Well, I think you're thinking "on the margin," focussing on what more you'd like to see happen -- e.g. the US use more of its wealth for remediation of the world's problems. You should every now and then think "at the mean," e.g. by asking yourself what the world would be like if the United States were replaced by a nation of equivalent wealth and power but more like, say, the Soviet Union at its peak, 18th-century Imperial Great Britain, Napoleonic France, the Roman Empire, or China in its own heyday of the Emperors. I think if you try this exercise honestly, you'll find you're pretty glad you live with the hegemon you've got.
Sure, the US causes problems. Sure, there can be improvement in its foreign policy, domestic priorities, yadda yadda. What else is new? Human beings are imperfect. But to say, as you do, that the US is a greater global problem than solution is excessive.
Why is smallpox no longer around? Of what nationality was the guy who invented the vaccine, and which nation supplied the bulk of the money to give it to all the children worldwide? Polish? Burmese? Not!
Why do we talk world-wide about "individual rights" like free speech, a free press, one-man-one-vote, stuff like that? Did these things grow out of Islamic or Confucian tradition? Nope, they didn't.
Why is there any hope at all for AIDS victims worldwide? How come there exists a drug called AZT that's fairly cheap and can dramatically reduce the incidence of mother to infant AIDS transmission? Would it be because of all the amazing anti-viral research done in, say, Malaysia or North Korea? Er, no.
Think solar power should replace coal? Think the Internet is enabling democratic "people power" grassroots organization all over the world? Well, we need the whole technology of semiconductors for that, don't we, which was developed in...um, Japan? India? Bolivia? Alas, no.
We could go on and on. Want to make a few side bets on what nation will generate, oh, 80% of new therapies for victims of heart disease over the next ten years? Where, if anywhere, a vaccine for AIDS or a cure for breast cancer might come from? Where gene therapy to cure cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell anemia might be developed?
What's happening, I think, is that you are simply taking for granted all the technological (and political) progress that the US has generated over its history. It just sort of seems like the world's inheritance now. No need to inquire where it came from (or where any future inheritance might come from). I'm reminded of the scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" where Reg asks what the Romans have done for the Jews. "Well, yeah, but aside from better sanitation, clean water, peace and a measure of justice, good roads, protection from bandits, et cetera, what have the Romans done for us lately?"
Criticism at the margin makes perfect sense. There's plenty the US does wrong, and I certainly agree it should take heat for those errors, plenty of it. When you've got a lot of power you've got a lot of responsibility. But to go over the top and say that the whole nation is a plague and should be replaced with, uh China? Brazil? South Africa? -- seems to me myopic and historically ignorant.
As for your initial point...
If America spent a significant portion of its wealth on research to end or reduce pollution, this would indeed be likely to massively help.
C'mon, dude. Check out funding opportunities for chemical engineers at the DOE, EPA or NSF. There's millions offered by the government to fund research on remediation, pollution control engineering, and so forth. What do you think the AQMD board does in SoCal? Why do we have catalytic converters, and who invented 'em? What's with all this EPA-mandated fiddling with gasoline reformulation to reduce emissions? Do you happen to know who figured out where most of the air pollution in Mexico City comes from, and what the government could do about it? (I do. He's an American, a Nobel p
I don't know, but I have a guess based on tangential conversations with biologists: see, the problem is, how do you tell the cells, even if they're willing to divide and grow, to organize themselves into some macroscopic shape, like a sac with tubes and various layers? They don't response to yelled commands, you know. And each cell doesn't exactly have a Master Blueprint in its DNA with its own role marked off in red ink.
As much as I can tell, large organ growth in the living organism is directed by complex gradients of growth factors (chemicals), e.g. a low-to-high concentration of growth factor foo along a finger bud causes the bud to preferentially grow in the direction of the steepest increase in foo concentration -- i.e. along the long axis of the bud -- so the bud grows longer and not wider, all without any mythical "central authority" actually coordinating the activity of the cells.
But if you're trying to grow an organ in a tank, without any surrounding complex bath of growth factors et cetera, it's not likely the environment will be right to direct the growth of the cells, so you're just going to get a pile of unorganized flesh, not a fresh gleaming liver ready to plug in.
