I just think our government is so retarded. Why pussyfoot around with the color of peoples' hair and the variety of equipment they are packing in their underwear? We don't need 34 pieces of information. We just need one data field and then everyone will agree that the U.S. is eminently reasonably. And that field is:
Terrorist: Yes/No?
No wonder things are so fucked up. All this innuendo and inference. Just ask the damn question. Here's an example: "Do you believe in killing people for the glory of your God?" If the answer is, "yes", that person goes in the terrorist category, and we put "Yes" in the Terrorist data field.
And any day now, Architecture and Carpentry will become obsolete, replaced by manufactured home/office "assemblers". Such Assemblers will have Lego PhDs and all manufactured units will be made out of legos; and not any of that new Mindstorm crap or anything. Just the most basic collection of: 1x1, 2x1, 2x2, and 2x3 pieces, plus an infinite supply of the big green ground panels.
A lot of people are saying a closed system can't generate thrust, so I was thinking: well, what if you put a magnet on metal coil. It just sits there and then you run juice through the coil and *BLAM* the thing goes flying. That's thrust of a sort, I suppose. But then I get this conservation of momentum issue. If you have an object just floating out in space and interacting with nothing but itself, then yeah, some material has to go one way for the object to go the other way.
But the thing that I think most people don't really think about is that an object isn't really ever "alone" out there. There are incredibly massive forces at play all over the place as far as I can see. The Earth zooms around the Sun with a huge connection keeping it in orbit. The Sun has a relationship like that to the galactic core, and so on out to larger scales. I'm no scientist of course, but I can certainly see for instance that a device similar to what is described in the article could interact with the Earth itself. As in, the Earth is the giant gravimagnetic object and you circulate power in this object, which creates a powerful repulsive force. It doesn't seem much different to me than the coil and magnet example I gave earlier.
Anyway, I'm sure the explanation this guy is giving is balogna, but that's not to say that what he's doing doesn't have a tangible interaction with Earth's gravitational or magnetic field for other reasons. Or maybe it is. You tell me;-)
The only bit of wisdom that I would add is that what I've found over the years is: you need balance between two things: consuming and producing. The underlying issue with TV and many other consumer eletronics is the "consume" in them. It is important to consume in life: food, information, etc. The quality is important, too. But equally important is that we produce something. It can be a sculpture (like your older son), or a painting, or photograph, or a program. And so on. There needs to be this balance between producing and consuming. Real growth in life comes from consuming some things and then investing ourselves into producing something with passion. From that comes skill, and from skill comes products which are things that we can share with others. From that sharing comes the network of relationships that we build with people in our life.
I think today really is different from 50 years ago, and 100, and 500, and 1000 years ago for only one reason. The volume of available information has increased so tremendously that without the proper skills, we do not know how to preserve the balance of consuming and producing. A lot of parents do not have this skill because the available information threshold for children only exploded very recently, so we are in a tremendous state of flux. But I can say with some certainty, that our children will learn the necessity of this balance, and they will develop this skill for balance and pass it on to their children. Right now, we adults may wrestle with the right degree of balance between outdoor activities and playing WoW or PSP, but when our children make it through to adulthood and the working world, their immune system will be stronger than ours likely was and they will have learned to keep balance in this rapidly changing world.
For sure we can help with that. We've got the maturity to save them some growing pains and take the edge of some of the lessons, but they will learn the important lessons sure enough. The one major lesson I think is tremendously important to pass on is the importance of producing something, some creative work that comes from a passion for some topic. Some kids naturally come to that, but others get lost in the sea of consumerism.
Given the end of your post about introducing your children to the joys of creative work, you know this lesson already and will pass it on. Not everyone realizes it, though. I know a lot of parents that are adrift in a sea of time pressure. They measure their children's success by the approval of other's ("If he gets A's in class, I did a good job raising him.") How easy to relieve ourselves from personal responsibility in critically thinking about how well we have equipped our child to find happiness in the world! Such things are the fast food of parenting in the broader sense. How can we pass on lessons of balance when our own life is not balanced itself? Can't! We should be worrying less about what the effect of consumerism is on our children and more about its affect on us, so we can find balance and pass on that.
