to increase the ammount of available colors to describe the relations there would be no limit. There is a relation between the complexity of a graph and the ammount of information that is needed to describe these relations uniquely.
So all they are saying is that there is a minimum of information needed to describe an arbitrary system.
And there are easier ways to do it. Sample a noise source twice, use one sample as pitch the other with a treshold as a trigger for activating a note. Maybe quantize the pitch to a normal note on a keyboard. In fact, sample the noise for any parameter of expression for the given instrument.
I've done this many times in the past with modular synthesizers, i don't see why this guy should get applauded at TED... Needless to say, mine were way more ugly (and a lot more denser, tho that is a preference) than this guys stuff.
Minecraft is nothing but a big pool of locked-up potential. And the sad thing is that Mojang is not touching it. They realy fail at tapping into it, maybe out of fear, maybe out of lazyness, noone can read the mind of Notch at this point. What i'm afraid of is that Minecraft will be released in it's half-baked form and everything fun (and i mean like 80%-90%) of the fun will have to come from the community. So i'm pretty sure that Mojang should just let it go so the community can finaly make a good game out of it.
"What we need is a nuclear power industry that uses no human modules. Anything short of that is clearly defective by design. "
You propose to move the problem (humans) to a different part of the design. Anything not made by humans is made by something that was made by humans. If that thing was not made by humans then the thing that made it was, etc, etc, etc., In the end, all technology starts with humans and so must be flawed at some point.
Since nature doesn't make ready-to-use nuclear fission reactors it seems we will never get them without human intervention.
"So instead of the FBI going after the fucking banksters they're spending time and money going after a guy who made a valid and reasonable claim about the significance of dead polar bears in the artic."
I beg you to read the stuff Monnett is saying. Nothing is reasonable or scientific about how he dealt with the data. The survey leans on extrapolating what they he describes as the effects of a storm on 3 polar bears onto the whole population of polar bears. Go figure. I mean, it could only be the storm of course and it applies to the whole of the arctic, of course. It's bogus.
Yeah, i don't realy understand why the IG is attacked when clearly the researchers had fantasies about what makes up a scientific research. They extrapolate their 11% surveyed area to 100% of the area while later on they go on to tell us that they think the spotted dead bears were due to a local storm. They based the historical figures on the memory of a retired leader of a group of surveyers (and not the surveyers themselfs) that were looking for whales because the whale records had no place to record dead bears. Nevertheless they conclude that because the whale survey leader didn't recall any occurences of dead bears (which his team was not looking for) there were, in fact, no dead bears at all (as if bears never died). There are so many holes in there that ANY conclusion would be speculation, not science. Just the thought that they used a whooping 7 counts of bears as a basis to extrapolate the total population situation on the whole arctic is mind boggling to me. Monnett showed little critical thinking and sounded more like an activist than an actual scientist, fitting the data to his preconceptions without further thought because, well, it makes sense you know dude. It was a horrible read that gave me the suggestion of blind leading the blind. Agendas, agendas, agendas.
If we could do it with sheep 20 years ago then why would you think that we cannot do it with humans right now? I think that the ONLY barrier is ethics and general denial from the general public. I mean, it's not as if they ask for people with a common genetic illness that they can study and cure. They specifically ask for very smart people to be studied, but what kind of study will this be and how will the results be applied? Cloning a bunch of super-smart people seems certainly like something they may asspire to. And if they do there will be very little in their way.
We now live in a time where we should consider such things very seriously and very carefully. Be prepared to see humanity radically change in the near future.
Another thing that i tripped over is that this tree is (as far as i understand) efficient for the area it is standing on. But it will need much more PV than a flat setup. Since PVs are the main cost of getting electriity from the sun it seems to me that this setup is actually more expensive and less efficient than the same ammount of PV spread over a larger area.
I disagree. It's the science within various disciplines that has become too abstracted and too specialized for most people to even begin developing ideas. This may eventually result in a revolution of some sort as people become more and more disconnected from the development around them. And that is a shame because we are already presented with some social problems that noone seems to get their head around, like the implications of genetig modifications to human beings. Science is increasingly putting humanity in an uncomfortable place and people just avoid it since they can do nothing about the avalanche of development. Meanwhile there is an attack on humanity from the entertainment and other consumerism industries and so everyone has a very good reason to hide behind easy living.
