How about creating jobs that also produce a product that is more useful to the entire country?
Are you trying to open up a war about whether the research that results from spaceflight is worth the investment?
My post was poorly worded. I'm all for the government spending a lot of money on space exploration. In fact, I'd like to see the military budget cut in half so that we would have way more money to spend on space while also paying off the national debt. My point was that instead of employing people on crappy space projects (much of Constellation), we should instead employ people in worthwhile, non-dead-end space projects that will efficiently lead to regular people living off-world.
Also, I think that you should have asked what I meant before you flew off the handle over your imagined beliefs about my unclear post.
Art is not about the person VIEWING or EXPERIENCING - it is about the creator.
Fascinating, my first thought was that art is something that evokes emotion in the person meditating upon it. It doesn't even require an artist. If a sunset makes you feel emotions then it is art for you. But maybe by thinking about the sunset in such a way that it makes you feel something, you become the artist? Maybe the professional artists' job is to create things that facilitate an observer's ability to think in ways that evoke emotion?
Perhaps Roger Ebert is so lacking in artistic ability, he can not do the type of thinking required to experience a game as art so for him it isn't art. So what? Or maybe, he is just trying to dump his morality on us--winning is bad? If so, perhaps his criticism is art since it makes me feel like telling him to STFU.
Maybe I don't know what art is, but I feel strongly that video games can be art. I have been moved by World of Warcraft so I feel it is art.
Yes, when did/. turn into Fox News or the National Enquirer? I'm sick of news that titillates the reader's basest emotions in order to sell their rag because the org lacks the competence to sell honest news.
I think you are making at least four faulty assumptions which affect the economics. First, asteroids are not made of one element but many so the supply of new resources would go into multiple markets. Second, harvesting those materials wouldn't be instantaneous, might take decades. Third, the bulk of stuff we could get from an asteroid might be most valuable if kept in space--iron, nickel, hydrocarbons useful for making space habitats that don't have to be hauled up from earth's gravity well. Fourth, whoever mines the asteroids might do what De Beers does with diamonds--sell slowly to keep the prices inflated.
I agree that environment is very important. If the environment would cause a bad trip, working in it will wear on you. I work in an big house that has the feel of a home. Teams more-or-less occupy the same rooms. It makes communication efficient between team members and does foster a sense of community and camaraderie.
On the other hand, too much talking can get really annoying when you're coding. So I wish there were a room dedicated to long conversations--some couches, food, and computers. Personal phone calls and meetings with clients should also take place there.
Also because intense coding uses a lot of working memory which is hard to remember between interruptions, there need to be some rules of etiquette about when it is okay to interrupt. There are few things worse than forgetting the details of a complicated solution because someone interrupted the thought to ask you about an entirely different code module.
I also like well behaved pets in the workplace. Several times it has helped me to talk problems out with someone's dog, and they also help reduce stress.
Usually we all get a say in hiring new employees. That seems to weed out the ones who would ruin the sense of community.
I think the same principles could be applied to a larger company by applying them to a team instead of to the whole company.
If you find a balloon, hide it and talk the people accompanying it into splitting the prize with you. Wait until the locations of the other balloons leaks. Collect prize. If people accompanying it won't play, kidnap them.
Sorry, maybe I did overstate things. This is just a very emotional subject for me as you can probably understand. However, if you read this and other articles like it, can we agree the Prozac fad of the 1990's was overblown?
I took Prozac and other SSRIs. They had absolutely no positive effect on my depression. Instead I got little blistering bumps on my skin that itched like mad and lasted for months and all of the usual sexual side effects. Worse, they gave me a flat affect and occasional visual hallucinations upon waking up in the morning, which got me a misdiagnoses of schizophrenia which lead to me having to drop out of college due to the side effects of the schizophrenia medications (which incidentally did nothing for the flat affect or hallucinations.)
At one point a doctor made me abruptly quit the SSRI I was on. That seemed to lead to the worst depression I have ever experienced. The hallucinations stopped. The doctor put me on a different SSRI.
I ended up gradually weaning myself off of all of the drugs almost a decade ago. I haven't had schizophrenia-like symptoms since. Doctors since then agree I was misdiagnosed and just had an unexpected reaction to SSRIs.
