This reminds me of a news story I saw once, I don't even know if it's true - but it could happen easiy. A man was being sued by his girlfriend because she received vaginal burns from a used condom. Apparently he was in the habit of putting a squirt of Tobasco sauce into them before throwing them away, and she thought that getting pregnant was the best way to get him to marry her.
My first thought was "What kind of a freak puts Tobasco in a condom?". My second thought was "Why doesn't every guy do this?". Given the way courts have been ruling, and the lack of effective (and verifiable) birth control for men, the only way to remain child free is to do every thing in your power to keep your sperm away from women.
Just remember - if the DNA fits (or you've acted like it's yours), it's your responsibility. It doesn't matter if she lied about being on the pill, lied about it being your child, poked a hole in the condom, got a used condom, or you were passed out or having an epileptic seisure.
So maybe we should separate daughters from their fathers at birth.
I don't know about sexual abuse, but biological mothers are more likely to abuse their own children than biological fathers. It's the step-parents and live-in SOs that do most of the damage - and that's when the men outdo the women by a large margin.
So it would make more sense to protect children by preventing men from residing with children that aren't their own, or by stoning women who have had sex with more than one man to death. Yeah, I'll go with number two, doesn't affect me directly and it will "make our children super-duper-ultra secure" (such a good phrase).
we will probably have way more efficient space travel
I think your estimates of rockets and elevators are a bit off. An elevator should be around 2 orders of magnitude (100X) more energy efficient than rockets. A tremendous amount of energy is wasted by rockets carrying their fuel (an elevator could be electric), even more is wasted countering gravity (it has to provide 9.8m/s of acceleration just to keep itself from falling), and even more is wasted just because rockets are very inefficient.
completely useless due to its slow speed and low capacity.
Don't think of it as an elevator, think of it as a vertical train track. It can be scaled up to insane dimentions rather cheaply (so I don't know how it would be low capacity), and speed isn't that important: space tourism as we know it would only be in low earth orbit anyway, that would only take a few hours, launching satellites takes a long time anyway (planning, building the satellite), so three days vs low cost and high reliablity would be worth it, and going farther away is going to take a while anyway, so why worry about three days added to your 18 month Mars mission (especially given that your interplanetary trip is faster because you can start with more fuel in orbit).
What NASA is shooting for is one large investment that would let them launch the equivilant of a shuttle every single day for a fraction of their current shuttle budget, easy access to higher orbits, and what would basically be 2/3-price missions to other planets (and that's ignoring space elevators on other bodies - one for the moon could be built today with Kevlar if we wanted to do so).
Anyway, I have one question for you: Can you give me one realistic technology that would be so cheap, high capacity, and safe that 100 years from now "going to the moon" will sound like "going to Europe" did 100 years ago - other than a space elevator?
First, don't you think that NASA could figure that stuff out on it's own? I mean they have smart people there that study orbital mechanics for a living.
According to the article, the satellite involved would be in geostationary orbit. OK, but the Centre of Mass of the entire system is not. Isn't the centre of mass of the orbiting body what determines the altitude of the orbit?.
The reporter was somewhat incorrect. The center of mass has to be slightly higher than a normal geostationary orbit, but at the same (rotational) velocity. To keep it from drifting into a higher orbit, there's tention on the cable.
I think that the formula is something like T^2= R^3*(4+PI^2)/(G*M)
That's looks right, but that's only true in the absence of the cable. The added force of the cable pulling downward alters its orbit.
How many things could kill off the human race but leave bacteria? An asteroid, nuclear war, alien invasion, Skynet,...
How many things could kill of all bacteria and leave human beings? I'm down to:
A) Humans ascend/upload into computers, leave the Earth, and Earth is swallowed by the sun when it turns into a red giant.
B) A divine being reaches out to us with His Noodly Appendage, and...
If we are counting federal expendatures per square mile, Alaska is getting screwed, not winning the lottery.
This is per capita.
You're right in that straight "taxes vs. spending" stats aren't too informative, but this is a state that pays people to live there! If they're not willing to spend less than 1% of their fund to build the bridge, they probably don't need it that badly. I mean the US is in debt, and they're sitting on cash, why are they begging the rest of us for money?
Just dumping gear on them by the pallet-load, she's a not gunna work. Never has, and can't see why it should mysteriously gain functionality just now.