It is such a strange thing that our standard of living has consistently risen, but the amount of quality time people devote to their children's success has not increased and has probably dwindled. Such is the liberty of a modern society. The freedom to measure our success by our ability to be the greatest consumer on the block...and there we see it. Can't teach our children balance between producing and consuming when we are busy measuring our success by the ability to consume. Our media programs us to do this.
Ever see a commercial that was trying to sell you on the idea of sitting down and writing a book, or drawing a picture, or making a sculpture? Without the subtext that they want you to buy something? It's laughable isn't it? Just utterly insane in our society. We don't spend our money advertise the merits of producing. We spend our money to motivate further consumerism. We spend our m
And Shakespear suffers only a minor setback. The only apparent side effect being that several of his tragedies are reclassified as comedies by the literati: "To be or not to be, that [to be] the question."
I think this whole thread is silly. All you need is an ice breaker. Just put on some bright red high heels, a tight pair of jeans, and a tee shirt that says, "I'd do me." I positively guarantee immediate acceptance from the men on the team and amusing comments like, "Me too!" and "I like your hair today!" and "OMG, girl! You have got to tell me where you shop."
If you speak imprecisely, or otherwise make errors in your prose, many people will take issue and nitpick your comments to death. If you were hoping for quick and constructive discourse, you might receive quite the opposite. You might also receive no response at all because another category of reader will write you off. "Why should I care what he says, when he does not care enough to correctly say what he says?"
Of course, some readers are mature enough to glance through what you said and respond to the spirit of the post rather waste everyones' time by pointing out that you have trouble with plurality and the spelling of the word "sentence".
Wee!
I don't play RTS games anymore because the clicking is so annoying. The games are so complicated with all the units and it is a definite skill that takes long hours of practice to learn keybindings and effective manipulations. I stopped when the UI was getting in the way of the strategy: as in, I would look at a situation and say, "Ok, I need those units over there, this guy has to go here, these three heal those 6, and that guy needs to scout NE." Then I would realize just how irritating it was to make that happen when I was already moving on thoughtwise to large strategic issues and next things I would want to do.
At that points virtually all of these games became tedious and boring...for me, anyway. I really loved Starcraft, Sim City, Civilization, etc. But I won't play them anymore other than briefly for nostalgic value and when I do I get annoyed straight away by the bottleneck of the UI.
I used to address every email and delete it immediately or hold onto it only long enough to get closure on the thread. I did that for many years and then last year, I figured: "Let's try a different approach and see where that leads." So now I don't delete a damn thing and if I run out of space I just chop off the oldest half. According to the article, I'm having my midlife crisis.
They will succeed because I can buy a prettier computer and run Linux or MacOS on it. *snort* "We are Microsoft and at last we have spoken on the proper way a computer should look. Now that you have been illuminated by our brilliance, go forth and do what we have said." *spit*
So when we give up rights for the war on 'terrorism' how can we EVER get them back?
This is the essential function of revolution, which has happened and will continue to happen ad nauseum until human nature changes (which it will likely never). People have a built in burning need for "more" which means when they get "more" they entrench themselves and keep gathering up even "more" (money, power, executive privilege, whatever). Considering what history has taught us about this pattern, I'm surprised anyone thinks we will peacefully resolve these issues. It's like a person agreeing to not get the last word in an argument--that takes more maturity than most people have (and politicians are too often not elected on the basis of maturity). So the resolution is to fight until someone dies. Presto. Someone has the last word. Idiotic, but true throughout history again and again.
Look all over the world at the strife and in all cases, it is this one simple mechanic.
Yes. I personally find the crap on youtube.com to be pretty hilarious, so I'm not even sure I can call it crap, but I probably wouldn't pay money to watch that stuff in a theatre: well, OK--maybe that AskANinja guy.