My guess is that SSRIs seem to work mostly due to the placebo effect. Anything beyond the placebo effect is due to some people having just the right kind of depression that can benefit from what SSRIs do. When I quit the SSRIs cold turkey, I believe that rebound depression was of the neurochemical type that SSRIs can successfully treat. In other words, I think there are probably many biological causes of depression and SSRIs only treat one cause. For some, like me, SSRIs just throw our neuro-chemistry way out of wack by overstimulating parts of the seratoninergic neurotransmitter system.
In my opinion, sloppy science or fraud allowed SSRIs to get FDA approval as a treatment for many kinds of depression when it only really treats a subtype of depression. That lead to those drugs being promoted as a panacea for everything from major depression to just not being cheerful all the time. It cost me the education and career and better life I wanted and otherwise would have had. While massaging of data might sound like a faux pas to a non-scientist, it can have tragic consequences.
I think it is time to stop giving special status to delusions such as Scientology and Christianity. In the USA churches are tax exempt. Church businesses should pay a "sin tax," a higher than normal tax rate, the way tobacco is taxed because it too is harmful. It should also be illegal to give children religion just as it is illegal to sell a child a carton of cigarettes to smoke. Many parents actually force children to attend brainwashing events one to three times a week at their local church. That is just plain sick.
Once upon a time I tried LSD. I would say it was the most profound experience of my life. The guy who went down the rabbit hole isn't quite the same guy who came out 12 hours later.
Good changes in no particular order:
Increased self esteem because I saw past all the layers of garbage people told me about me, down to who I really am.
Increased love and empathy for people and all life
A better understanding of what makes people tick
A nice feeling of interconnectedness with the universe
Possible insights into how the brain works
Was horrible at arithmetic but now I can multiply any two three digit numbers in my head.
Many personal psychological insights
Made me much more liberal
I see many sides to issues now rather than just the ones I was conditioned to see.
Improved artistic talent and computer coding abilities
More in touch with my aesthetic sense
Went from atheist to Buddhist atheist.
Curious ability to make myself feel good even when things are going badly. The same ability also seems to get rid of headaches.
Put a lot of childhood abuse behind me
More varied imagination
Not so good stuff:
I have difficulty putting on a persona when the situation (arguably) calls for one. They seem too fake and insincere for me to stomach now.
More awareness of others' psychology which sometimes feels like an invasion of their privacy.
Occasional emotions of being trapped in a tight place... difficult to explain. I think it has something to do with an incomplete rebirth I experienced as the drug was wearing off, got stuck in the birth canal and stayed there while returning to consensual reality. Maybe I should go to Mexico to finish being born again:-)
Overall, I think the world would be a better place if most people tried LSD at least once, providing they spent months of their free time learning all they could about LSD before using it and used it in a safe environment in a responsible way.
I agree that libraries are wonderful places, temples of knowledge, one of the very few things I hold sacred. I love printed books. They are sensuous right down to their spicy scent between their leathery leaves. I have not yet been able to imagine the Internet providing the full sensory experience I get from books. Maybe in time...
However, it pains me that Mr. Bradbury, one of my all time favorite authors, has allowed himself to stop growing. I think it is very likely that some people reading this will never die unless they choose to. Imagine living to be 20,000 years old and hating whatever newfangled things replace the Internet, hating pretty much everything about the world because it has changed and you have not. Human history is tiny, the future potentially vast; why confine yourself to some small region of the past and let history race by you into the future?
I was just listening to something a little old, Alexander Scriabin's 2nd symphony. A month ago, I never even heard of Scriabin. I found him on the Internet and now have his music. I doubt I would have found him at the local library. Now I'm listening to Shpongle which is kind of new (2005) and goes shockingly well with mushroom soup and strolls through mossy eldritch forests as well as with computer programming. I wouldn't have found Shpongle at the library either. This Fall I hope to share my home with an 18 year old college student for the simple reason that she will bring novelty--both modern youth culture and her tribal culture which is completely and wonderfully alien to me. That's how I try to live, always throwing something new into the old brain pan so it never goes empty.
Now if you'll excuse me, my head feels like a Frisbee...
People did play a part in turning me on to science, but I mostly only know those people through books.
