Of course we will call the crash a war and blame the whole thing (including the initial shortage of resources), on the loser's nastyness.
One of the most interesting (and chilling) sections of Jared Diamond's Collapse was the studies of the Rwandan genocide that documented how the same level of "genocide" occurred in tribally homogeneous areas. One particular area had a single Tutsui, but the death ratio was comparable to the rest of the country. To a large extent, the patterns of murder in this area appeared connected with land disputes caused by overpopulation.
Under-population threatens to be a serious problem to developed economies in future - this is partly why immigration is allowed in such large numbers.
Assuming we ever get there. Have a look at Jared Diamond's Collapse. I agree that it could be an issue if we do get there, but it is not clear to me that we will.
I'm not saying it'll happen for sure, but I can well believe that in 30 years we'll look back on worries about over-population the same way we look at 70s worries about global cooling today.
Plese stop repeating this meme - it is simply not true.
Considering the Greek attitude towards practical applications of mathematics, I sort of doubt Archimedes invented integral calculus with physics in mind.
Penrose for instance suggests that yes, there is an average 500 ms delay, but that is compensated by quantum effects that are time symmetric - that the brain actually sees into the future, which then is delayed to create a real-time decision process. While this is rejected as absurd by a majority of neuroscientists and physicists, it is a good example of how passionately some people feel about the role of the brain.
On the other hand, Dean Radin (while barking mad in some ways) has done an experiment that suggests that this is actually correct. His results have been reproduced by other groups using different equipment but the same basic idea: You do a series of tests showing people a mixture of disturbing and relaxing images under computer control and record their responses. Radin use galvanic skin responses, and a European team used live brain MRI (IIRC) but both got the same result - there is a statistically significant incidence of response before the stimulus. I don't know what this says about consciousness, but it seems reasonable to investigate atemporal phenomena in the brain more carefully. John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics seems relevant here as a physical model for how this might happen. And if Cramer is right, then it seems reasonable that evolution would be able to harness such physical laws even if we don't know about them.
And in the case of anything that challenges deterministic orthodoxy, we may be talking about laws that a large number of working scientists refuse to even consider - even though there is no reason a priori why they should not. The irony here is that determinism grew out of theological notions of Natural Law but is now so much a part of the scientific culture that anything else is treated as heresy!
With merit being skill and merit being decoupled from wealth in absolute terms. who decides who gets what and why should someone have more then someone else?
Probably the same people that do it now - the owners of the machines.
I'm not even convinced that the universe is deterministic, but current computers most definitely are. The brain may well be taking advantage of physics we don't even know about.
After reviewing the latest in the US political scene, getting machines smarter than humans isn't going to take so much as we thought. My toaster almost qualifies now.
"The strongest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill
This doesn't mean anyone is talking "wrong". Unless you are trying to be silly, you can't really speak your native tongue in any way but the right one!
I don't think it is as simple as this. Yes, certain kinds of usage are regional (says the expat Brit living in Seattle and gritting his teeth;-) but there is another class of word substitution error that I feel impoverishes the language. My canonical example is people who say "take a different tact" instead of "tack". This error loses the nautical imagery of the original expression and prmotes gibberish.
They are still an "evil oil company" thus far as I can see
A few years ago I thoguth I'd "vote with my wallet" and try to patronise the "least evil" oil companies. I quickly discovered that there is no such thing and switched to my convenience. Well, except Exxon, which seems to take evil to a whole new level...
What puzzles me is whether these more intricate and complex interactions are really organization or whether organization does not exist and is a byproduct of what we define as intelligence. Humans look at themselves and the world around them and define it in terms of patterns. They label the patterns, discover how to create new patterns through the interaction of patterns. Patterns of matter, elements, forces, properties, what do all those words have in common? They are labels we have assigned to patterns.
I've often wondered about this WRT the second law of thermodynamics. If you look at the second law as a statement about the sizes of partitions in phase space, then while it is true, one is left wondering about the arbitrariness of the partitions. They are useful to us, but are they really there?
Put another way, is the second law really a law or an just engineering maxim?
Back in about 1980 or so I was an AOR ("Album Oriented Rock") DJ. That was a format that allowed you to play interesting stuff but also required a playing a fair amount of popular tracks to pay the bills. One of the steaming piles of talentless dreck on our rotation in those years was whatever the Subject band had most recently excreted. Several of us noticed at the time that you could tell the age of their albums by the amount of movement in the console VU meters (yes, analogue meters children - I am an ooold fart!) In other words, to keep the listeners interested in this stuff, they had to keep jacking up the compression level with each release. Once the needles stopped moving, guess what? They dropped off the face of the earth.