That completely misses my point. All I was sayting is that helping the (desperately) poor generally means that their population gets larger, because fewer of them die. It doesn't matter whether it's an efficiency improvement or bags of food dumped on them. When you save the life of a poor person, rather than let them die, that means there's going to be one more poor person still alive.
Yes, PP's view is skewed towards "electronics == technology" but that doesn't make your view rational or reasonable either. (-:
Poor as I'm using it means the above referenced definition: people who are unable to support themselves and their families.
And that's the same definition I'm using.
our ancestors were very good at providing for their own needs.
I really don't think they were. And that's the crux of our disagreement - you believe that ancient man was well-off, while I don't. Thus you believe that things are generally going downhill, while I believe the opposite.
That problem is only going to get worse so long as our population keeps growing.
Oddly enough, that's a side effect of doing well. The really poor (like our ancestors) have their population kept in check by disease, starvation, and warfare - and fast reproduction is a necessity. When they gain more control over their lives (usually by becoming wealthier) they first focus on staying alive - the population skyrockets. Only after the "bad old days" are a distant memory, and new interests pop up, do people focus on things other than reproduction and survival.
So, oddly enough, I take the same data as being a good sign. A large part of the world's population has already reached that third stage, where population is stable and life is good. If we can get the rest of the world there, the overpopulation problem solves itself.
I'm a scientist at heart and an engineer by training. I do not make such statements without having a reason to believe them.
Forgive me, but someone who writes "YES!! I just about leapt out of my chair when I read your post - Ahhhhhh it's refreshing to finally see someone who gets it!" doesn't seem to be someone who's writing from a scientific standpoint.
And your bias is so obvious it's suffocating - I never claimed Quinn is a philosopher
You did hold him up as an example - if he doesn't have any more understanding than the average person, then why do that?
And just because someone has an alternative opinion about our culture doesn't mean they hate our culture - that's also just you closing your mind to any idea that is different than the ones you accept.
He is a good example of a person stepping back and critically examining his own culture, and I do admire that, but he does seem to only see the bad and never the good. That doesn't mean I'm closing my mind, I just think he has his own bias - the way you think I have mine.
Youre focussing on the letter of my suggestion, and completely ignoring it's intent.
That's because I agree with your intent (for the most part), but I find the letter of your suggestion quite outlandish.
Copyright law is intended to promote progress in the arts and sciences, its got nothing to do with GE corn, or cats. This isn't a copyright issue.
Patents exist for exactly the same purpose and stem from the same clause in the US Constitution. I thought that making an analogy that would be more accessable to a croud that discusses open source and GPL issues would make things clearer. Sorry if I just muddied the waters. As for the cats, that's an exactly parallel situation, the only difference being the species.
Or do you think that, for example, if some mega-corporation sells you drugs that bind to your DNA, that your kids should be considered their derivative work? Cos i sure don't.
Now you've gone off on a tangent that's only vaguely related to my post. Unless the company is planning to sterilize me or my children, it's irrelevant.
That seems a bit far. That's like saying I can't neuter a cat before I sell it because the person I sell it to, even if they know about the neutering beforehand, and are fine with it, might want to breed it later.
An analogy: It's one thing to keep copyright infringement a civil offence, or limit the period to 5 years, or to just eliminate copyright oughtright. It's something else to suggest that selling dead-tree books should be illigal, because they're harder to copy than digital ones.
all we're doing is moving wealth... around to make some people look wealthier, happier, and others end up being dirt poor.
The reason poor people exist is because the entire human race started out poor, not because what they had was taken from them. And we don't just move wealth around - even sharpening a stick into a spear creates value - you can now feed your family more easily.
We're the equivalent of a mindless drone committing suicide by jumping off a tall building - so long as we are in the air, and we keep flapping our arms, we can fool ourselves into thinking we're flying - until we hit the ground. And we WILL hit the ground, because the universe is a harsh mistress.. and doesn't take kindly to childish races foolishly believing they can live above the laws of life and get away with it.
Of course, you can't back any of this up, because it's just a product of the strong belief that most people have that "the end is near" or "things are just going to get worse" or "this is our peak". People have predicted the end of civilization for as long as there's been civilization, but we're still here. This is just you accepting your intuitions at face value.