What I think they're doing here is figuring a way to direct the growth more or less by "lithography," i.e. by laying down one tiny layer at a time. You lay down a support matrix in the pattern you want the cells to form in this layer, let them grow, add another layer, rinse, repeat....by and by, you can construct any larger organized structure you want, layer by tiny layer. That's the point, I'm guessin.
I'm going to argue that my viewpoint is based on statistical probability, instead of worst-case or best-case scenarios, or other frankly irrelevant stuff.
It's not irrationally optimistic to believe that solutions to social problems generally go along with economic success. If this were not true, how could anyone rationally argue that the United States is the nation that is best-positioned to solve global problems? When people say the US should shoulder substantial fractions of the world's problems, they implicitly acknowledge that as the major economic power the US is best positioned to solve those problems. How could it be otherwise? You need wealth and leisure to solve knotty problems. If you're scratching for survival, you haven't time or energy to tackle long-range subtle issues, which global pollution problems mostly are.
So all I've done is assume that if the Chinese became as economically successful as the US, then in addition to their increased pollution we could reasonably expect a greatly increased power to solve such problems.
Does the ability to solve pollution problems run ahead of the rate of creation of such problems, when an economy is successfully growing? Of course. The historical record is clear. The US and Europe certainly have the most stringent pollution-control laws on the books, the most advanced pollution-control technology, the best record at actually solving pollution problems (e.g. compare Los Angeles air quality in 2005 to 1970, or note the fact that you can swim in Boston's Back Bay now, where you couldn't in 1980, or note the substitution of wind-power using sophisticated computer-controlled turbines with fancy composite material blades for fossil fuels in Europe and the US). Places like China and Mexico are sinks of filth on a per-polluter (e.g. per automobile) comparison, and have no hope of deploying cool high-tech clean power real soon. Why is this? Well, duh, we have the wealth and technology to do it and they don't. As any number of UN agencies and NGOs will tell you, when they ask for a substantial chunk of US change to lend to the efforts of poorer countries. In addition, places that have fallen on hard time economically -- Russia springs to mind, of course -- have lost ground on pollution control.
But in any event, I suggest the notion that increased wealth, broader education, and more leisure time creates more problems (even for the environment) than it solves is what really needs proving. Even the Marxists never went so far as to argue that the solution to human problems is to be found in increased poverty, a higher fraction of human time devoted to pure survival, and a reduction in the spread of technology.
Newsflash: the chinese economy is already gigantic, they already have first-world class researchers, they already have plenty of money to invest in cleaning up their habits. Have we seen anything approaching what you're insisting is going to happen? Nope... not yet....
Well, that would be the difference between being gigantic and being gigantic on a per-capita basis, right? While China's economy is certainly substantial in an absolute sense, it is still way smaller than the US economy on a per-person basis.
It says "don't worry, we're smart and creative, we'll think of something".
Not quite. First of all, I've never said "don't worry." I just pointed out that when one tries to guess what might happen if the Chinese started to act like Americans (the OP's point), you've got to include the productive aspects of a far bigger Chinese economy as well as the consumptive. They go along together.
Secondly, just as there's a difference between mindless boosterism and rational optimism, there's a difference between mindless negativism and rational caution.
If every chinese started behaving like the average American already do behave, that would lead to a huge increase in pollution.
Hmmm. Seems to me you've only done half the thought experiment. You've imagined increasing the amount of pollution the average Chinese generates to what the average American generates and said, yuck, blech!
But what you've forgotten to do is also increase the amount of economic value the average Chinese generates to what the average American generates. If you did that, then the world economy would have $50 trillion more to devote to remediating pollution, not to mention the fact that it would have three or four times as many highly-trained scientists and engineers working in well-funded First-World-quality research institutes to invent dazzling new efficient technologies to solve those pollution problems.
You might as well have said that if each Chinese farmer eats as much as an American farmer, the world will run out of food, forgetting that if each Chinese farmer also grows as much food as an American farmer, no such thing will happen.
People are producers as well as consumers, eh? And, generally speaking, people in more technologically advanced nations consume more because they also produce more.
Hmmm. And the reason it's no longer happening would be...?
