...but you also need to point out that most of the labourers will be leaning on their shovels rather than working. At least, that's how the Minesweeper Consultant/Solitaire Expert crowd that I've seen in action behave.
The guy with the Komatsu (a WA1200, I'm sure, for the reach and flexibility) will be ripping around at full throttle, will top-dress your lawn in passing, fix the corporate toaster on his lunch break and be writing his own novel on the side as he works. And constantly thanking you for letting him play with this neat toy.
...US schools are effectively mandated to teach a theory believed to be entirely true only by a minority of the population, and they are so mandated for religious reasons - specifically, they are mandated in support of Materialism.
At least after mandating ID as an alternative teachers (and so by extension students) will have a choice of religious mandates to select amongst.
Dubya's economic policies are generally money-driven and old-boy-network-driven rather than theology driven, but the mutant version of Creationism used by some of those old boys is terrifying to both Materialist/Evolutionists and what you might call bona fide Creationists as well.
The basic approach is to ignore the reams and reams of Biblical instruction about responsibility and us being judged on what we've done with this world - and after tossing that over their mental shoulder, reason as follows: "Since Jesus is going to destroy the Earth by fire and renew it when He returns, it doesn't matter what we do with it in the mean time". They just don't "get it" at all.
Unfortunately, the politics of his opposition are just as dumb and scary in different ways, and also for religious reasons. Abortion is a classic. If you can follow the reasoning that makes murder legal as long as it's in utero, you'll get a feel for it.
Russ' biggest blooper is that he distinguishes by racial, not cultural grouping.
Here in Australia there's a massive "Aboriginal Industry" which consists of two classes of people: greedy men happy to walk on the backs of others, and the lazy men that the first group "farms" for money, power and perks.
It's a cultural thing. Most of the above are half-castes, some of whom are whiter than I (mostly Pommie descent, big chunk of Austrian, smattering of other things), but there are many full-bloods in it too. But not all Aboriginals have fallen prey to this (I believe) handout-induced turpor. I know both half-castes and full-bloods who live and think like "proper" Aboriginals and others who are culturally indistinguishable from me.
There is indeed a problem, and it has nothing to do with race.
That the problem is recognised within the races in question is indisputable. The TIs (Torres-strait Islanders) call their problem children "coconuts" because they're only dark on the outside, and the mainlanders use the term "rainbows" because they're not sure what colour to be.
But yes, having someone that simplistic in OSI, and unwilling to recant, is a bit of a worry.
You need grass to feed the herds on, you need a lot more water to grow crops, vegetables and fruits.
Actually, you need 10x and much area and 35x as much water to turn land into a kg of beef as you do to turn land into a kg of wheat.
Planting carefully selected tree crops and supporting undercroft also reduces evapouration (and topsoil) losses due to wind, and alters the local microclimate to be more rain-friendly. The soil under rainforests generally sucks, being of limited fertility and stability. It's the forest itself which attracts the rain and holds the soild together. On top of this, the trees actually collect considerably more water from dew and fog than lands as rain.
The answer is not to turn into tree-hugging hippies, because they're generally as thick as two short planks and highly destructive in their own way - but to go on being blindly industrial, producing hopelessly inefficient meat crops and hopelessly destructive, vulnerable and chemical-dependent massive monocultures, is just suicidal.
Taking a step back, you could view it this way: luxury is the enemy of the human race. The simplest way to gut the reproduction rate of a population is to make them rich.
The Malthusians amongst us may well rejoice, but they would be stupid. The only population groups who will continue to reproduce at high rates are the altrusitic - which basically equates to people who expect the world to end dramaticlly and soon but who are more likely to eschew luxury - and those too culturally retarded to develop enough technology to be able to afford luxuries.
Unless the first group survives the second (unlikely), we as a race are dead.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
while it confers more genetic variety, it also allows more genetic damage to collect.
Don't mistake the map for the territory.
While the "digital life" models may be helpful in visualising what's going on in real life, and in devising experiments to test real life with, the digital environment is about as artificial as it gets.
That said, what the models are showing is that sexual reproduction accumulates changes faster, but does not change the quality of what accumulates. The next step will be to tweak the models even further from reality in order to see them accumulate more advantages than handicaps. Otherwise the results are too depressing.
In analogue life (ironic that digital life should be an analogue of analogue life), genuinely advantageous mutations are collectors items - or would be.
...the girls all had headaches for generations. As usual, the blokes were left to fend for themselves and had to work something out. In the absence of technology to support paracetamol production, this was all they could do.
...thinking that they'd simply rigged the voting machines more effectively after a few years in power. No dubious court cases needed now that the process is streamlined.