In 5th or 6th grade, my reading skills were abysmal because of dyslexia. To motivate me to read more, my teacher got me a "job" at the school library as a librarian's assistant. The librarian directed me to the Thomas Edison biographies and told me that old Tom was said to have had dyslexia too and that I could probably learn to help myself by studying his life. It probably took me a month or two to make it through that first book. Within a year, I had taken up Tom's (alleged) habit of reading a foot of books per week. By then my interests had branched from Edison worship to all things science. (If I ever run into Ms. Tysinger(sp?), the librarian, I'll plant a big kiss on her cheek and buy her dinner.)
Before people became overly obsessed with safety, there were some really good science project books on the shelves. I can't recall any of the titles. They had really interesting projects like how to build your own X-Ray machine, Tesla coils, fireworks, and the like that today might get a kid branded as a terrorist, but would give any red-blooded kid an interest in science. Look for stuff written prior to the 1970's, the older, the better. German authors were especially fun. Some of the science might be a little off, but the projects were a blast.
I also really liked "Cosmos" and other titles by Carl Sagan. Richard Dawkins was after my childhood, but I imagine everything by him would be motivational. Douglas Adams's fiction would be great for kids. Thomas Edison, Einstein, Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alan Turing, Fermi, Marconi, I fell madly in love with all of them.
I guess my father played a small part in my development as a geek. He made sure I got science-related gifts at Xmas, bought my copy of "Cosmos" and I remember him making an electromagnet for me when I was a toddler. He wasn't a scientist though, and I can't remember him discussing mathematical proofs at the dinner table.
"Even if you can not make it impossible for your enemies to obtain a secret, you can still make it harder -- every step of the way. And making it harder for America's enemies (such as Iran and North Korea) to build their own ICBMs is a good goal.
For more, search this site and others for something like 'security is a process'."
Agreed, but you don't go far enough. To protect our freedom and our children, we need to go much further. The government needs to genetically engineer a super-bookworm that can destroy all print information in the world within the next decade. And of course a super-virus/worm/whatever to clog all the Internet's tubes. Private ownership of computers needs to be made illegal. Scientists and engineers need to be shot or enslaved in government labs. The public needs a steady diet of mercury and lead to prevent rediscovery any dangerous knowledge. Only through this process can we truly be free and secure in the loving arms of our beloved big brother.
Get a freaking clue.
Personally, I wish Bush and Cheney would order everyone to march into the sea in the interest of national security, peace, freedom, apple pie and the American way. Then we would be free of you anti-freedom lemmings.
Maybe I have misunderstood your comment and if so, I apologize in advance. Are you saying the 60's accomplished nothing?
I was born too late to experience the 60's, but it seems to me its generation accomplished quite a bit.
* Civil rights for black people * More women's rights * General liberalization of society * Greater sexual freedom * Greater freedom to be different * End of Vietnam war (Much like Iraq) * Greater acceptance of gays (Stonewall)
That's just the stuff I can think of right off the top of my head. They also screwed up some stuff, such is the nature of revolution. Overall, I think we are better off than we would be had they played ostrich.
Something the rest of the world needs to understand about Americans is that we are incredibly stupid and lazy. Americans think in binary: Vote yes or vote no. We won't vote for universal health care and then keep on the government's ass to make sure it is implemented in a rational way. Most likely it will be the most expensive (per capita) health program on earth, cost more than we presently pay, and we will on average have worse health care. We will bitch and moan about it in public forums, like/., and talk radio, but we won't do anything to improve the system. The right will say it is socialism so it can't work, end of thought. The left will say it doesn't work because the right prevents them from throwing enough money at it. Instead of becoming more useful, it will become yet another bloated bureaucracy that serves no one but government.
If a small business becomes bloated and inefficient and doesn't serve its customers, it goes out of business. What incentive does government have to keep lean, efficient, and in service to us? Us riding its ass. Iraq War, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Homeland inSecurity, all well hated and bitched about, but not enough people get mad enough to see them fixed or eliminated. Instead we worry about celebrity nipple and beaver shots and answer Winston Churchill when Jay Leno asks us what general lead our side of the cotton picking Revolutionary War.
