The Third World's problem, oddly enough, isn't always poor agricultural practices, because even if you gave regions like sub-Saharan Africa consistent export-level surpluses, the agricultural subsidies and protectionist put in place in industrialized nations basically would kill an export economy anyways.
We've long tampered with natural processes. Probably the most significant event in that long process was the development of agriculture and urban civilization. These two developments have probably outweighed all others in altering our evolution.
But I'm not sure how much you can ascribe the particular developments in medicine (and by extension, food safety, public health, etc.) to population growth, seeing as the areas with the highest growth are the ones where the benefits of various health programs and processes are seen the least. Go to India, one of the fastest growing places on Earth, and you won't find an overabundance of such measures. A good chunk of the population still lives in poverty, with few benefits flowing from the economic engine. You can't tell me that all those medical procedures you speak of are responsible for India's population growth.
At the same time, the nations that do have the greatest benefits from modern medicine and public health; namely the industrialized nations, are, in fact, showing the lowest population gains. Some places, like Spain and Japan, are in fact in decline, with the mean age shifting upward. Other places, like Britain and Western Europe, are seeing that upward-trending needle only being controlled by immigration. Without immigration, I suspect a number of other industrialized nations would be much closer to no net gain, or possibly decline.
With all of that considered, I think your theory is probably wrong. I do not think modern medical breakthroughs are responsible for population increases. Since such procedures are usually only present in wealthier nations, and greater wealth has long been known in general to reduce overall family sizes and number of births, I think you might find the reality to be the exact opposite of what you claim.
Even Hamill could invoke gravitas without behaving like a spoiled adolescent. Ponder the final confrontation between Luke and Vader in RotJ, and then look at Christensen's sheer lack of chops in Anakin's final battle against Obiwan. Hamill was no Shakespearean actor, I'll grant you, but he was a helluva lot better than Christensen. Even with good dialogue, Christensen would have sucked. Hamill, at least, was watchable even with stuck with some of Lucas's infamously badly written lines.
Something that has long bothered me about the Jawas was the idea that Tatooine was littered with serviceable escaped droids just waiting to be picked up and resold. It really is a stupid idea. Wouldn't it have made more sense for the the droids to have crashed the escape pod into Uncle Owen's back yard?
My kids were bored by them. They weren't made for kids. They were made for chumps... and seeing as I went to the theater and watched them and own them now, I guess I'm one of those chumps.
We have two other engineers on this thread that do. There's a problem in your discipline, at the very least it seems to teach an extraordinary amount of arrogance when dealing with disciplines its adherents seem ill-equipped to assess.
You think brain-eating amoebas, mal-adapted spines for bipedal apes, land-bearing tetrapods going back to the water but unable to get gills back are hallmarks of elegance?
The only reason, I suspect, that you hold your views is because of a deep ignorance of nature. Oh, and what's with the "randomness" petulance? Oh well, the Salem Hypothesis confirmed again.
You're not making your position clear, and you seem to be falling into the very trap that the Salem Hypothesis refers to.
Nature can be complicated, but actual manufactured artifacts tend towards find optimum solutions. Actually looking at living systems, you do not find optimization. Evolution does not push towards optimum solutions, but rather towards solutions that are good enough for the environment. Worse, once a population starts down a specific evolutionary path, and the environmental conditions change, they can't just simply drop evolutionary innovations and restart the clock. Evolving populations have to work with what they have. When the ancestors of whales went back to the ocean, they didn't get to back to having gills like they're ancient ancestors. They remained air-breathing mammals, and the best that could be done is a slow alteration of existing land-living tetrapod breathing apparatus for an aquatic life.
As much as nature has produced complexity in living systems, it has also created a vast number of compromises. Human bipedalism is my favorite, because while it has given Hominids incredible advantages, we are still only partially adapted to it, and from there we get a large number of knee and spinal problems. I suspect any engineer would be able to come up with a far better arrangement than evolution has produced. And yet we have the Salem Hypothesis.
The first thing we were taught in my typing class was to stop reading what we were typing. To a well-trained and experienced touch typist it should be irrelevant whether what they're typing is ""Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", or "Mr. Stevens agreed to meet with the principals at 4:00PM on Friday to work out the details for the transfer" or "sadjlkj aoirwtoiqj34t nas904845$$42jgf".
If you're making mistakes because the text is hard, you're reading the text, and that not only means higher error rates, it also means you're not typing as fast as you could.
It's pretty pathetic. I learned on manuals and IBM Selectrics (now there was a kick-ass keyboard), and got my speeds up to 90wpm, a perfectly respectable typing speed for a secretary 20 years ago. It just galls me to look at kids nowadays fumble around on keyboards, getting pathetic speeds with horrific accuracy. The first thing my high school typing teacher did was to break the will of hunt-and-peck typists of their spirit, like some sort of office ed. drill sergeant. It paid off, no one in the class was below 50wpm at the end of the term.