Our culture is the descendence of what Daniel Quinn calls Takers...
Interesting stuff, but all it shows is that Quinn dislikes our culture and is willing to interpret everything it does as bad. His stuff doesn't even qualify as philosophy, it's just a rant.
There has been no real progress in human development for nearly ten thousand years
I'll take that as your thesis.
Five billion people live on pennies a day. Just because YOU are comfortable doesn't mean their lives are better.
If we hadn't had signifigant progress in the last hundred years, most of those five billion would be dead. It's rather ironic, but helping the poor means the poor don't die, and that makes society poorer on average and makes it more economically unequal. From the perspective of you statistics, deliberately killing off the third world would be good, because fewer people would be living on pennies a day. In other words, you're lying with stats.
all it will take to bring about the Techno Rapture is a global EMP.
Right, cause that will destory all our knowledge stored on paper, our own memories, and the products of technology themselves (even if they don't work). I think your view is skewed very strongly toward the idea that "computers == technology".
So both the Earth (covered with water) and heaven existed before the big bang? I understand your desire to make your religion compatible with your science, but I think you're trying so hard that it's blinded you to the fact that really aren't compatible.
Now you have the Big Bang theory stated in the first 3 verses of Genesis.
All you've shown is that with enough selective reading, the right assumptions, and a good dose of rationalization, you can shoehorn a religious story into being congruent with current scientific theory.
Great! I have a morally equivilant idea that will make Western countries even more powerful - selective immigration and deportation.
Get the smarter and harder-working people to come to Europe, the US and Canada. At the same time we can ship our lazier or criminally-minded people to the third world. Think about how great the USA would be if we replaced all of our homeless with college grads from India! Low unemployment (ship layabouts to Equadore), low crime (third bust for posession -> free [one way] trip to Mexico), and let's see Iran develop nukes when we bribe all their scientists away and replace them with high-school dropouts.
Think of it! A real, honest-to-God meritocracy! No trust fund babies or welfare queens, nor geniuses without labratories or great artists without brushes. And all we'd have to do is let the government decide who gets to live here, and supress our desire to help people that live on the other side of an imaginary line.
Just to be fair, people that end up receiving assistance aren't starving, because they're getting help. Also, using the word 'nobody' might be an exageration, but 1.5% of the population would be 'almost nobody'.
More to the point, without changing the amount of farmland, etc. currently being used, we could feed everyone quite well and only slightly reduce the amount of meat being produced. In other words the increase in the price of food caused by shifting resources to meat production is small relative to other economic pressures that keep prices up.
You have this notion that there is a progression from "guess" to "hypothesis" to "fact" or "correct hypothesis".
No, I don't. I was just pointing out that science recognizes theories, hypotheses, facts, observations, and so on as relevant groups of ideas, but it has no category called "guesses". A couple of paragraphs down I show the relationship between some of those ideas.
While real-world scientists have their prejudices and preferences and clearly apply them in practice, such distinctions are not part of the scientific method.
What? I have no idea what thought you were trying to convey here, or at least how it relates to the rest of the discussion.
Scientists may sometimes refer to a scientific hypothesis as a "fact"
No, they don't. Facts and hepotheses are separate categories of ideas. The theory of gravity suggests the hypothesis that letting go of a rock will cause it to fall to the ground. When I drop the rock and see it fall, my observation lets me see the fact that the rock fell, confirms the hypothesis, and lends support to the theory.
There are many examples of that, e.g., general relativity and the cause of AIDS.
Both of those theories had supporting evidence at they time they were proposed. Relativity explained a great number of things that had already been observed, and the fact that a specific group of people were getting AIDS symptoms would be explained by an infectious agent. The "goldfish have a three second memory" theory either doesn't explain any existing observation, or the observation can be used as evidence, contradicting your idea that "claims without evidence deserve a hearing".
There simply is no principle in science that specific people always have a "burden of proof".
Not people, theories. Theories with more evidence, or that require fewer assumptions, are favored over those with less evidence, or more assumptions. Your claim, by your own admission, has no evidence, so it is given equal status to all other possible ideas about how goldfish memory works. It has an equal "burden of proof" as an infinite number of other ideas, and this is what we mean by 'dismissing' it.