Also, I thought "dark matter" was dark in part because it doesn't emit or absorb light.
Ordinary hydrogen, as we know, readily absorbs light. Then, after a short time as an excited atom, it re-emits the light, producing a beautiful red glowing nebula in the sky whenever clouds of hydrogen are found near light sources, e.g. stars.
So, why would hydrogen atoms when they fall to the "true" ground state suddenly stop acting like ordinary hydrogen atoms, and refuse to absorb any light? Why don't we see glowing nebulae whenever these clouds of hydrinos are located near stars?
Hmmm. It sounds like you're saying what most bugs you about my smoking is the effects it has on you, the non-smoker. You don't actually give a damn what happens to me, and, I suppose, if I confined myself to a hermetically-sealed box and smoked myself to death with zero effect on you or anyone else you wouldn't care.
One would think you'd agree with my thought, then: that the objectionable part of being a polluting country is forcing the citizens of other countries to experience your pollution.
There's nothing magical about integers in quantum mechanics. Whether the energy gap between electron orbits is 1 or 1/3 or 0.4456788897 is just a question of what units of energy you use. Nor are the energy gaps guaranteed to be equally spaced. In fact, only in the unusual case of a harmonic potential does that happen. Usually they are unequally spaced.
What QM says that is strongly in disagreement with classical mechanics is that the observable energy of any degree of freedom that is confined (like an electron confined to an atom) must be discontinuous -- i.e., energy gaps must open up between the states, and in particular between the energy of any confined state and the unconfined state. Formally, this means that the set of all possible states, which can be mapped to the set of all real numbers in classical mechanics, can be mapped to the set of all integers in quantum mechanics. This is actually the only way in which "integers" are a necessary part of QM.
Furthermore, and this is where it gets interesting for electrons in atoms, the size of the energy gaps grows with increasing confinement. In other words, the smaller the volume of space to which the particle is confined, the larger grow the gaps between allowed states. Now think this out for the atom: as we confine the electron to smaller and smaller volumes, closer and closer to the nucleus, the gap between energy levels grows and grows. Furthermore, the gap between the energy of the unconfined electron and the lowest-energy confined state grows and grows.
For a while, the extra energy needed to confine the electron is more than supplied by the energy released by allowing the electron to fall closer to the nucleus, to which it's attracted by the Coulomb force.
However, eventually we reach a volume of confinement where the least amount of energy we need to confine the electron to this volume exceeds what we can get by allowing the electron to get that close to the nucleus. This is the ground state. We can't confine the electron to smaller volumes, because the energy of attraction to the nucleus isn't enough to supply the energy necessary to confine the electron.
A more conventional way of putting this is that over-confining the electron drives its kinetic energy so high that the potential energy of attraction to the nucleus is insufficient to make the total energy lower than that of the free electron, so the electron always escapes.
Why don't you add every chemical reaction to your list of what QM explains? You do realize, I hope, that the exact structure of the Periodic Table of Elements, and all it implies about chemical reactivity, is a direct result of quantum mechanics?
Exemplii gratia, it is no accident that the first row of the Periodic Table holds two elements and the first electron shell holds two electrons, that the second row of the Table holds eight elements and the second electron shell holds eight electrons, and so on. Furthermore, because QM predicts that the second shell will be more stable when exactly filled with eight electrons we can predict that hydrogen (one outer electron) and oxygen (six) will form a compound with the formula H2O.
If we follow the implications out further, as legions of teenagers are taught to do in high school and their first year of college, we can go on to predict that carbon will form a compound with hydrogen with the formula CH4 (methane), and that this compound will combine with oxygen gas (i.e. burn) to produce CO2 and H2O, a fact which everyone verifies for himself daily, when he turns on the gas stove to cook dinner.
Hey, shouldn't people be allowed to produce pollution they breathe themselves? Do you care if I smoke and ruin my own lungs, so long as you don't have to breathe it? That is, doesn't the offense of pollution, if offense there be, come from producing pollution that other people have to breathe?
In which case, the way to measure the obnoxiousness of pollution by country X is just to divide the pollution by the population of the rest of the world, everybody except those who live in X.