Up until the advent of cheap OCR, I was still being handed stuff to type from copy, and could get into that weird tstate where you no longer see words or sentences, but simply characters. Now, of course, I watch people scanning in a few pages and then spending 20 minutes fixing all the spelling mistakes, and thinking "Ah, my, 15 years ago I could have typed that two or three times over."
Biology... so you don't show up on the Internet a few years later insisting that your experience and training in engineering equips you to declare evolution false.
Divert attention from what? A crap paper by an oil company shill who could only get it published in an obscure journal, and still managed to get caught peddling bullshit?
As his critics have pointed out, Spencer has basically just created a model that confirms his own claims. More to the point, he avoided going to a mainstream journal with this paper, obviously knowing that he'd get laughed out of the room. Where someone is going to try to publish pseudoscientific bullshit, this is the preferred method is to do so via some obscure journal, thus proclaiming "We are published!"
The only gravy train I see around here is the Heartland Institute gravy train, funded to a rather huge sum by Big Oil. And shockers, Spencer has a close association to them.
Read Spencer's own blog, where three or four other climatologists tear his claims apart. But do it quick. Spencer, I suspect, won't let any post that isn't from like minded ideologues survive long.
Well, more to the point, read his critics, who he seems determined to ban. They are making cogent points, calling him on his methodological failings, and he's basically sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "Neener neener neener!" and basically claiming that the IPCC is screwing with him.
As I said, Spencer is a shill, and his peers know this. He's the Michael Behe of climatology, except even Behe is smarter than to try to get any of his ID bullshit published in any biology or molecular biology journals. Of course, Behe's benefactors don't have the vast sums of wealth that the oil companies do.
Go to his bloody blog, where three or four actual researchers are doing that right now. But do it quick before Spencer bans them and deletes their posts.
I'd say being an ID advocate is a damned good litmus test for rationality. Actually claiming that Creationism can be scientifically validated simply because you remove the word "God" from your assertions and replace it with "Intelligent Designer" suggests a troubling lack of rational capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, for a conspiracy theorist, evidence against a conspiracy is evidence for a conspiracy.
I'm curious, are you trolling, or just a fucktard?
The Third World's problem, oddly enough, isn't always poor agricultural practices, because even if you gave regions like sub-Saharan Africa consistent export-level surpluses, the agricultural subsidies and protectionist put in place in industrialized nations basically would kill an export economy anyways.
We've long tampered with natural processes. Probably the most significant event in that long process was the development of agriculture and urban civilization. These two developments have probably outweighed all others in altering our evolution.
But I'm not sure how much you can ascribe the particular developments in medicine (and by extension, food safety, public health, etc.) to population growth, seeing as the areas with the highest growth are the ones where the benefits of various health programs and processes are seen the least. Go to India, one of the fastest growing places on Earth, and you won't find an overabundance of such measures. A good chunk of the population still lives in poverty, with few benefits flowing from the economic engine. You can't tell me that all those medical procedures you speak of are responsible for India's population growth.
At the same time, the nations that do have the greatest benefits from modern medicine and public health; namely the industrialized nations, are, in fact, showing the lowest population gains. Some places, like Spain and Japan, are in fact in decline, with the mean age shifting upward. Other places, like Britain and Western Europe, are seeing that upward-trending needle only being controlled by immigration. Without immigration, I suspect a number of other industrialized nations would be much closer to no net gain, or possibly decline.
With all of that considered, I think your theory is probably wrong. I do not think modern medical breakthroughs are responsible for population increases. Since such procedures are usually only present in wealthier nations, and greater wealth has long been known in general to reduce overall family sizes and number of births, I think you might find the reality to be the exact opposite of what you claim.
Even Hamill could invoke gravitas without behaving like a spoiled adolescent. Ponder the final confrontation between Luke and Vader in RotJ, and then look at Christensen's sheer lack of chops in Anakin's final battle against Obiwan. Hamill was no Shakespearean actor, I'll grant you, but he was a helluva lot better than Christensen. Even with good dialogue, Christensen would have sucked. Hamill, at least, was watchable even with stuck with some of Lucas's infamously badly written lines.
Something that has long bothered me about the Jawas was the idea that Tatooine was littered with serviceable escaped droids just waiting to be picked up and resold. It really is a stupid idea. Wouldn't it have made more sense for the the droids to have crashed the escape pod into Uncle Owen's back yard?
My kids were bored by them. They weren't made for kids. They were made for chumps... and seeing as I went to the theater and watched them and own them now, I guess I'm one of those chumps.
In Soviet Russia gum chews you!
We have two other engineers on this thread that do. There's a problem in your discipline, at the very least it seems to teach an extraordinary amount of arrogance when dealing with disciplines its adherents seem ill-equipped to assess.