You're making the same mistake as the other poster
We make the same 'mistakes' because we both have experience with the scientific method.
it's concerned with repeatable experiments and testable predictions, nothing more.
Yes. Make some predictions and do some experiments, and get back to us.
Discriminating against someone "because he's gay" or "because he's short" is NOT the same as "because I don't like him".
Why? You're still making an uninformed judgement based on personal bias.
You seem to think reducing persons to one single aspect of their personality is the same as judging them as a person and deciding you are not on the same wave-length.
You seem to think that when someone just doesn't like someone, and they can't put their finger on why, it's OK to discriminate then. But a minute later when they say "I know what it was, he's a fag!", all of the sudden the discrimination was bad.
reducing an applicant to one aspect... is not only plain stupid and amoral, but also makes zero business sense.
I agree completely, but I still think it should be legal. I think you skipped my Liberal Paradox section - if it's illegal to do everything that's stupid, amoral, or in some other way bad, you can't have any meaningful amount of freedom. Plus, this whole issue seems to revolve around a "money exception" to liberty that quite a few people have. I'd assume that you believe that it's none of the government's business when it comes to choosing friends, dates and so on, but if a dollar changes hands, then anything goes.
A few crackpots believing that HIV does not cause AIDS is not the same as a powerful individual or organization forcing pseudoscience on the masses to support its agenda.
I agree with that, but only in a quantitative sense. The scale of the damage may be different, but the motivation is that same.
Therefore, the correct statement is "you can't prove me wrong, therefore both of our hypotheses remain valid until someone finds experimental data that decides the matter".
No, the correct statement is "if you want your claim to get serious consideration, get some evidence". The only way to deal with the literally infinite number of claims that have no supporting evidence is to essentially ignore them until evidence is found.
That may seem like a logical fallacy to you, but it's the way the scientific method works.
No, it isn't. The scientific method starts out with a hypothesis, which is just an idea that's testable. There's no claim here, just brainstorming - nobody is really suggesting that they know it's right, just that it might possibly be right, as far as they know. After a test has been made, then we have a theory, which would be a valid scientific claim. Now people are actually saying that they have good reason to think that the idea is correct. (Or at least likey to be much less wrong than the others that exist at the time.)
To be more specific, there's no good reason to promote the "goldfish have a three second memory" claim over the "ten second" claim, the "perfect memory for life" claim, or the "goldfish think atemporally, so they don't need a memory" claim. They're all just random guesses, and reason clearly suggests that random guesses should never be treated as facts. And science, as a rational process, has to separate facts and well-supported theory from guesses. In fact, you could define science as a method for turning mere guesses into actual knowledge by testing them.
According to the 1999 World Health Organization (WHO) report,...
It's quite possible that the number of people infected in various areas is in dispute. It's also possible that many purported AIDS cases in poorer countries are the result of misdiagnosis. Neither of which has any bearing on whether or not AIDS is caused by HIV.
As for the rest of your post, most of it is misleading:
HIV-1 and HIV-2 are more genetically similar to SIV strains in monkeys and chimps, respectively, than to each other.
Most strains of SIV don't cause signifigant symptoms in their normal hosts, but in a different host it often results in SAIDS.
SIV and HIV don't normally cross from or to humans because of single mutation in a key protein.
The reasonable conclusion to draw is that humans were protected from SIV strains by their protein difference, a new strain developed that got around that difference, infected a human, and because it's not in its normal host it causes immune difficiancy. Then this happened again with HIV-2.
First, he isn't an expert on anything virus or immune system related. The "RT-PCR Test" only refers to fact that PCR is used to make copies of DNA/RNA in order to make test more accurate and so that small samples can be used - PCR isn't really the test itself, the Reverse Transcriptase to create DNA and the sequences on the container wall are the only truly required parts. Even worse, his only contribution to PCR is that he realized that using a heat resistant polymerase would make the older techniques (where heat destroyed the polymerases then in use) better.
The end result is that you're holding up the inventor of the Pyrex test tube (test tubes having already been invented) as expert on pregnancy, simply because one of the currently used pregnency tests (out of many) is refered to as "The Test-Tube Test".
Second, Kary Mullis is a nutjob. A fullbown global warming is a hoax, CFCs don't deplete the ozone layer, HIV doesn't lead to AIDS, LSD using, UFO abductee nutjob.