"When does the other end of the pole move towards you, after MY END MOVES? "
It is best not to be overly concerned about such things when making love. I really can't help you anyway since I'm not into bears, bear bears or even bare bears. Otters, maybe.
"Maybe they can't recognize siblings at all. Maybe the genetics are close enough so that the plant can not distinguish its own root from that of its siblings."
So if it is just chemistry, it isn't thought? If so, then we humans don't think either.
I am not saying that plants feel the warm and fuzzies for their family members or that they are conscious. I do think the type of chemical interaction you suggest could be considered thought (recognition), albeit at a very simple level.
Sorry if I am putting words in your mouth; I am also responding to various comments after yours and insomnia has fried my brain.
Your statement, perhaps/probably unintentionally, is sexually biased. As a gay male middle school student, I would have welcomed extracurricular activities with a hot male teacher. I often heard female students in my classes comment on their desire for hot male teachers.
I find it very annoying that when a woman teacher has sex with a boy, comedians like Jay Leno and a large portion of society joke about how stupid the boy was for reporting the teacher. But when the teacher is a male, the student is a poor victim and the teacher must be thrown into jail for life and have his balls whacked off or else the four horsemen of the apocalypse will descend from heaven to slaughter mankind.
I do not think it is right for teachers to seduce students. However, as long as protection is used and all involved are willing, I don't think the genders involved matter and I don't think the crime is as bad as murder, armed robbery, rape, torture, etc.
Americans get way too uptight about sex. What this substitute teacher has been through is ridiculous. Even if she isn't convicted, she has lost a significant portion of her life fighting a frivolous lawsuit and probably will never work as a teacher again.
Sheeze, when I was a student, a friend and I put a naked lady photo on the overhead projector. The teacher accidentally showed it to the class. He chuckled; the class laughed; and he threw it away, end of story. Apparently, America has gone insane since the 1980's.
As a Pastafarian, I was thinking The Flying Spaghetti Monster's heaven might be a nice place. There are beer volcanos everywhere and stripper factories. Beats the cubical.
It maximizes sexual variety if everyone is potentially interested in everyone else. A straight crew of 3 men and 3 women means each person has 3 potential partners. A gay crew of 6 gives each person 5 potential partners, six, if you count going solo.
Bisexuals or lesbians would also work. I'm just prejudiced in favor of gay men:-)
They should also have a taboo against turning anyone down for sex.
I signed the ballot initiative and voted for it knowing full well what it said. I missed this meeting though. Is there any local pro-legalization group in Missoula that I could join?
Slashdot Mirror
How about creating jobs that also produce a product that is more useful to the entire country?
Are you trying to open up a war about whether the research that results from spaceflight is worth the investment?
My post was poorly worded. I'm all for the government spending a lot of money on space exploration. In fact, I'd like to see the military budget cut in half so that we would have way more money to spend on space while also paying off the national debt. My point was that instead of employing people on crappy space projects (much of Constellation), we should instead employ people in worthwhile, non-dead-end space projects that will efficiently lead to regular people living off-world.
Also, I think that you should have asked what I meant before you flew off the handle over your imagined beliefs about my unclear post.
How about creating jobs that also produce a product that is more useful to the entire country?
Put a bag over the asteroid (or part of it, like a greenhouse) and microwave it. Collect the vapor.
Art is not about the person VIEWING or EXPERIENCING - it is about the creator.
Fascinating, my first thought was that art is something that evokes emotion in the person meditating upon it. It doesn't even require an artist. If a sunset makes you feel emotions then it is art for you. But maybe by thinking about the sunset in such a way that it makes you feel something, you become the artist? Maybe the professional artists' job is to create things that facilitate an observer's ability to think in ways that evoke emotion?
Perhaps Roger Ebert is so lacking in artistic ability, he can not do the type of thinking required to experience a game as art so for him it isn't art. So what? Or maybe, he is just trying to dump his morality on us--winning is bad? If so, perhaps his criticism is art since it makes me feel like telling him to STFU.
Maybe I don't know what art is, but I feel strongly that video games can be art. I have been moved by World of Warcraft so I feel it is art.
Yes, when did /. turn into Fox News or the National Enquirer? I'm sick of news that titillates the reader's basest emotions in order to sell their rag because the org lacks the competence to sell honest news.