Thanks for the law, Sturgeon! I look forward to killing you soon!
The more abundant the resources, the less effective the selection process. Put another way: as the cost of production falls, volume rises, because peoples' ability to be bored remains a constant.
Compare these extremes: Pixar Studios and youtube.com. In the former case you have a company that has staked its success on a small number of expensive to produce products and consequently the selection process is very stringent before anything reaches distribution. In the latter case, the cost of production and distribution is astonishingly low and so is volume of crap.
Technology lowers the bar. Just like having cars leads to fatter asses on average, the diminishing cost efficiency of TV and mainstream theatre production and distribution puts the content in the middle of the quality vs. volume graph.
So yeah, there is more crap. It's inevitable. But also, there is a higher percentage of crap because the forces that cull lower quality are also weaker.
I think it is a mistake to state that it is only with the addition of Western science that progress will be made. There have been 4000 years of progress. Eastern medicine has also been driven by external observation and experimentation for thousands of years. The difference is that it has also been driven by internal observation, and Eastern medicine is past the stage of "If I don't have an explanation for this that fits my current model of the Universe, it doesn't exist," which is regrettably the stage that many Western scientists occupy. In medicine that might be related to all the money they get from the pharmaceutical companies that emphasize long-term treatment of symptoms, but that's a different discussion.
But my point is: this is really, really old news. I didn't say it was unimportant that Western scientists finally found some information that might possibly perhaps allow them to give credence to a huge body of scientific work done under a different model that they usually reject as unscientific. And I did not say or imply anything about what can or cannot be done with bioelectric energy or energy from other sources. I posted because the context of the article and some of the discussion struck me as, "Wow, this is new!" In reality it is very old information.
I've been practicing Qigong for about 5 years and I can tell you for a fact that damage causes an energetic potential in the area of the wound because I can feel it. The area around the wound becomes "fuzzy" somewhat like the resistance you feel when passing your hand through an area charged with static electricity. Is that scientific? Well, I think it is. It is measurable and repeatable, and if I focus on moving energy through that area in a particular way, I can tell you that it heals faster. Over the years, I've had plenty of injuries from which to obtain experimental results. People have been doing that in Qigong (though the practices go by many names in different cultures) for thousands of years. I'm not saying anything new, which is why I don't spend much time saying it to people. And most people will disagree with you without even investing the time to experience it.
But there's a wealth of science out there about this topic already if you are interested.
150 years ago, some guy said, "Oh, electricity can heal." 2000-4000 years ago, some guys in India and China said the same thing and--voila! Yoga and Qigong. Both of which move biolectric energy through the body and can be used for healing purposes. Oldest. News. Ever.
They kidnapped a Draeni pally and got the power from him.
I have this funny image of a bunch of elves confronting the Draeni and yelling, "Give me your God. Give me God now!!!" Sorry, pal...it doesn't actually work that way. And yeah, I read the flimsy lore.
Nothing interesting will happen until they can do EM shielding. It's ridiculous that we send human beings up in tin cans and hope they aren't torn apart by accelerated particles or solar activity. Then when you've got some longevity, there's always the joy of fungus eating away at your hull. I wish we'd spend more time preserving the home we've got instead of thinking of ways to get to another rock that we can mess up.
Oh, gravity. Need that, too. The body gets really messed up without it. Solve that one (a way to create artifical gravity--and no I don't mean centrifugal force) and you go a long way to solving propulsion issues as well. I guess it seems silly...sure we can put someone in a can and fire them at the moon...but the difference between that and something really long term viable is enormous. I don't even know why we'd bother going to the moon until we can do it in a safe way and have any hope of creating self-sustaining habitation that won't be destroyed by random meteor hits (no atmosphere remember and a seasonal meteor shower is risk).
Shielding is the big thing. The Earth has an atmosphere which is an incredible thing. It protects us from the sun (not just the radiant energy but also the sporadic emissions), cosmic radiation, meteors, you name it. It is an amazing thing, and if we want to go anywhere that doesn't have one, we need to make one even if it's very localized. We need them around our ships (the Earth is a huge ship in a real sense) and we need them around our settlements. Otherwise we're ducks in shooting gallery.
