Good point. However, my boss can be pretty funny at times and I doubt she posts with such candor on LinkedIn. Also, though I joined LinkedIn, I hardly ever visit the site. Between Slashdot, facebook, and Newsvine (though, since MSNBC bought them, I've found the quality of discussion has gone down dramatically and I visit very infrequently), I've got about all the social media I can handle.
I can relate. A good many of my friends are co-religionists, many of whom I've never met. Others are friends from college, few of whom are very religious. Consequently, I find myself not wanting to be too religious for fear of offending the secular folks and afraid of being too worldly for fear of appearing less devout to the religious. So, I end up lurking mostly (and also because I'm friends on facebook with my boss and don't want her to think I'm spending all day on the site).
What the author is trying to say is that conventional cameras are set to one particular f-stop at any given time. Of course, the f-stop can be changed, but you're still only using one setting at a time. With HDR photography/videography, the same image is captured multiple times at different f-stops.
If you read the article, the author mentions both the folks in SF who did HDR video previously as well as the fact that the Warwick team have indeed developed a new HDR display for their system.
Also mentioned is that the new system generates 42GB/minute of data to capture images with 20 exposures per frame. My backup nightmare just grew large fangs!
Surely you've heard of the phenomenon where kidnap victims frequently come to identify with and sympathize with their captors? When an animal has been raised to be almost completely dependent upon a "master", there's not much chance of them running off into the wild, is there?
It's not a black-and-white issue for me. I can certainly see the beauty of responsible, loving animal stewardship, but I can also see the inherant inequities and injustice. By was of disclosure, we have three cats at home (though they were brought there by a former house-mate who's since moved to a place that doesn't allow pets) and I recently bought my daughter a hamster after much fretting and soul-searching.
Wow!! An insightful, cogent response. I would have been happy with a snappy one-liner. Of course, I can't just respond with a one-liner now.
Please don't think I take anything I state here as gospel truth, this is just a hypothesis I play with to help explain why there seems to be actual ethics in the real world (beyond prescriptive academic philosophy) while there is no apparent source of these ethics (yes, I'm an atheist).
No danger of that here. There are few things I take as gospel truths and this is just an informal discussion. As for theism, I wish I could say I believe in God, but it's more like I *want* to believe in God and often operate under the assumption that there is a God. But that's besides the point (which is off-topic to begin with:).
Some of these traits are uniquely human, and some continued on from previous primate iterations (notice the commonalities within social structures of divergent primate groups).
Your hypothesis seems perfectly tenable. Since you bring up other primates, the question arises (again?) how we define "human". Chimpanzees are 96-99% genetically identical to humans. According to this article, Chimpanzees are more genetically similar to humans than various species of yeast are to one another. Recent research indicates that there are non-human animals which are self-aware to some degree.
What we define as human, or human like varies with culture. Black people weren't human for a time, and neither were Jews or women (who still aren't in many cultures considered fully human), for example, and thus were not part of the formula.
Exactly. The demarcation line is not at all immovable. So, why not err on the side of caution? Of course, that's a personal choice (albeit influenced by our cultural progress).
There are many variations by culture since the evolutionary framework only provides us with a hard and fast default, which can be somewhat overwritten by cultural conditioning and personal circumstances, it becomes more and more apt at larger aggregate levels though.
Is culture evolutionary as well?
Cannabalism can spread nasty prion diseases (kuru, historically), meaning there may be larger cultural and traditional forces against it, or even another slight evolutionary imperative.
So can eating non-human animals. Some folks suspect that vCJD (Mad Cow Disease) is much more prevalent than meat industry stakeholders want (or will allow) us to believe. Since it takes so long for symptoms of the disease to manifest, it's hard to know. Some have suggested that, perhaps, Alzheimer's is also prion-related.
We didn't genetically evolve past slavery, we just culturally reclassified black people (or poor people, or whoeever) as being equally human with us, and thus entitled to the same rights and ethical choices as us.
Well, yes. Time has shown that there's more to evolution than simple genetic mutation/natural selection. *Choices* do play a role. Much of human "evolution" in the past 10,000 years have been a product more of adaptation to circumstances and our lifestyle choices than pure survival. More and more evidence is revealing that many of our former assumptions about other animal species (e.g. that they are essentially automatons driven by instinct) are not valid.
The problem is that animals are not human, and thus face an uphill battle.
Not human by our current definition. We could (once again) redefine what it means to be human.
The only alternative I can see is that ethics and rights are completely socially derived, and thus completely transient and arbitrary.
It's a scary thought, but it might be so.
Anyways, I thank you for your though-provoking response. I wish my own response was more detailed and reasoned, but this is the best I can do at the moment. I have way more questions than answers.
Cheers!!
--MM
Think of the poor, oppressed jellyfish!! Oh, the humanity!