Slashdot Mirror
"What I can't accept is your assertion that my belief is false, when there is in fact no scientific evidence to support either viewpoint." It is trivial to show that god is not here. Just call out and see that there is no answer besides statistical noise. But then the believers say that god somehow works in more mysterious ways. You cannot simply call out, that would be too easy, right? But that is just running away, isn't it? By now the basic stance of most religious people is that god is there where science cannot see. It used to be that gods lived on moutains and in clouds. The problem is of course that science now has a pretty good look of what is around and the only places left for religious people to hide their god is: A) somewhere beyond quantum mechanics B) somewhere outside the big bang/universe C) inside their heads (seems to be your position) These are all places where science has not illuminated stuff and it is here where concepts of god have to be reduced to. Don't count on god smiting you down with lightning from his cloud because we know he is not there and that lightning is a natural phenomenon. God is now mostly a personal experience simply because science cannot read your mind very well and so the concept of your god is safe inside your brain.
Which makes me wonder. How does this tie in with the upcoming policy change at google? I mean, if your google blog gets censored, all google services on that account would be aware of that. Is this new policy change introduced just to ease the work of the censors? It is increasingly becoming clear that google has no other goals than keeping their pockets filled and mottos like "Do no evil" become meaningless flutter.
"So some fucking cunt can harass fellow photographers over a fucking picture most people won't even see?" Did you even read the story or the judgement? It's about one company making a photoshop. Then another wants to use it for their own brand but doesn't want to pay licensing fees. Then this second companie goes on to make a somewhat different photoshop that looks a lot like the original just to circumvent paying these fees. The story has very little to do with everyday fellow photographers. And it is, in fact, not about photographs. It is about photoshops and companies using them.
Here is an interesting quote from AMD's head of GPU developer relations, Richard Huddy :
'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.' 'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'
Also, the rest of the article explains most of the things that suck about D3D.
Note the last sentence, according to him D3D does damage to innovation. So your comment about microsoft providing functionality as demand rises is nonsense. There is demand, yet no solution from microsoft.
"On the way out, so it's being replaced by....what? Don't pretty much all best selling PC/Xbox games use DirectX?"
On the way out as in game devs dedicating more time to circumvent D3D to achieve new types of visuals.
"Never mind efficiency; MS is efficient, and would provide missing functionality if there's a market demand for it."
dictating a standard != providing missing functionality
And microsoft is not a nimble little fairy that magically implements everything gamedevs ever wanted and more, lol.
Besides, it's not about providing missing functionality.
It's about their 3D framework being designed for old graphics hardware and system specs at the core.
nVidia and AMD have to keep implementing stupid and ridiculous stuff in their drivers to satisfy direct3d while at the same time d3d prevents the full use of modern gpu architecture.
That is why we have stuff like CUDA that sidestep the graphics pipeline alltogether and use the GPU in a different way.
I mean, you could not do a real time ray tracing thing with D3D, but the GPU wouldn't mind chewing on those calculations.
It simply is a very limited api if you care to look at what the hardware is capable of.
You can only do games efficiently if they look like D3D
And they know it to.
You mention xbox, but on that platform (as on any other console) it becomes essential to circumvent provided apis as much as possible to be able to deliver new experiences. It is impossible to talk to the hadware directly without going through a mile of abstraction layer in D3D.
If people would purely use D3D on the 360 then we would see games with worse graphics than a 5 year old pc game.
That's because 5 years ago pc hardware was about as powerfull as that of an 360.
Surprise surprise, the 360 does way cooler things now graphically than pc games did 5 years ago.
Why?
Because on the pc it's totaly impractical to optimize around D3D (unless you use newer versions of opengl, and even then).
And that is why pc games look way crappier running on a pc then on similar hardware but on consoles.
"Also, DirectX targets the GPU, as I understand it. Games say `needs DirectX 10` or whatever and you get a graphics card with a GPU which also supports it, so I'm not sure what you mean."
Because a cards driver can process D3D things doesn't mean it is limited to D3D or that D3D can realize everything the hardware is capable of.
The cards do not process D3D directly, the driver translates D3D to more native commands.
Problem is, of course, that the native commands in the driver change depending on the GPU architecture.