You think brain-eating amoebas, mal-adapted spines for bipedal apes, land-bearing tetrapods going back to the water but unable to get gills back are hallmarks of elegance?
The only reason, I suspect, that you hold your views is because of a deep ignorance of nature. Oh, and what's with the "randomness" petulance? Oh well, the Salem Hypothesis confirmed again.
Here's news, pal, you're not a scientist.
You're not making your position clear, and you seem to be falling into the very trap that the Salem Hypothesis refers to.
Nature can be complicated, but actual manufactured artifacts tend towards find optimum solutions. Actually looking at living systems, you do not find optimization. Evolution does not push towards optimum solutions, but rather towards solutions that are good enough for the environment. Worse, once a population starts down a specific evolutionary path, and the environmental conditions change, they can't just simply drop evolutionary innovations and restart the clock. Evolving populations have to work with what they have. When the ancestors of whales went back to the ocean, they didn't get to back to having gills like they're ancient ancestors. They remained air-breathing mammals, and the best that could be done is a slow alteration of existing land-living tetrapod breathing apparatus for an aquatic life.
As much as nature has produced complexity in living systems, it has also created a vast number of compromises. Human bipedalism is my favorite, because while it has given Hominids incredible advantages, we are still only partially adapted to it, and from there we get a large number of knee and spinal problems. I suspect any engineer would be able to come up with a far better arrangement than evolution has produced. And yet we have the Salem Hypothesis.
The first thing we were taught in my typing class was to stop reading what we were typing. To a well-trained and experienced touch typist it should be irrelevant whether what they're typing is ""Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", or "Mr. Stevens agreed to meet with the principals at 4:00PM on Friday to work out the details for the transfer" or "sadjlkj aoirwtoiqj34t nas904845$$42jgf".
If you're making mistakes because the text is hard, you're reading the text, and that not only means higher error rates, it also means you're not typing as fast as you could.
It's pretty pathetic. I learned on manuals and IBM Selectrics (now there was a kick-ass keyboard), and got my speeds up to 90wpm, a perfectly respectable typing speed for a secretary 20 years ago. It just galls me to look at kids nowadays fumble around on keyboards, getting pathetic speeds with horrific accuracy. The first thing my high school typing teacher did was to break the will of hunt-and-peck typists of their spirit, like some sort of office ed. drill sergeant. It paid off, no one in the class was below 50wpm at the end of the term.
Up until the advent of cheap OCR, I was still being handed stuff to type from copy, and could get into that weird tstate where you no longer see words or sentences, but simply characters. Now, of course, I watch people scanning in a few pages and then spending 20 minutes fixing all the spelling mistakes, and thinking "Ah, my, 15 years ago I could have typed that two or three times over."
Biology... so you don't show up on the Internet a few years later insisting that your experience and training in engineering equips you to declare evolution false.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis
Divert attention from what? A crap paper by an oil company shill who could only get it published in an obscure journal, and still managed to get caught peddling bullshit?
As his critics have pointed out, Spencer has basically just created a model that confirms his own claims. More to the point, he avoided going to a mainstream journal with this paper, obviously knowing that he'd get laughed out of the room. Where someone is going to try to publish pseudoscientific bullshit, this is the preferred method is to do so via some obscure journal, thus proclaiming "We are published!"
See the Synthese debacle for a similar ID stunt.
The only gravy train I see around here is the Heartland Institute gravy train, funded to a rather huge sum by Big Oil. And shockers, Spencer has a close association to them.
Read Spencer's own blog, where three or four other climatologists tear his claims apart. But do it quick. Spencer, I suspect, won't let any post that isn't from like minded ideologues survive long.
Well, more to the point, read his critics, who he seems determined to ban. They are making cogent points, calling him on his methodological failings, and he's basically sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "Neener neener neener!" and basically claiming that the IPCC is screwing with him.
As I said, Spencer is a shill, and his peers know this. He's the Michael Behe of climatology, except even Behe is smarter than to try to get any of his ID bullshit published in any biology or molecular biology journals. Of course, Behe's benefactors don't have the vast sums of wealth that the oil companies do.
Are you hoping to evade the question in this manner?
I asked a pretty straightforward question, so are you going to give a straightforward answer?
Go to his bloody blog, where three or four actual researchers are doing that right now. But do it quick before Spencer bans them and deletes their posts.
I'd say being an ID advocate is a damned good litmus test for rationality. Actually claiming that Creationism can be scientifically validated simply because you remove the word "God" from your assertions and replace it with "Intelligent Designer" suggests a troubling lack of rational capacity.
I'm sure you can actually provide some verifiable evidence for this "behind the scenes" claim, right? I mean, you wouldn't just a liar would you?
Let's take the mitts off here. Spencer is a posterboy for the Heartland Institute, and so basically an oil company shill.
Lemme guess, we're going to hear more about Al Gore, the pseudo-skeptics' favorite whipping boy.