Well, what do I know. I've been hit over the head one too many times by old Star Trek episodes. Best movie I ever saw was Starman in which the ship was a gigantic sphere, which probably had a gigantic engine and gravity generator at the central core, with a thin habitable layer on the surface of the sphere and then a reflective shell of shielding around that. Which just goes to show you that to do anything useful in space, you need a lot of balls.
I practice Taijiquan and Qigong and a while back, I started feeling just awful if I sat for more than 30 minutes, so I put my computer on my kitchen counter and I stand while I use it. In Qigong we have standing meditation, so I just do that while I do whatever I am doing on the computer. I get things done, I don't get stiff or uncomfortable, and I can do some of my training while I work on other things. It's important to walk around every so often to keep the body happy, and it's much easier to do that when you're not sitting on your duff the whole time. If there's a break in what I'm doing, I just drift over to another room and do chores or whatever. That sounds odd, but previously, if I were sitting, I just wouldn't think to actually get up (so much effort, I mean Woah!) and do it. Anyway, I get more done, I don't dally while I'm at the computer, and I do more things around the house as well.
It burns a bunch of calories as well, which I found pretty interesting. But to address the issue of feeling more alert or energetic, I would have to say its a natural result of the added blood flow and circulation you have when you engage the large muscles in your legs to stand. More nutrients are getting too your brain, whereas if you sit, circulation (oxygen in particular) is reduced to the brain. It's not uncommon for people that sit a long time and suddenly stand up, to become dizzy or nearly black out because of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorist: Yes/No?
No wonder things are so fucked up. All this innuendo and inference. Just ask the damn question. Here's an example: "Do you believe in killing people for the glory of your God?" If the answer is, "yes", that person goes in the terrorist category, and we put "Yes" in the Terrorist data field.
<napoleon>Well, Duh.</napoleon>
Choosing to not gamble requires no defense.
And any day now, Architecture and Carpentry will become obsolete, replaced by manufactured home/office "assemblers". Such Assemblers will have Lego PhDs and all manufactured units will be made out of legos; and not any of that new Mindstorm crap or anything. Just the most basic collection of: 1x1, 2x1, 2x2, and 2x3 pieces, plus an infinite supply of the big green ground panels.
But the thing that I think most people don't really think about is that an object isn't really ever "alone" out there. There are incredibly massive forces at play all over the place as far as I can see. The Earth zooms around the Sun with a huge connection keeping it in orbit. The Sun has a relationship like that to the galactic core, and so on out to larger scales. I'm no scientist of course, but I can certainly see for instance that a device similar to what is described in the article could interact with the Earth itself. As in, the Earth is the giant gravimagnetic object and you circulate power in this object, which creates a powerful repulsive force. It doesn't seem much different to me than the coil and magnet example I gave earlier.
Anyway, I'm sure the explanation this guy is giving is balogna, but that's not to say that what he's doing doesn't have a tangible interaction with Earth's gravitational or magnetic field for other reasons. Or maybe it is. You tell me ;-)
Like in Vietnam, or Cuba, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or...
"John Spartan, you're fined two credits for violation of the verbal-morality statute."
The only bit of wisdom that I would add is that what I've found over the years is: you need balance between two things: consuming and producing. The underlying issue with TV and many other consumer eletronics is the "consume" in them. It is important to consume in life: food, information, etc. The quality is important, too. But equally important is that we produce something. It can be a sculpture (like your older son), or a painting, or photograph, or a program. And so on. There needs to be this balance between producing and consuming. Real growth in life comes from consuming some things and then investing ourselves into producing something with passion. From that comes skill, and from skill comes products which are things that we can share with others. From that sharing comes the network of relationships that we build with people in our life.