So the only real use for D3D is hardware abstraction.
But i think they have taken it too far and now they are dictating what a card should be capable of instead of providing a real interface to the cards capabilities.
"DirectX rules the gaming world, and doesn't need to add `vital features` as it already has them."
Direct3d is on the way out.
The platform is not designed to keep up with the flexibility of modern gpu designs and the increased bandwith between gpu and cpu.
There are bits of directx that put gigantic overhead on doing things in other ways than dictated by direct3d.
Very little effort is put into making it future-proof and directx already cannot expose more than 15% (guestimate, in reality propably lower) of a modern GPU's capabilities.
That's right, pc gamers have been pissing their moneys away because directx wants things done in a certain way.
GPU these days are pretty potent calculators and the directx api is severily limiting what you can do with that power.
A direct3d game cannot efficiently do things that directx cannot do, even if the card or the drivers can do much much more fancy things.
It's inefficient bloaty overly complex crapware that manages to produce some compatibility.
But that means the high end suffers for being limited.
I'm pretty sure it was just a logic burp...
It happens from time to time.
"Easier than you think."
In fact, much harder than YOU think, apparently.
The above article states the issue as a volume problem, which is not the case.
It is in fact a loudness problem, which is the perception of volume or the energy present in the signal.
And the problem with this energy is that we can artificially enhance it by using clever loudness optimization algorithms without affecting the amplitude.
This effectively means that for the same volume (amplitude) you get more loudness (energy).
So althou the commercials are peaking at the same amplitude as normal material they sound a lot louder.
(that besides the practice of just running the commercials at a louder volume than the programs).
Thankfully we can now measure the perceived loudness of a programme and adjust the volume accordingly.
And with laws backing this up tv audio will be a little better again.
Nah,. i say let him make his own internets.
First post1!!! ...
Sorry, i just wanted to participate..
I hope i won't get censored for this...
"I bought a 560 Ti just a month ago and now this? FFFFFFfffffffffff..."
Don't worry.
There won't be games that will use you cards full power for at least 2 or 3 years.
Current game developers produce art that fits the consoles and PC gamers are stuck with sub-par graphics that run great on 2 year old hardware.
It may be expanding, but does the entopy increase?
"His deep insight that true chaos devolves from ordered deterministic processes (e.g. cellular automatia) across all of nature is nothing short of astounding."
Then i must be at least as much a genius as he is since this was the first thought i had when i saw CA's for the first time as a teenager...
In fact, my thought was that CA's can cover the whole spectrum between order and chaos and chaos was nothing more than very complicated order.
You're incorrect.
It would be a collection of muscle cells.
Meat is something different.
Meat is those cells but then trained for years, drenched in the animals blood, supplemented with the animals fat.
Meat is a combination of the cells with other factors and grown in a very specific environment (hint: not a petri dish).
I've seen a program about this some months ago on the dutch telly.
The main problem, the scientists claimed, was that it doesn't taste like meat.
They are now in a process of trying tomake the cells do a work-out.
This involves electrical stimulation of the tissue.
A problem with this is that it costs energy and still does not make 'meat'.
Another problem is texture.
The cells do not arrange themselfs into muscle fibers by themselfs.
All they have now is these gelatinous plaques of cells.
So this is nothing like the thing we know as meat.
It is just part of meat, but misses most of the noticeable properties.
That's not a good description of the pancake flipping problem.
The pancakes are not numbered, they can be in either of 2 states, 0 or 1.
So you have a stack like this: [0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
You can sort a stack of n pancakes in at most n times by fliping the stack (starting with the top on) so that its state matches the next one, then include the next one in the stack.
So you get:
[0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]*
[0,0,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0]*
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0]
[1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0]
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]*
If you are alowed to peek at the states of the remaining pancakes without flipping you can leave out the flips with an asterisk.
That's nonsense and only holds if you choose the word in which you express the pattern sufficiently small.
The examples you give limit themselfs to just two descripting elements, red and blue.
If one were to increase the ammount of available colors to describe the relations there would be no limit.
There is a relation between the complexity of a graph and the ammount of information that is needed to describe these relations uniquely.
So all they are saying is that there is a minimum of information needed to describe an arbitrary system.
And there are easier ways to do it.