I think you are making at least four faulty assumptions which affect the economics. First, asteroids are not made of one element but many so the supply of new resources would go into multiple markets. Second, harvesting those materials wouldn't be instantaneous, might take decades. Third, the bulk of stuff we could get from an asteroid might be most valuable if kept in space--iron, nickel, hydrocarbons useful for making space habitats that don't have to be hauled up from earth's gravity well. Fourth, whoever mines the asteroids might do what De Beers does with diamonds--sell slowly to keep the prices inflated.
I agree that environment is very important. If the environment would cause a bad trip, working in it will wear on you. I work in an big house that has the feel of a home. Teams more-or-less occupy the same rooms. It makes communication efficient between team members and does foster a sense of community and camaraderie.
On the other hand, too much talking can get really annoying when you're coding. So I wish there were a room dedicated to long conversations--some couches, food, and computers. Personal phone calls and meetings with clients should also take place there.
Also because intense coding uses a lot of working memory which is hard to remember between interruptions, there need to be some rules of etiquette about when it is okay to interrupt. There are few things worse than forgetting the details of a complicated solution because someone interrupted the thought to ask you about an entirely different code module.
I also like well behaved pets in the workplace. Several times it has helped me to talk problems out with someone's dog, and they also help reduce stress.
Usually we all get a say in hiring new employees. That seems to weed out the ones who would ruin the sense of community.
I think the same principles could be applied to a larger company by applying them to a team instead of to the whole company.
If you find a balloon, hide it and talk the people accompanying it into splitting the prize with you. Wait until the locations of the other balloons leaks. Collect prize. If people accompanying it won't play, kidnap them.
How do you suppose hospitals cover the cost of treating the uninsured?
Sorry, maybe I did overstate things. This is just a very emotional subject for me as you can probably understand. However, if you read this and other articles like it, can we agree the Prozac fad of the 1990's was overblown?
I took Prozac and other SSRIs. They had absolutely no positive effect on my depression. Instead I got little blistering bumps on my skin that itched like mad and lasted for months and all of the usual sexual side effects. Worse, they gave me a flat affect and occasional visual hallucinations upon waking up in the morning, which got me a misdiagnoses of schizophrenia which lead to me having to drop out of college due to the side effects of the schizophrenia medications (which incidentally did nothing for the flat affect or hallucinations.)
At one point a doctor made me abruptly quit the SSRI I was on. That seemed to lead to the worst depression I have ever experienced. The hallucinations stopped. The doctor put me on a different SSRI.
I ended up gradually weaning myself off of all of the drugs almost a decade ago. I haven't had schizophrenia-like symptoms since. Doctors since then agree I was misdiagnosed and just had an unexpected reaction to SSRIs.
My guess is that SSRIs seem to work mostly due to the placebo effect. Anything beyond the placebo effect is due to some people having just the right kind of depression that can benefit from what SSRIs do. When I quit the SSRIs cold turkey, I believe that rebound depression was of the neurochemical type that SSRIs can successfully treat. In other words, I think there are probably many biological causes of depression and SSRIs only treat one cause. For some, like me, SSRIs just throw our neuro-chemistry way out of wack by overstimulating parts of the seratoninergic neurotransmitter system.
In my opinion, sloppy science or fraud allowed SSRIs to get FDA approval as a treatment for many kinds of depression when it only really treats a subtype of depression. That lead to those drugs being promoted as a panacea for everything from major depression to just not being cheerful all the time. It cost me the education and career and better life I wanted and otherwise would have had. While massaging of data might sound like a faux pas to a non-scientist, it can have tragic consequences.
I think it is time to stop giving special status to delusions such as Scientology and Christianity. In the USA churches are tax exempt. Church businesses should pay a "sin tax," a higher than normal tax rate, the way tobacco is taxed because it too is harmful. It should also be illegal to give children religion just as it is illegal to sell a child a carton of cigarettes to smoke. Many parents actually force children to attend brainwashing events one to three times a week at their local church. That is just plain sick.
Once upon a time I tried LSD. I would say it was the most profound experience of my life. The guy who went down the rabbit hole isn't quite the same guy who came out 12 hours later.