How does a RV - essentially a bit of RNA (no cell walls) - attack a white cell? No one understands.
So?
Science does make mistakes like this from time to time.
Yes, it's possible the HIV doesn't cause AIDS. But there's always that "exraordinary claims require extraordiary evidence" issue. The burden is on you, and all you've shown me is one intelligent crackpot and that there are unanswered questions.
I was just pointing out that there are many personal and professional reasons that someone could have that would affect their views on AIDS. As for homophobes, if they can make the argument that AIDS is caused by drug use (as one person on slashdot has suggested) then the gay people are only suffering from their own actions, and don't deserve as much pity/help. If it's really caused by a virus, then they'd have to fall back to the "AIDS is Gods punnishment for homos" and "the Bible says so" arguments to connect homosexuality with evil, which are much weaker.
Again, we don't need every detail. Just an outline would do. Also, most of your books suggest that AIDS is caused by a factor other than HIV. That doesn't make the definition, or anyones argument I've seen, circular.
Slashdot Mirror
My first thought was "What kind of a freak puts Tobasco in a condom?". My second thought was "Why doesn't every guy do this?". Given the way courts have been ruling, and the lack of effective (and verifiable) birth control for men, the only way to remain child free is to do every thing in your power to keep your sperm away from women.
Just remember - if the DNA fits (or you've acted like it's yours), it's your responsibility. It doesn't matter if she lied about being on the pill, lied about it being your child, poked a hole in the condom, got a used condom, or you were passed out or having an epileptic seisure.
Ah, the joys of being a man!
So it would make more sense to protect children by preventing men from residing with children that aren't their own, or by stoning women who have had sex with more than one man to death. Yeah, I'll go with number two, doesn't affect me directly and it will "make our children super-duper-ultra secure" (such a good phrase).
What NASA is shooting for is one large investment that would let them launch the equivilant of a shuttle every single day for a fraction of their current shuttle budget, easy access to higher orbits, and what would basically be 2/3-price missions to other planets (and that's ignoring space elevators on other bodies - one for the moon could be built today with Kevlar if we wanted to do so).
Anyway, I have one question for you: Can you give me one realistic technology that would be so cheap, high capacity, and safe that 100 years from now "going to the moon" will sound like "going to Europe" did 100 years ago - other than a space elevator?
How many things could kill off the human race but leave bacteria? An asteroid, nuclear war, alien invasion, Skynet, ...
How many things could kill of all bacteria and leave human beings? I'm down to: ...
A) Humans ascend/upload into computers, leave the Earth, and Earth is swallowed by the sun when it turns into a red giant.
B) A divine being reaches out to us with His Noodly Appendage, and
You're right in that straight "taxes vs. spending" stats aren't too informative, but this is a state that pays people to live there! If they're not willing to spend less than 1% of their fund to build the bridge, they probably don't need it that badly. I mean the US is in debt, and they're sitting on cash, why are they begging the rest of us for money?
So, oddly enough, I take the same data as being a good sign. A large part of the world's population has already reached that third stage, where population is stable and life is good. If we can get the rest of the world there, the overpopulation problem solves itself.
Forgive me, but someone who writes "YES!! I just about leapt out of my chair when I read your post - Ahhhhhh it's refreshing to finally see someone who gets it!" doesn't seem to be someone who's writing from a scientific standpoint. You did hold him up as an example - if he doesn't have any more understanding than the average person, then why do that? He is a good example of a person stepping back and critically examining his own culture, and I do admire that, but he does seem to only see the bad and never the good. That doesn't mean I'm closing my mind, I just think he has his own bias - the way you think I have mine.An analogy: It's one thing to keep copyright infringement a civil offence, or limit the period to 5 years, or to just eliminate copyright oughtright. It's something else to suggest that selling dead-tree books should be illigal, because they're harder to copy than digital ones.
Get the smarter and harder-working people to come to Europe, the US and Canada. At the same time we can ship our lazier or criminally-minded people to the third world. Think about how great the USA would be if we replaced all of our homeless with college grads from India! Low unemployment (ship layabouts to Equadore), low crime (third bust for posession -> free [one way] trip to Mexico), and let's see Iran develop nukes when we bribe all their scientists away and replace them with high-school dropouts.