I think today really is different from 50 years ago, and 100, and 500, and 1000 years ago for only one reason. The volume of available information has increased so tremendously that without the proper skills, we do not know how to preserve the balance of consuming and producing. A lot of parents do not have this skill because the available information threshold for children only exploded very recently, so we are in a tremendous state of flux. But I can say with some certainty, that our children will learn the necessity of this balance, and they will develop this skill for balance and pass it on to their children. Right now, we adults may wrestle with the right degree of balance between outdoor activities and playing WoW or PSP, but when our children make it through to adulthood and the working world, their immune system will be stronger than ours likely was and they will have learned to keep balance in this rapidly changing world.
For sure we can help with that. We've got the maturity to save them some growing pains and take the edge of some of the lessons, but they will learn the important lessons sure enough. The one major lesson I think is tremendously important to pass on is the importance of producing something, some creative work that comes from a passion for some topic. Some kids naturally come to that, but others get lost in the sea of consumerism.
Given the end of your post about introducing your children to the joys of creative work, you know this lesson already and will pass it on. Not everyone realizes it, though. I know a lot of parents that are adrift in a sea of time pressure. They measure their children's success by the approval of other's ("If he gets A's in class, I did a good job raising him.") How easy to relieve ourselves from personal responsibility in critically thinking about how well we have equipped our child to find happiness in the world! Such things are the fast food of parenting in the broader sense. How can we pass on lessons of balance when our own life is not balanced itself? Can't! We should be worrying less about what the effect of consumerism is on our children and more about its affect on us, so we can find balance and pass on that.
It is such a strange thing that our standard of living has consistently risen, but the amount of quality time people devote to their children's success has not increased and has probably dwindled. Such is the liberty of a modern society. The freedom to measure our success by our ability to be the greatest consumer on the block...and there we see it. Can't teach our children balance between producing and consuming when we are busy measuring our success by the ability to consume. Our media programs us to do this.
Ever see a commercial that was trying to sell you on the idea of sitting down and writing a book, or drawing a picture, or making a sculpture? Without the subtext that they want you to buy something? It's laughable isn't it? Just utterly insane in our society. We don't spend our money advertise the merits of producing. We spend our money to motivate further consumerism. We spend our m
I think these writers are a bunch of stupidheads. I've been using consumer electronics for 30 years, and my friends are still telling me to grow up.
And Shakespear suffers only a minor setback. The only apparent side effect being that several of his tragedies are reclassified as comedies by the literati: "To be or not to be, that [to be] the question."
I think this whole thread is silly. All you need is an ice breaker. Just put on some bright red high heels, a tight pair of jeans, and a tee shirt that says, "I'd do me." I positively guarantee immediate acceptance from the men on the team and amusing comments like, "Me too!" and "I like your hair today!" and "OMG, girl! You have got to tell me where you shop."
If you speak imprecisely, or otherwise make errors in your prose, many people will take issue and nitpick your comments to death. If you were hoping for quick and constructive discourse, you might receive quite the opposite. You might also receive no response at all because another category of reader will write you off. "Why should I care what he says, when he does not care enough to correctly say what he says?" Of course, some readers are mature enough to glance through what you said and respond to the spirit of the post rather waste everyones' time by pointing out that you have trouble with plurality and the spelling of the word "sentence". Wee!
My problem is that when I see the people that send those emails, they know how much of an idiotic retard I think they are, even if I don't say a word.
At that points virtually all of these games became tedious and boring...for me, anyway. I really loved Starcraft, Sim City, Civilization, etc. But I won't play them anymore other than briefly for nostalgic value and when I do I get annoyed straight away by the bottleneck of the UI.
. o o O ( Where are all the giant-brained goldfish? )
According to me, the whole thing is nonsense.
They will succeed because I can buy a prettier computer and run Linux or MacOS on it. *snort* "We are Microsoft and at last we have spoken on the proper way a computer should look. Now that you have been illuminated by our brilliance, go forth and do what we have said." *spit*
Look all over the world at the strife and in all cases, it is this one simple mechanic.
non-Geek: "Is this a sexual reference? I don't get it...are they talking about that weird cyber thing?"