Personally, my wish is not so much that any particular Heckle or Jekyll gets into power, but that there was a party or leader which/who didn't suck.
Bush's crew mostly have their heads so far up their ass in search of religious rightness that they need air pumped in through their navels. Kerry's crew would happily rip up and trample over an emormous number of "traditions" without stopping to notice how well they've worked for centuries, nor stop to ask themselves why this might be. Neither side has a handle on what separation of church and state actually means.
No other party is going to get a look in any time soon (not that the alternatives are exactly confidence-inspiring) and there's no way to elect people even on a case-by-case basis, let alone on practical merit or anything other than "team politics".
Conclusion: the USA is screwed and is going down big time over the next decade or few. Which is not going to be a happy event no matter how yankophobic one is since they're also the world's most potent industrial and military force.
It would take a series of major miracles for the USA to recover its original purpose, character and vitality again.
Either the artist wants to be pauid twice (for the commissioning of the work, and again for photos taken of it) or SBC wants to both give away the work and keep it.
If they wanted to charge people for looking at it, they should have made the park private and charged admission. Having donated the piece to a public park, they've got the only bite at this particular cherry they deserve.
Unless the RIAA figures out how to DRM your eyeballs, that is. Great SciFi plot idea, but in real life pretty miserable.
But probably not at the same time. Both of them can be quite bright and a lot of fun as pets, neither of them are a fraction as much trouble to keep as an occy.
Actually, you wouldn't want to bake trilobites...
on
Happy Darwin Day!
·
· Score: 1
...since while they're right at the bottom of the geological column but they've also got a bunch of highly developed features like their powerful underwater low-light eyesight. They've also got living relatives (which somehow managed to "not evolve") in horseshoe crabs.
Better avoid Darwin's Finches, too, since they turned out to be homeostatic around a norm. And the wings are a bastard to get off the tray without breakage.
If you wanted glow-in-the-dark bikkies, you could try a coleocanth - except that all of those fins are a bit fiddly, and, oh, yes - they turned to to still be alive and unevolved as well.
Horses? No, the horse lineage turned out to be a furphy. Brontosaurus? No, sorry, that head belongs to an apatosaurus, and the limbs are too delicate to avoid burning them when they bake. You could make coffee-flavoured Java Man cookies, or Peking Man cookies with a fortune in them - but both of those turned out to be frauds, too. Hummmm - archaeopteryx? No, that's just a hoatzin with teeth. Hippos are a possible - nice and round - but you'd have to wait until the various factions finish squabbling over which major phylogenetic tree they came from (pigs, whales, whatever)...
I'm sure you get the picture. (-:
What's the weather like on your planet? (-:
on
Happy Darwin Day!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Religion beliefs produce large populations because they ignore reality. Science is left to figure out ways to protect this huge population. If religion and science wasted all their time arguing about it they would not evolve. So insert the greedy politicions and the species evolves in a steady forward motion.
Yeah, well, I can understand why you'd mod him down for the homophobia, but I think this part of the post deserved a +1, Funny...
Amino acids cant improve themselves without defining improve first.
...and this needs a +1, Insightful.
Sigh. Chances of getting CowboyNeal to allow separate moderation of selected sentences?
Ironically enough, "fag" - a diminuitive of "fagot" or kindling - was originally applied to Protestant Christians burned at the stake for being honest and helpful, then came to mean anybody burned at the stake, then settled on the narrower meaning of "pervert suitable for burning at the stake" and finally seems to have come to rest as a descriptor for male homosexuals.
I've never seen a lesbian called a "fag" but OTOH I don't hang out in or near gay nightclubs.
So, you were expecting to escape "poofter-bashing" on SlashDot? Why?
Yes, very clever. Now if you could explain...
on
Happy Darwin Day!
·
· Score: 1, Funny
...how asexual critters evolve, how sexuality arose in the first place and provide some kind of viable cover for abiogeneis, I think you'd be on to something.
One major problem with existing mutations is that they all represent destruction of information. My favourite analogy is of a blind man trying to improve the structure of a Lego diorama using only a rifle from across the street. There seems to be no way to add new and useful information, which is kind of essential, nor to prevent any which somehow magically manages to get added from being drowned out by the "genetic burden" of otherwise universally destructive mutations.
Mostly because it isn't, if you set the boundary anywhere less than about 1e300,000 in a universe 1e18 seconds old and containing 1e81 atoms recombining 1e12 times a second. (-:
PS, is this day for Erasmus Darwin, or really for Charles? Erasmus has a better claim on having "invented" evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
...but you also need to point out that most of the labourers will be leaning on their shovels rather than working. At least, that's how the Minesweeper Consultant/Solitaire Expert crowd that I've seen in action behave.