We got plenty of space we can cover with solar cells so it's not important that they are extremely efficient, just cheap enough so it doesn't cost much to cover large areas.
While this may be true at the governance level, it is not true at the individual level. I live in a city house on a smallish lot, so putting solar panels on my house is limited by my roof space. So lack of efficiency is a deal breaker for me.
That doesn't get much attention, but let them leave "In God We Trust" off a dollar coin and people are all up about that. Hypocrites.
I love this one.
A clueless family member forwarded me this meme and the funniest thing about it was that both mottos are on the coins - they are engraved around the edge (just like on some European coins.) There were a few accidentally struck without it, but they are valuable and not really in circulation. Plus there was this bit about the Founding Fathers(tm) coming up with this motto for the coinage, when in fact it was Lincoln's Treasury Secretary who caved in to a letter writing campaign by fundamentalists (surprise, surprise). "In God we Trust" wasn't even an official motto of the US until an act of Congress in 1956. Up to then, the country's motto was "E Pluribus Unum" (which is also on the coinage).
Getting back on topic, I just want to say that many Christians find these priorities as abhorrant as you do. "As you do to the least of my brethren, so you do to Me."
All I can say is, FUD of the highest order. No astronaut in his/her right mind (Nowak notwithstanding) would be drunk on launch day. There are dozens of abort scenarios a Shuttle astronaut has to be ready for if something goes wrong and no astronaut would jeopardize their safety and the safety of their crewmates by being less than 100% ready to go. I also don't believe for a second that any Shuttle commander would let someone fly on their crew if they were inebriated.
I'm not even sure it is physically possible. Astronauts are strapped in 4-6 hours before launch. To guarantee you were sloshed at liftoff, you would have to down at least 6 shots just before they started putting you in your suit. I think even a strapping male astronaut would be hard pressed to stand upright and not drool with that much booze in their system...
Next time you figure out how to put something the size of an apartment building on display *without* being infested by bugs, squirrels, and pollution you let me know, mm'kay?
If you could work out a way to incorporate algae into the sewage treatment process, you'd kill two birds with one stone.
Even better, if the municipalities could sell the fuel stock, maybe we could convert a large part of the country's foreign trade debt into tax base. Just think - instead of paying unstable foreign governments huge amounts of cash, you pay it to local government and reduce/eliminate your taxes.
A big criticism of quantum mechanics (still) is that nobody is exactly sure the minimum you have to do to one entangled particle to "measure" it, which determines what the person with the other entangled particle will he when he "measures" his particle. Schrodinger's cat paradox has never beeon completely satisfactorily answered. The existance of quantum entanglement is well established, though.
This sounds like the Copenhagen Interpreatation. You should read one of Dr. Cramer's papers on an alternative interpretation of the QM formalism called the Transactional Interpretation. It is the model that he is using to think about these issues. It also has a nice discussion of the mainstream interpretations (including the CI).
And even if there was a way to get read of all fear reactions, you'd still have a BRAIN and the ability to choose not to do things that you reason are too risky.
You should read a book called Descartes' Error by neroscientist Antonio D'Amasio. The book is all about how we use emotions to facilitate reasoning and has several examples of patients with the "lack of rections" you describe all of whom are incapable of making even simple decisions like when their next appointment should be. They disappear down the rabbit hole of cost-benefit analysis and never finish because emotions are what cause us to assign values in such analyses.
So while this sounds cool, it will not have the effect you seem to be hoping for. Bur as you say, it may be of value for folks who have been deeply traumatised.
If you assume the universe is infinite in space but finite in time, then it's possible that there simply hasn't been time for light from objects more than ~14 billion light years away to reach us.
I believe that there is also the assumption that objects are not receding at greater than the speed of light. The expanding universe seems to imply that the size of the universe that we can actually interact with is finite.
I've never understood the appeal of Everett-Wheeler for storytelling. Sure, there are an infinite number of universes where "anything can happen". The problem, though, is that everything happens. Every concievable choice by a character and every concievable consequence happens somewhere, which negates the meaning of the narrative. This is one of the things that I found annoying about Pullman's His Dark Materials. The story would have been just fine if he had used some other parallel universe mechanism (like his bete noir C.S.Lewis did with Narnia;-)) and in practice, that is basically what he does. So please lay off the storytelling angle - it renders all stories meaningless.