Still, if the Hindu conception of the soul is correct, then all souls *are* equal (at least qualitatively), though the bodies they inhabit may have vastly differing capabilities.
Your use of evolution here sounds kinda sounds like a "God of the gaps". You mean "evolution" in the sense of genetic mutation and natural selection? In that case, how would you explain the vastly differing moralities of various cultures? In some cultures, canibalism is intrinsic, in others it's taboo.
Still, for the sake of argument, if morals are evolutionary in origin, I can claim that, just as we have (largely) evolved past slavery, the next step in our moral evolution is to transcend cruelty to and callous domination of other animal species.
By necessity, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban agriculture went almost completely organic. Also, an amazing percentage of the fresh produce eaten in Havana is grown within the city--urban agriculture. During WWII, Americans were encouraged to plant "Victory Gardens" to help free up resources for the war effort. Some neighbors of mine have a sign up in front of their house that says "Food, Not Lawns".
I've heard that sprouted (raw) grains and beans contain enzymes which aid in digestion of the grains and beans. I'm too lazy at the moment to find a reference other than my own personal experience.
Please give me a reason for this. Why should I care? (BTW, I have reasons from my own belief system as to why I should care about animal suffering, however, most slashdotters who express your type of opinion reject my belief system and fail to replace it with one that gives any logically consistent reason as to why I should care about the suffering of others).
Because reason is just a tool, it's not a religion (well, it seems to be for some people).
Still, to give a rational answer: extended self-interest. It's in your best interest to care about the suffering of others since (almost) all of us are dependent upon the goodwill of others for our survival.
Good point. I made a similar point after you did and before I'd read your comment. I'm curious about which specific "wrong moral axioms" you're referring to?
Also anyone who claims animals have equal rights with humans is just a nut job, it is almost impossible to take that statement seriously, must less rationally justify it. Animals are not little people.
From where do humans derive their rights--scientifically-speaking? You can claim that humans have inalienable rights derived from God, but that's not a scientific proposition. Rationally-speaking, humans have the rights they have granted themselves. Humans can also grant whatever rights they choose to the other animals under their control. It's a choice, so there's nothing crazy about saying all animals ought to have the same rights.
If you want to argue that animals can't speak, write, etc., and use that as a basis to deny them rights, then the same reasoning would apply to human babies. They can't sign contracts, so they ought not to have any rights?
Humans *are* animals and, in most places, animals *do* have rights, though not commensurate with the rights of animals of the human species.
Of course, this raises the question of just who is "human"? Plenty of persons in positions of power have, in the past, tried to rationalize brutality to humans of African, Native American, Jewish and other ethnicities based on the premise that they are not human.
Obviously, there are differences, but there are also many similarities.
I'm reading the Civil War section of Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" at the moment. Zinn describes the shock of certain Southern slave owners when their slaves deserted the plantations in droves after the Emancipation Proclamation. They assumed the slaves would stay out of gratitude for all they perceived they'd done for them.
Here's a quote from page 194:
"Also in 1865, a South Carolina planter wrote to the New York Tribune that:
the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion...I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these positions...If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know; and thus left their perhaps really good masters whom they did know from infancy?"
Thanks for the update. Regardless, I admire the man's chutzpah. It seems few people (who are entrenched in the establishment (it's easy enough to be contrarian when one is on the periphery)) are self-assured enough to go against the grain.
I haven't been following this issue as closely has I once had, but is Richard Lindzen at M.I.T. still pointing out negative feedback mechanisms that other climate scientists had missed?
"Although dumping radioactive wastes at sea from ships is now banned, paradoxically the discharge of radioactive wastes into the sea via pipelines from land is not," said Mike Townsley of Greenpeace. "Such 'double standards' are not maintained for technical or scientific reasons, but only because the operators of the nuclear reprocessing facilities in La Hague (France) and Sellafield (UK) want to save money."
"It is cheaper for them to continue to use the sea as a radioactive garbage bin than to store this radioactive waste on land; for the nuclear industry, money comes first and the environment second", said Mike Townsley (2).
Each year, Europe's giant nuclear reprocessing facilities at Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France, discharge hundreds of millions of litters of radioactive waste into the sea. The amount of radioactivity discharged from La Hague and Sellafield in only 9 months exceeds that dumped in the Hurd Deep.
"Hurd Deep and the other former ocean dump sites stand testament to the irreversibility of dumping radioactive wastes in the ocean -- regardless of whether from a ship or a land-based pipe", said Mike Townsley.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't jet engines have a propeller-like thing called a turbine? Wouldn't they have a similar effect?
That's a scary story!! I'd heard about thalidomide and any number of other major medical blunders, but not that particular one before.
I'm not quite following your math here, though, "11/3 of all hospital patients"?