The guy with the Komatsu (a WA1200, I'm sure, for the reach and flexibility) will be ripping around at full throttle, will top-dress your lawn in passing, fix the corporate toaster on his lunch break and be writing his own novel on the side as he works. And constantly thanking you for letting him play with this neat toy.
...US schools are effectively mandated to teach a theory believed to be entirely true only by a minority of the population, and they are so mandated for religious reasons - specifically, they are mandated in support of Materialism.
At least after mandating ID as an alternative teachers (and so by extension students) will have a choice of religious mandates to select amongst.
...but not the politics.
Dubya's economic policies are generally money-driven and old-boy-network-driven rather than theology driven, but the mutant version of Creationism used by some of those old boys is terrifying to both Materialist/Evolutionists and what you might call bona fide Creationists as well.
The basic approach is to ignore the reams and reams of Biblical instruction about responsibility and us being judged on what we've done with this world - and after tossing that over their mental shoulder, reason as follows: "Since Jesus is going to destroy the Earth by fire and renew it when He returns, it doesn't matter what we do with it in the mean time". They just don't "get it" at all.
Unfortunately, the politics of his opposition are just as dumb and scary in different ways, and also for religious reasons. Abortion is a classic. If you can follow the reasoning that makes murder legal as long as it's in utero, you'll get a feel for it.
...but generally not for more than about 2 or 3 hours.
Melbourne is definitely female.
Russ' biggest blooper is that he distinguishes by racial, not cultural grouping.
Here in Australia there's a massive "Aboriginal Industry" which consists of two classes of people: greedy men happy to walk on the backs of others, and the lazy men that the first group "farms" for money, power and perks.
It's a cultural thing. Most of the above are half-castes, some of whom are whiter than I (mostly Pommie descent, big chunk of Austrian, smattering of other things), but there are many full-bloods in it too. But not all Aboriginals have fallen prey to this (I believe) handout-induced turpor. I know both half-castes and full-bloods who live and think like "proper" Aboriginals and others who are culturally indistinguishable from me.
There is indeed a problem, and it has nothing to do with race.
That the problem is recognised within the races in question is indisputable. The TIs (Torres-strait Islanders) call their problem children "coconuts" because they're only dark on the outside, and the mainlanders use the term "rainbows" because they're not sure what colour to be.
But yes, having someone that simplistic in OSI, and unwilling to recant, is a bit of a worry.
...where it goes over 120degF every summer. The kangaroos don't seem to mind much.
Planting carefully selected tree crops and supporting undercroft also reduces evapouration (and topsoil) losses due to wind, and alters the local microclimate to be more rain-friendly. The soil under rainforests generally sucks, being of limited fertility and stability. It's the forest itself which attracts the rain and holds the soild together. On top of this, the trees actually collect considerably more water from dew and fog than lands as rain.
The answer is not to turn into tree-hugging hippies, because they're generally as thick as two short planks and highly destructive in their own way - but to go on being blindly industrial, producing hopelessly inefficient meat crops and hopelessly destructive, vulnerable and chemical-dependent massive monocultures, is just suicidal.
...let's look at the list:
Mutant virus? Check.
Plays dead? Check.
Does unexpected things? Check.
Makes errors while copying? Check.
Expands to consume available resources? Check.
Looking good so far.
Taking a step back, you could view it this way: luxury is the enemy of the human race. The simplest way to gut the reproduction rate of a population is to make them rich.
The Malthusians amongst us may well rejoice, but they would be stupid. The only population groups who will continue to reproduce at high rates are the altrusitic - which basically equates to people who expect the world to end dramaticlly and soon but who are more likely to eschew luxury - and those too culturally retarded to develop enough technology to be able to afford luxuries.
Unless the first group survives the second (unlikely), we as a race are dead.
You will notice that there is no place in there for Atheism, since Atheism defaults to selfishness, which in turn implies no troublesome descendents.
While the "digital life" models may be helpful in visualising what's going on in real life, and in devising experiments to test real life with, the digital environment is about as artificial as it gets.
That said, what the models are showing is that sexual reproduction accumulates changes faster, but does not change the quality of what accumulates. The next step will be to tweak the models even further from reality in order to see them accumulate more advantages than handicaps. Otherwise the results are too depressing.
In analogue life (ironic that digital life should be an analogue of analogue life), genuinely advantageous mutations are collectors items - or would be.
...the girls all had headaches for generations. As usual, the blokes were left to fend for themselves and had to work something out. In the absence of technology to support paracetamol production, this was all they could do.