And while everyone is getting all misty eyed about EW, here is a critique of it written by physicist John Cramer (the guy doing the time signalling research at the University of Washingtion that is being funded by donations). A quote:
With each splitting of the universe, spatial regions megaparsecs distant from an event locus are instantaneously split into alternate realities due to the distant quantum event. It would seem that both the propagation speed of the splitting and its simultaneity are manifestly inconsistent with relativistic invariance.
(And lest anyone get their knickers in a twist over this quote, Cramer also describes EW as "perhaps the most 'heroic' of the efforts to deal with the problem of collapse.")
The whole article this analysis is part of is well worth reading as it presents a good description of the issues involved in thinking about all these interpretations. It also presents an interesting interpetation that some readers may not have encountered - the Transactional Interpretation - which is built on work done by Feynman. Even if you don't agree with his views, I think most will find it an interesting read.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the Greek attitude towards practical applications of mathematics, I sort of doubt Archimedes invented integral calculus with physics in mind.
On the other hand, Dean Radin (while barking mad in some ways) has done an experiment that suggests that this is actually correct. His results have been reproduced by other groups using different equipment but the same basic idea: You do a series of tests showing people a mixture of disturbing and relaxing images under computer control and record their responses. Radin use galvanic skin responses, and a European team used live brain MRI (IIRC) but both got the same result - there is a statistically significant incidence of response before the stimulus. I don't know what this says about consciousness, but it seems reasonable to investigate atemporal phenomena in the brain more carefully. John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics seems relevant here as a physical model for how this might happen. And if Cramer is right, then it seems reasonable that evolution would be able to harness such physical laws even if we don't know about them.
And in the case of anything that challenges deterministic orthodoxy, we may be talking about laws that a large number of working scientists refuse to even consider - even though there is no reason a priori why they should not. The irony here is that determinism grew out of theological notions of Natural Law but is now so much a part of the scientific culture that anything else is treated as heresy!
I'm not even convinced that the universe is deterministic, but current computers most definitely are. The brain may well be taking advantage of physics we don't even know about.
"The strongest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill
- Tom Lehrer
Put another way, is the second law really a law or an just engineering maxim?
Back in about 1980 or so I was an AOR ("Album Oriented Rock") DJ. That was a format that allowed you to play interesting stuff but also required a playing a fair amount of popular tracks to pay the bills. One of the steaming piles of talentless dreck on our rotation in those years was whatever the Subject band had most recently excreted. Several of us noticed at the time that you could tell the age of their albums by the amount of movement in the console VU meters (yes, analogue meters children - I am an ooold fart!) In other words, to keep the listeners interested in this stuff, they had to keep jacking up the compression level with each release. Once the needles stopped moving, guess what? They dropped off the face of the earth.
For anyone who finds space.com as annoying as I do, here is the link to the original story at NASA's Spitzer site.
A clueless family member forwarded me this meme and the funniest thing about it was that both mottos are on the coins - they are engraved around the edge (just like on some European coins.) There were a few accidentally struck without it, but they are valuable and not really in circulation. Plus there was this bit about the Founding Fathers(tm) coming up with this motto for the coinage, when in fact it was Lincoln's Treasury Secretary who caved in to a letter writing campaign by fundamentalists (surprise, surprise). "In God we Trust" wasn't even an official motto of the US until an act of Congress in 1956. Up to then, the country's motto was "E Pluribus Unum" (which is also on the coinage).
Getting back on topic, I just want to say that many Christians find these priorities as abhorrant as you do. "As you do to the least of my brethren, so you do to Me."
You mean like this?
(Next time you set yourself up for such a obvious smackdown, maybe you could have to courage to post as yourself, mm'kay?)
Even better, if the municipalities could sell the fuel stock, maybe we could convert a large part of the country's foreign trade debt into tax base. Just think - instead of paying unstable foreign governments huge amounts of cash, you pay it to local government and reduce/eliminate your taxes.
So while this sounds cool, it will not have the effect you seem to be hoping for. Bur as you say, it may be of value for folks who have been deeply traumatised.
And while everyone is getting all misty eyed about EW, here is a critique of it written by physicist John Cramer (the guy doing the time signalling research at the University of Washingtion that is being funded by donations). A quote:(And lest anyone get their knickers in a twist over this quote, Cramer also describes EW as "perhaps the most 'heroic' of the efforts to deal with the problem of collapse.")
The whole article this analysis is part of is well worth reading as it presents a good description of the issues involved in thinking about all these interpretations. It also presents an interesting interpetation that some readers may not have encountered - the Transactional Interpretation - which is built on work done by Feynman. Even if you don't agree with his views, I think most will find it an interesting read.