Sample a noise source twice, use one sample as pitch the other with a treshold as a trigger for activating a note.
Maybe quantize the pitch to a normal note on a keyboard.
In fact, sample the noise for any parameter of expression for the given instrument.
I've done this many times in the past with modular synthesizers, i don't see why this guy should get applauded at TED...
Needless to say, mine were way more ugly (and a lot more denser, tho that is a preference) than this guys stuff.
Minecraft is nothing but a big pool of locked-up potential.
And the sad thing is that Mojang is not touching it.
They realy fail at tapping into it, maybe out of fear, maybe out of lazyness, noone can read the mind of Notch at this point.
What i'm afraid of is that Minecraft will be released in it's half-baked form and everything fun (and i mean like 80%-90%) of the fun will have to come from the community.
So i'm pretty sure that Mojang should just let it go so the community can finaly make a good game out of it.
"What we need is a nuclear power industry that uses no human modules. Anything short of that is clearly defective by design. "
You propose to move the problem (humans) to a different part of the design.
Anything not made by humans is made by something that was made by humans.
If that thing was not made by humans then the thing that made it was, etc, etc, etc.,
In the end, all technology starts with humans and so must be flawed at some point.
Since nature doesn't make ready-to-use nuclear fission reactors it seems we will never get them without human intervention.
Both sides had an agenda.
The survey should under no circumstances have extrapolated that data to the whole population, for one.
"So instead of the FBI going after the fucking banksters they're spending time and money going after a guy who made a valid and reasonable claim about the significance of dead polar bears in the artic."
I beg you to read the stuff Monnett is saying.
Nothing is reasonable or scientific about how he dealt with the data.
The survey leans on extrapolating what they he describes as the effects of a storm on 3 polar bears onto the whole population of polar bears. Go figure.
I mean, it could only be the storm of course and it applies to the whole of the arctic, of course.
It's bogus.
Yeah, i don't realy understand why the IG is attacked when clearly the researchers had fantasies about what makes up a scientific research.
They extrapolate their 11% surveyed area to 100% of the area while later on they go on to tell us that they think the spotted dead bears were due to a local storm.
They based the historical figures on the memory of a retired leader of a group of surveyers (and not the surveyers themselfs) that were looking for whales because the whale records had no place to record dead bears. Nevertheless they conclude that because the whale survey leader didn't recall any occurences of dead bears (which his team was not looking for) there were, in fact, no dead bears at all (as if bears never died).
There are so many holes in there that ANY conclusion would be speculation, not science.
Just the thought that they used a whooping 7 counts of bears as a basis to extrapolate the total population situation on the whole arctic is mind boggling to me.
Monnett showed little critical thinking and sounded more like an activist than an actual scientist, fitting the data to his preconceptions without further thought because, well, it makes sense you know dude.
It was a horrible read that gave me the suggestion of blind leading the blind.
Agendas, agendas, agendas.
If we could do it with sheep 20 years ago then why would you think that we cannot do it with humans right now?
I think that the ONLY barrier is ethics and general denial from the general public.
I mean, it's not as if they ask for people with a common genetic illness that they can study and cure.
They specifically ask for very smart people to be studied, but what kind of study will this be and how will the results be applied?
Cloning a bunch of super-smart people seems certainly like something they may asspire to.
And if they do there will be very little in their way.
We now live in a time where we should consider such things very seriously and very carefully.
Be prepared to see humanity radically change in the near future.
Another thing that i tripped over is that this tree is (as far as i understand) efficient for the area it is standing on.
But it will need much more PV than a flat setup.
Since PVs are the main cost of getting electriity from the sun it seems to me that this setup is actually more expensive and less efficient than the same ammount of PV spread over a larger area.
I disagree.
It's the science within various disciplines that has become too abstracted and too specialized for most people to even begin developing ideas.
This may eventually result in a revolution of some sort as people become more and more disconnected from the development around them.
And that is a shame because we are already presented with some social problems that noone seems to get their head around, like the implications of genetig modifications to human beings.
Science is increasingly putting humanity in an uncomfortable place and people just avoid it since they can do nothing about the avalanche of development.
Meanwhile there is an attack on humanity from the entertainment and other consumerism industries and so everyone has a very good reason to hide behind easy living.