Good changes in no particular order:
Not so good stuff:
Overall, I think the world would be a better place if most people tried LSD at least once, providing they spent months of their free time learning all they could about LSD before using it and used it in a safe environment in a responsible way.
I agree that libraries are wonderful places, temples of knowledge, one of the very few things I hold sacred. I love printed books. They are sensuous right down to their spicy scent between their leathery leaves. I have not yet been able to imagine the Internet providing the full sensory experience I get from books. Maybe in time...
However, it pains me that Mr. Bradbury, one of my all time favorite authors, has allowed himself to stop growing. I think it is very likely that some people reading this will never die unless they choose to. Imagine living to be 20,000 years old and hating whatever newfangled things replace the Internet, hating pretty much everything about the world because it has changed and you have not. Human history is tiny, the future potentially vast; why confine yourself to some small region of the past and let history race by you into the future?
I was just listening to something a little old, Alexander Scriabin's 2nd symphony. A month ago, I never even heard of Scriabin. I found him on the Internet and now have his music. I doubt I would have found him at the local library. Now I'm listening to Shpongle which is kind of new (2005) and goes shockingly well with mushroom soup and strolls through mossy eldritch forests as well as with computer programming. I wouldn't have found Shpongle at the library either. This Fall I hope to share my home with an 18 year old college student for the simple reason that she will bring novelty--both modern youth culture and her tribal culture which is completely and wonderfully alien to me. That's how I try to live, always throwing something new into the old brain pan so it never goes empty.
Now if you'll excuse me, my head feels like a Frisbee...
There's a lot of work still to be done on tuning the satellite and instruments for optimum performance
What does tuning involve?
I'll give parent post partial credit:-)
People did play a part in turning me on to science, but I mostly only know those people through books.
In 5th or 6th grade, my reading skills were abysmal because of dyslexia. To motivate me to read more, my teacher got me a "job" at the school library as a librarian's assistant. The librarian directed me to the Thomas Edison biographies and told me that old Tom was said to have had dyslexia too and that I could probably learn to help myself by studying his life. It probably took me a month or two to make it through that first book. Within a year, I had taken up Tom's (alleged) habit of reading a foot of books per week. By then my interests had branched from Edison worship to all things science. (If I ever run into Ms. Tysinger(sp?), the librarian, I'll plant a big kiss on her cheek and buy her dinner.)
Before people became overly obsessed with safety, there were some really good science project books on the shelves. I can't recall any of the titles. They had really interesting projects like how to build your own X-Ray machine, Tesla coils, fireworks, and the like that today might get a kid branded as a terrorist, but would give any red-blooded kid an interest in science. Look for stuff written prior to the 1970's, the older, the better. German authors were especially fun. Some of the science might be a little off, but the projects were a blast.
I also really liked "Cosmos" and other titles by Carl Sagan. Richard Dawkins was after my childhood, but I imagine everything by him would be motivational. Douglas Adams's fiction would be great for kids. Thomas Edison, Einstein, Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alan Turing, Fermi, Marconi, I fell madly in love with all of them.
I guess my father played a small part in my development as a geek. He made sure I got science-related gifts at Xmas, bought my copy of "Cosmos" and I remember him making an electromagnet for me when I was a toddler. He wasn't a scientist though, and I can't remember him discussing mathematical proofs at the dinner table.
"Even if you can not make it impossible for your enemies to obtain a secret, you can still make it harder -- every step of the way. And making it harder for America's enemies (such as Iran and North Korea) to build their own ICBMs is a good goal.
For more, search this site and others for something like 'security is a process'."
Agreed, but you don't go far enough. To protect our freedom and our children, we need to go much further. The government needs to genetically engineer a super-bookworm that can destroy all print information in the world within the next decade. And of course a super-virus/worm/whatever to clog all the Internet's tubes. Private ownership of computers needs to be made illegal. Scientists and engineers need to be shot or enslaved in government labs. The public needs a steady diet of mercury and lead to prevent rediscovery any dangerous knowledge. Only through this process can we truly be free and secure in the loving arms of our beloved big brother.
Get a freaking clue.
Personally, I wish Bush and Cheney would order everyone to march into the sea in the interest of national security, peace, freedom, apple pie and the American way. Then we would be free of you anti-freedom lemmings.