Thanks for the law, Sturgeon! I look forward to killing you soon!
Compare these extremes: Pixar Studios and youtube.com. In the former case you have a company that has staked its success on a small number of expensive to produce products and consequently the selection process is very stringent before anything reaches distribution. In the latter case, the cost of production and distribution is astonishingly low and so is volume of crap.
Technology lowers the bar. Just like having cars leads to fatter asses on average, the diminishing cost efficiency of TV and mainstream theatre production and distribution puts the content in the middle of the quality vs. volume graph.
So yeah, there is more crap. It's inevitable. But also, there is a higher percentage of crap because the forces that cull lower quality are also weaker.
But my point is: this is really, really old news. I didn't say it was unimportant that Western scientists finally found some information that might possibly perhaps allow them to give credence to a huge body of scientific work done under a different model that they usually reject as unscientific. And I did not say or imply anything about what can or cannot be done with bioelectric energy or energy from other sources. I posted because the context of the article and some of the discussion struck me as, "Wow, this is new!" In reality it is very old information.
I've been practicing Qigong for about 5 years and I can tell you for a fact that damage causes an energetic potential in the area of the wound because I can feel it. The area around the wound becomes "fuzzy" somewhat like the resistance you feel when passing your hand through an area charged with static electricity. Is that scientific? Well, I think it is. It is measurable and repeatable, and if I focus on moving energy through that area in a particular way, I can tell you that it heals faster. Over the years, I've had plenty of injuries from which to obtain experimental results. People have been doing that in Qigong (though the practices go by many names in different cultures) for thousands of years. I'm not saying anything new, which is why I don't spend much time saying it to people. And most people will disagree with you without even investing the time to experience it.
But there's a wealth of science out there about this topic already if you are interested.
150 years ago, some guy said, "Oh, electricity can heal." 2000-4000 years ago, some guys in India and China said the same thing and--voila! Yoga and Qigong. Both of which move biolectric energy through the body and can be used for healing purposes. Oldest. News. Ever.
They kidnapped a Draeni pally and got the power from him. I have this funny image of a bunch of elves confronting the Draeni and yelling, "Give me your God. Give me God now!!!" Sorry, pal...it doesn't actually work that way. And yeah, I read the flimsy lore.
Oh, gravity. Need that, too. The body gets really messed up without it. Solve that one (a way to create artifical gravity--and no I don't mean centrifugal force) and you go a long way to solving propulsion issues as well. I guess it seems silly...sure we can put someone in a can and fire them at the moon...but the difference between that and something really long term viable is enormous. I don't even know why we'd bother going to the moon until we can do it in a safe way and have any hope of creating self-sustaining habitation that won't be destroyed by random meteor hits (no atmosphere remember and a seasonal meteor shower is risk).
Shielding is the big thing. The Earth has an atmosphere which is an incredible thing. It protects us from the sun (not just the radiant energy but also the sporadic emissions), cosmic radiation, meteors, you name it. It is an amazing thing, and if we want to go anywhere that doesn't have one, we need to make one even if it's very localized. We need them around our ships (the Earth is a huge ship in a real sense) and we need them around our settlements. Otherwise we're ducks in shooting gallery.
Well, what do I know. I've been hit over the head one too many times by old Star Trek episodes. Best movie I ever saw was Starman in which the ship was a gigantic sphere, which probably had a gigantic engine and gravity generator at the central core, with a thin habitable layer on the surface of the sphere and then a reflective shell of shielding around that. Which just goes to show you that to do anything useful in space, you need a lot of balls.
It burns a bunch of calories as well, which I found pretty interesting. But to address the issue of feeling more alert or energetic, I would have to say its a natural result of the added blood flow and circulation you have when you engage the large muscles in your legs to stand. More nutrients are getting too your brain, whereas if you sit, circulation (oxygen in particular) is reduced to the brain. It's not uncommon for people that sit a long time and suddenly stand up, to become dizzy or nearly black out because of this.