Good point. However, my boss can be pretty funny at times and I doubt she posts with such candor on LinkedIn. Also, though I joined LinkedIn, I hardly ever visit the site. Between Slashdot, facebook, and Newsvine (though, since MSNBC bought them, I've found the quality of discussion has gone down dramatically and I visit very infrequently), I've got about all the social media I can handle.
I can relate. A good many of my friends are co-religionists, many of whom I've never met. Others are friends from college, few of whom are very religious. Consequently, I find myself not wanting to be too religious for fear of offending the secular folks and afraid of being too worldly for fear of appearing less devout to the religious. So, I end up lurking mostly (and also because I'm friends on facebook with my boss and don't want her to think I'm spending all day on the site).
I bow before your superior pedantry! Please pardon me while I sell my belongings, move into a cave, and ponder this dilemma for the next 30 years. :)
Is it on-topic? The headline specifies "the Most Abused Word in Tech". GP argues that the F-word is the most abused word, period.
What the author is trying to say is that conventional cameras are set to one particular f-stop at any given time. Of course, the f-stop can be changed, but you're still only using one setting at a time. With HDR photography/videography, the same image is captured multiple times at different f-stops.
If you read the article, the author mentions both the folks in SF who did HDR video previously as well as the fact that the Warwick team have indeed developed a new HDR display for their system.
Also mentioned is that the new system generates 42GB/minute of data to capture images with 20 exposures per frame. My backup nightmare just grew large fangs!
"By way of disclosure"
Surely you've heard of the phenomenon where kidnap victims frequently come to identify with and sympathize with their captors? When an animal has been raised to be almost completely dependent upon a "master", there's not much chance of them running off into the wild, is there?
It's not a black-and-white issue for me. I can certainly see the beauty of responsible, loving animal stewardship, but I can also see the inherant inequities and injustice. By was of disclosure, we have three cats at home (though they were brought there by a former house-mate who's since moved to a place that doesn't allow pets) and I recently bought my daughter a hamster after much fretting and soul-searching.
Please don't think I take anything I state here as gospel truth, this is just a hypothesis I play with to help explain why there seems to be actual ethics in the real world (beyond prescriptive academic philosophy) while there is no apparent source of these ethics (yes, I'm an atheist).
No danger of that here. There are few things I take as gospel truths and this is just an informal discussion. As for theism, I wish I could say I believe in God, but it's more like I *want* to believe in God and often operate under the assumption that there is a God. But that's besides the point (which is off-topic to begin with :).
Some of these traits are uniquely human, and some continued on from previous primate iterations (notice the commonalities within social structures of divergent primate groups).
Your hypothesis seems perfectly tenable. Since you bring up other primates, the question arises (again?) how we define "human". Chimpanzees are 96-99% genetically identical to humans. According to this article, Chimpanzees are more genetically similar to humans than various species of yeast are to one another. Recent research indicates that there are non-human animals which are self-aware to some degree.
What we define as human, or human like varies with culture. Black people weren't human for a time, and neither were Jews or women (who still aren't in many cultures considered fully human), for example, and thus were not part of the formula.
Exactly. The demarcation line is not at all immovable. So, why not err on the side of caution? Of course, that's a personal choice (albeit influenced by our cultural progress).
There are many variations by culture since the evolutionary framework only provides us with a hard and fast default, which can be somewhat overwritten by cultural conditioning and personal circumstances, it becomes more and more apt at larger aggregate levels though.
Is culture evolutionary as well?
Cannabalism can spread nasty prion diseases (kuru, historically), meaning there may be larger cultural and traditional forces against it, or even another slight evolutionary imperative.
So can eating non-human animals. Some folks suspect that vCJD (Mad Cow Disease) is much more prevalent than meat industry stakeholders want (or will allow) us to believe. Since it takes so long for symptoms of the disease to manifest, it's hard to know. Some have suggested that, perhaps, Alzheimer's is also prion-related.
We didn't genetically evolve past slavery, we just culturally reclassified black people (or poor people, or whoeever) as being equally human with us, and thus entitled to the same rights and ethical choices as us.
Well, yes. Time has shown that there's more to evolution than simple genetic mutation/natural selection. *Choices* do play a role. Much of human "evolution" in the past 10,000 years have been a product more of adaptation to circumstances and our lifestyle choices than pure survival. More and more evidence is revealing that many of our former assumptions about other animal species (e.g. that they are essentially automatons driven by instinct) are not valid.
The problem is that animals are not human, and thus face an uphill battle.
Not human by our current definition. We could (once again) redefine what it means to be human.
The only alternative I can see is that ethics and rights are completely socially derived, and thus completely transient and arbitrary.
It's a scary thought, but it might be so. Anyways, I thank you for your though-provoking response. I wish my own response was more detailed and reasoned, but this is the best I can do at the moment. I have way more questions than answers. Cheers!! --MM
Good to know. I definitely prefer my lentils cooked in soup in the winter-time, though I love my sprouted lentils when it's warmer.