Think of it! A real, honest-to-God meritocracy! No trust fund babies or welfare queens, nor geniuses without labratories or great artists without brushes. And all we'd have to do is let the government decide who gets to live here, and supress our desire to help people that live on the other side of an imaginary line.
Such a glorious, Utopian dream![/sarcasm]
More to the point, without changing the amount of farmland, etc. currently being used, we could feed everyone quite well and only slightly reduce the amount of meat being produced. In other words the increase in the price of food caused by shifting resources to meat production is small relative to other economic pressures that keep prices up.
Why? You're still making an uninformed judgement based on personal bias.
You seem to think that when someone just doesn't like someone, and they can't put their finger on why, it's OK to discriminate then. But a minute later when they say "I know what it was, he's a fag!", all of the sudden the discrimination was bad.
I agree completely, but I still think it should be legal. I think you skipped my Liberal Paradox section - if it's illegal to do everything that's stupid, amoral, or in some other way bad, you can't have any meaningful amount of freedom. Plus, this whole issue seems to revolve around a "money exception" to liberty that quite a few people have. I'd assume that you believe that it's none of the government's business when it comes to choosing friends, dates and so on, but if a dollar changes hands, then anything goes.
I'm not the guy you're arguing with, but:
No, the correct statement is "if you want your claim to get serious consideration, get some evidence". The only way to deal with the literally infinite number of claims that have no supporting evidence is to essentially ignore them until evidence is found.
No, it isn't. The scientific method starts out with a hypothesis, which is just an idea that's testable. There's no claim here, just brainstorming - nobody is really suggesting that they know it's right, just that it might possibly be right, as far as they know. After a test has been made, then we have a theory, which would be a valid scientific claim. Now people are actually saying that they have good reason to think that the idea is correct. (Or at least likey to be much less wrong than the others that exist at the time.)
To be more specific, there's no good reason to promote the "goldfish have a three second memory" claim over the "ten second" claim, the "perfect memory for life" claim, or the "goldfish think atemporally, so they don't need a memory" claim. They're all just random guesses, and reason clearly suggests that random guesses should never be treated as facts. And science, as a rational process, has to separate facts and well-supported theory from guesses. In fact, you could define science as a method for turning mere guesses into actual knowledge by testing them.
It's quite possible that the number of people infected in various areas is in dispute. It's also possible that many purported AIDS cases in poorer countries are the result of misdiagnosis. Neither of which has any bearing on whether or not AIDS is caused by HIV.
As for the rest of your post, most of it is misleading:HIV-1 and HIV-2 are more genetically similar to SIV strains in monkeys and chimps, respectively, than to each other.
Most strains of SIV don't cause signifigant symptoms in their normal hosts, but in a different host it often results in SAIDS.
SIV and HIV don't normally cross from or to humans because of single mutation in a key protein.
The reasonable conclusion to draw is that humans were protected from SIV strains by their protein difference, a new strain developed that got around that difference, infected a human, and because it's not in its normal host it causes immune difficiancy. Then this happened again with HIV-2.
The end result is that you're holding up the inventor of the Pyrex test tube (test tubes having already been invented) as expert on pregnancy, simply because one of the currently used pregnency tests (out of many) is refered to as "The Test-Tube Test".
Second, Kary Mullis is a nutjob. A fullbown global warming is a hoax, CFCs don't deplete the ozone layer, HIV doesn't lead to AIDS, LSD using, UFO abductee nutjob.
So? Yes, it's possible the HIV doesn't cause AIDS. But there's always that "exraordinary claims require extraordiary evidence" issue. The burden is on you, and all you've shown me is one intelligent crackpot and that there are unanswered questions.I was just pointing out that there are many personal and professional reasons that someone could have that would affect their views on AIDS. As for homophobes, if they can make the argument that AIDS is caused by drug use (as one person on slashdot has suggested) then the gay people are only suffering from their own actions, and don't deserve as much pity/help. If it's really caused by a virus, then they'd have to fall back to the "AIDS is Gods punnishment for homos" and "the Bible says so" arguments to connect homosexuality with evil, which are much weaker.
Again, we don't need every detail. Just an outline would do. Also, most of your books suggest that AIDS is caused by a factor other than HIV. That doesn't make the definition, or anyones argument I've seen, circular.
If you need a book to show (in brief) how something is a circular argument, your IQ is not 154.