Maybe I have misunderstood your comment and if so, I apologize in advance. Are you saying the 60's accomplished nothing?
I was born too late to experience the 60's, but it seems to me its generation accomplished quite a bit.
* Civil rights for black people
* More women's rights
* General liberalization of society
* Greater sexual freedom
* Greater freedom to be different
* End of Vietnam war (Much like Iraq)
* Greater acceptance of gays (Stonewall)
That's just the stuff I can think of right off the top of my head. They also screwed up some stuff, such is the nature of revolution. Overall, I think we are better off than we would be had they played ostrich.
Something the rest of the world needs to understand about Americans is that we are incredibly stupid and lazy. Americans think in binary: Vote yes or vote no. We won't vote for universal health care and then keep on the government's ass to make sure it is implemented in a rational way. Most likely it will be the most expensive (per capita) health program on earth, cost more than we presently pay, and we will on average have worse health care. We will bitch and moan about it in public forums, like /., and talk radio, but we won't do anything to improve the system. The right will say it is socialism so it can't work, end of thought. The left will say it doesn't work because the right prevents them from throwing enough money at it. Instead of becoming more useful, it will become yet another bloated bureaucracy that serves no one but government.
If a small business becomes bloated and inefficient and doesn't serve its customers, it goes out of business. What incentive does government have to keep lean, efficient, and in service to us? Us riding its ass. Iraq War, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Homeland inSecurity, all well hated and bitched about, but not enough people get mad enough to see them fixed or eliminated. Instead we worry about celebrity nipple and beaver shots and answer Winston Churchill when Jay Leno asks us what general lead our side of the cotton picking Revolutionary War.
"When does the other end of the pole move towards you, after MY END MOVES? "
It is best not to be overly concerned about such things when making love. I really can't help you anyway since I'm not into bears, bear bears or even bare bears. Otters, maybe.
"Maybe they can't recognize siblings at all. Maybe the genetics are close enough so that the plant can not distinguish its own root from that of its siblings."
So if it is just chemistry, it isn't thought? If so, then we humans don't think either.
I am not saying that plants feel the warm and fuzzies for their family members or that they are conscious. I do think the type of chemical interaction you suggest could be considered thought (recognition), albeit at a very simple level.
Sorry if I am putting words in your mouth; I am also responding to various comments after yours and insomnia has fried my brain.
Your statement, perhaps/probably unintentionally, is sexually biased. As a gay male middle school student, I would have welcomed extracurricular activities with a hot male teacher. I often heard female students in my classes comment on their desire for hot male teachers.
I find it very annoying that when a woman teacher has sex with a boy, comedians like Jay Leno and a large portion of society joke about how stupid the boy was for reporting the teacher. But when the teacher is a male, the student is a poor victim and the teacher must be thrown into jail for life and have his balls whacked off or else the four horsemen of the apocalypse will descend from heaven to slaughter mankind.
I do not think it is right for teachers to seduce students. However, as long as protection is used and all involved are willing, I don't think the genders involved matter and I don't think the crime is as bad as murder, armed robbery, rape, torture, etc.
Americans get way too uptight about sex. What this substitute teacher has been through is ridiculous. Even if she isn't convicted, she has lost a significant portion of her life fighting a frivolous lawsuit and probably will never work as a teacher again.
Sheeze, when I was a student, a friend and I put a naked lady photo on the overhead projector. The teacher accidentally showed it to the class. He chuckled; the class laughed; and he threw it away, end of story. Apparently, America has gone insane since the 1980's.
As a Pastafarian, I was thinking The Flying Spaghetti Monster's heaven might be a nice place. There are beer volcanos everywhere and stripper factories. Beats the cubical.
http://www.venganza.org/
I agree, send an all gay crew.
It maximizes sexual variety if everyone is potentially interested in everyone else. A straight crew of 3 men and 3 women means each person has 3 potential partners. A gay crew of 6 gives each person 5 potential partners, six, if you count going solo.
Bisexuals or lesbians would also work. I'm just prejudiced in favor of gay men:-)
They should also have a taboo against turning anyone down for sex.
I hereby volunteer to test out this system.
I signed the ballot initiative and voted for it knowing full well what it said. I missed this meeting though. Is there any local pro-legalization group in Missoula that I could join?