Thanks for the explanation!
And the heat of cooking would tend to destroy those enzymes, no?
Think of the poor, oppressed jellyfish!! Oh, the humanity!
Still, if the Hindu conception of the soul is correct, then all souls *are* equal (at least qualitatively), though the bodies they inhabit may have vastly differing capabilities.
Your use of evolution here sounds kinda sounds like a "God of the gaps". You mean "evolution" in the sense of genetic mutation and natural selection? In that case, how would you explain the vastly differing moralities of various cultures? In some cultures, canibalism is intrinsic, in others it's taboo.
Still, for the sake of argument, if morals are evolutionary in origin, I can claim that, just as we have (largely) evolved past slavery, the next step in our moral evolution is to transcend cruelty to and callous domination of other animal species.
By necessity, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban agriculture went almost completely organic. Also, an amazing percentage of the fresh produce eaten in Havana is grown within the city--urban agriculture. During WWII, Americans were encouraged to plant "Victory Gardens" to help free up resources for the war effort. Some neighbors of mine have a sign up in front of their house that says "Food, Not Lawns".
I've heard that sprouted (raw) grains and beans contain enzymes which aid in digestion of the grains and beans. I'm too lazy at the moment to find a reference other than my own personal experience.
Please give me a reason for this. Why should I care? (BTW, I have reasons from my own belief system as to why I should care about animal suffering, however, most slashdotters who express your type of opinion reject my belief system and fail to replace it with one that gives any logically consistent reason as to why I should care about the suffering of others).
Because reason is just a tool, it's not a religion (well, it seems to be for some people).
Still, to give a rational answer: extended self-interest. It's in your best interest to care about the suffering of others since (almost) all of us are dependent upon the goodwill of others for our survival.
Good point. I made a similar point after you did and before I'd read your comment. I'm curious about which specific "wrong moral axioms" you're referring to?
Also anyone who claims animals have equal rights with humans is just a nut job, it is almost impossible to take that statement seriously, must less rationally justify it. Animals are not little people.
From where do humans derive their rights--scientifically-speaking? You can claim that humans have inalienable rights derived from God, but that's not a scientific proposition. Rationally-speaking, humans have the rights they have granted themselves. Humans can also grant whatever rights they choose to the other animals under their control. It's a choice, so there's nothing crazy about saying all animals ought to have the same rights.
If you want to argue that animals can't speak, write, etc., and use that as a basis to deny them rights, then the same reasoning would apply to human babies. They can't sign contracts, so they ought not to have any rights?
Humans *are* animals and, in most places, animals *do* have rights, though not commensurate with the rights of animals of the human species.
Of course, this raises the question of just who is "human"? Plenty of persons in positions of power have, in the past, tried to rationalize brutality to humans of African, Native American, Jewish and other ethnicities based on the premise that they are not human.
Obviously, there are differences, but there are also many similarities. I'm reading the Civil War section of Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States" at the moment. Zinn describes the shock of certain Southern slave owners when their slaves deserted the plantations in droves after the Emancipation Proclamation. They assumed the slaves would stay out of gratitude for all they perceived they'd done for them. Here's a quote from page 194: "Also in 1865, a South Carolina planter wrote to the New York Tribune that: the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion...I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these positions...If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know; and thus left their perhaps really good masters whom they did know from infancy?"
Thanks for the update. Regardless, I admire the man's chutzpah. It seems few people (who are entrenched in the establishment (it's easy enough to be contrarian when one is on the periphery)) are self-assured enough to go against the grain.
I haven't been following this issue as closely has I once had, but is Richard Lindzen at M.I.T. still pointing out negative feedback mechanisms that other climate scientists had missed?
"Although dumping radioactive wastes at sea from ships is now banned, paradoxically the discharge of radioactive wastes into the sea via pipelines from land is not," said Mike Townsley of Greenpeace. "Such 'double standards' are not maintained for technical or scientific reasons, but only because the operators of the nuclear reprocessing facilities in La Hague (France) and Sellafield (UK) want to save money." "It is cheaper for them to continue to use the sea as a radioactive garbage bin than to store this radioactive waste on land; for the nuclear industry, money comes first and the environment second", said Mike Townsley (2). Each year, Europe's giant nuclear reprocessing facilities at Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France, discharge hundreds of millions of litters of radioactive waste into the sea. The amount of radioactivity discharged from La Hague and Sellafield in only 9 months exceeds that dumped in the Hurd Deep. "Hurd Deep and the other former ocean dump sites stand testament to the irreversibility of dumping radioactive wastes in the ocean -- regardless of whether from a ship or a land-based pipe", said Mike Townsley.
Put another way: TANSTAFL.