</deadpan>
If we spend all of our time looking over our shoulders, nothing gets done, the enemy has won and we might as well not even try.
So I become a martyr to some random cause? Even the Bible says some evil must come, but I hope one of the DMCA framers is reading this, so they can also read the followup to it, or this concise description of the RIAA's activities.
Ironic? It precipitates airborne particles while you watch. (-:
...thinking that they'd simply rigged the voting machines more effectively after a few years in power. No dubious court cases needed now that the process is streamlined.
Personally, my wish is not so much that any particular Heckle or Jekyll gets into power, but that there was a party or leader which/who didn't suck.
Bush's crew mostly have their heads so far up their ass in search of religious rightness that they need air pumped in through their navels. Kerry's crew would happily rip up and trample over an emormous number of "traditions" without stopping to notice how well they've worked for centuries, nor stop to ask themselves why this might be. Neither side has a handle on what separation of church and state actually means.
No other party is going to get a look in any time soon (not that the alternatives are exactly confidence-inspiring) and there's no way to elect people even on a case-by-case basis, let alone on practical merit or anything other than "team politics".
Conclusion: the USA is screwed and is going down big time over the next decade or few. Which is not going to be a happy event no matter how yankophobic one is since they're also the world's most potent industrial and military force.
It would take a series of major miracles for the USA to recover its original purpose, character and vitality again.
As in: I Am Not A Reenigne?
Either the artist wants to be pauid twice (for the commissioning of the work, and again for photos taken of it) or SBC wants to both give away the work and keep it.
If they wanted to charge people for looking at it, they should have made the park private and charged admission. Having donated the piece to a public park, they've got the only bite at this particular cherry they deserve.
Unless the RIAA figures out how to DRM your eyeballs, that is. Great SciFi plot idea, but in real life pretty miserable.
trademarked product ObIncrediblesRef.
But probably not at the same time. Both of them can be quite bright and a lot of fun as pets, neither of them are a fraction as much trouble to keep as an occy.
...since while they're right at the bottom of the geological column but they've also got a bunch of highly developed features like their powerful underwater low-light eyesight. They've also got living relatives (which somehow managed to "not evolve") in horseshoe crabs.
Better avoid Darwin's Finches, too, since they turned out to be homeostatic around a norm. And the wings are a bastard to get off the tray without breakage.
If you wanted glow-in-the-dark bikkies, you could try a coleocanth - except that all of those fins are a bit fiddly, and, oh, yes - they turned to to still be alive and unevolved as well.
Horses? No, the horse lineage turned out to be a furphy. Brontosaurus? No, sorry, that head belongs to an apatosaurus, and the limbs are too delicate to avoid burning them when they bake. You could make coffee-flavoured Java Man cookies, or Peking Man cookies with a fortune in them - but both of those turned out to be frauds, too. Hummmm - archaeopteryx? No, that's just a hoatzin with teeth. Hippos are a possible - nice and round - but you'd have to wait until the various factions finish squabbling over which major phylogenetic tree they came from (pigs, whales, whatever)...
I'm sure you get the picture. (-:
Sigh. Chances of getting CowboyNeal to allow separate moderation of selected sentences?
"pissing into the wind" (-:
Ironically enough, "fag" - a diminuitive of "fagot" or kindling - was originally applied to Protestant Christians burned at the stake for being honest and helpful, then came to mean anybody burned at the stake, then settled on the narrower meaning of "pervert suitable for burning at the stake" and finally seems to have come to rest as a descriptor for male homosexuals.
I've never seen a lesbian called a "fag" but OTOH I don't hang out in or near gay nightclubs.
So, you were expecting to escape "poofter-bashing" on SlashDot? Why?
...how asexual critters evolve, how sexuality arose in the first place and provide some kind of viable cover for abiogeneis, I think you'd be on to something.
One major problem with existing mutations is that they all represent destruction of information. My favourite analogy is of a blind man trying to improve the structure of a Lego diorama using only a rifle from across the street. There seems to be no way to add new and useful information, which is kind of essential, nor to prevent any which somehow magically manages to get added from being drowned out by the "genetic burden" of otherwise universally destructive mutations.
Certainly, his explanations are. It's a kind of compatibility.
It's the Mathematicians who don't think evolution is possible.
Mostly because it isn't, if you set the boundary anywhere less than about 1e300,000 in a universe 1e18 seconds old and containing 1e81 atoms recombining 1e12 times a second. (-:
PS, is this day for Erasmus Darwin, or really for Charles? Erasmus has a better claim on having "invented" evolution.