By this standard, the Chinese may not do so well, because the non-Chinese population of the world (everybody but the Chinese) is much smaller than the non-US (everybody but the Americans), non-Canadian, non-Australian, et cetera. That is, the amount of US pollution the average non-US citizen must breathe might be less than the amount of Chinese pollution the average non-Chinese citizen must breathe. Oh well.
I think this guy has focussed on the big and sexy issue of QM and whether it's the Last Word because it's a dazzling distraction. The real hard-to-swallow issue here is thermodynamic. Namely, how is that almost every atom in the Universe has, from the Big Bang right up until 2005 and Dr. Mills' clever insight, remained conveniently "stuck" in a high-energy state?
Frankly, I would more easily believe QM is rubbish than believe that. He's asking us to believe nearly every atom in the universe is not in its lowest energy state. Well, why not? What pushed all of them up there? Why have they stayed up there for umpty billion years, and, for that matter, continue to stay up there everywhere in the Cosmos except for the environs of 493 Old Trenton Road, Cranbury, NJ, 08512?
It's not that it would be hard to know if atoms occasionally fell down into states lower than the "lowest" predicted by QM. When they did, if they did, then as Doc Mills says they would emit visible photons. That is, they'd broadcast their activity far and wide: "Yoo hoo! Here I am! Falling to a lower orbit than you thought existed! Whee.....!" The light from this process could hardly be missed by all those folks with giant telescopes peering into the heavens.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Doc Mills has stolen a march on Wolfgang Pauli and assorted quantum mechanics. They're only human. But...believe he's discovered a natural process that just happens to not occur anywhere else in the Universe, and just happens to have not happened here on Earth any time from 4,500,000 BC right up until Mills filed his patent? Erg, that's a bit much to swallow.
My recommendation on Blacklight stock would be Hold, at best.
Not in the least. Jews would be hiding in attics because they were hiding from deliberate attacks from other humans. A "test" to find them would be a betrayal of them to their attackers.
Down's Syndrome is not a deliberate attack on babies by anything. It's just a tragic accident when the DNA doesn't divide right. So a test to detect it isn't a betrayal of the child to his attackers.
Unless you are saying that a child's parents should generally be regarded as its attackers, because they will kill him if they can find a reason why he isn't perfect. In that case a test for Down's does betray the child to its attackers -- its own parents. And in that case, your analogy is apt.
I think you're wrong. Because of the test, parents have a choice. Parents who choose not to abort believe they have taken a deeply meaningful step, made a profound act of affirmation of life and hope for the future. They have freely chosen to accept the child as he is, knowing his handicaps. Their act would be less meaningful, less an act of grace, if it were not the free choice which the genetic test makes it.
Well, the reason you can do heart, liver, kidney et cetera transplants successfully is because of the anti-rejection drugs developed in the United States.
The reason you can tell whether your child will have Down's syndrome in time to abort and try again is because of genetic analysis developed in the United States.
The reason you solve certain crimes is because of DNA analysis invented by an American scientist.
The reason people with diabetes can have more normal lives is because of recombinant human insulin produced in bacteria colonies, a method developed in the United States.
The reason AIDS is not automatically a death sentence anymore is because of powerful antiviral therapies developed in the United States.
The reason breast cancer survival rates are far higher than they were 20 years ago is because of new chemotherapies, including tamoxifen and herceptin, developed in the US.
And, finally, the reason you can ask this question and get an answer is because of a nifty idea called the Internet, invented in...well, you get the idea.
The Chinese...are on their way to becoming a Superpower....
Wait a minute....didn't the Chinese start out as a superpower, say about 800 years ago or so? I'm always hearing that the Chinese were civilized and inventing paper and fire and logic and stuff when my ancestors were grunting around a campfire eating raw antelope with their fingers.
Luckily, we have a biosphere that continually turns sunlight into fuel. It's mostly just a question of processing, you know. It's convenient to have the hydrocarbons reduced to an easily pumpable fluid, but it isn't strictly necessary. When the time comes, it will be easy enough to grow plants and convert them to various forms of chemical fuel.
I would think that, when the time comes, when there are enough people, then it would be those folks living on the Moon who would want to create their government. And they're not likely to be asking us for any advice.
Why do people want to mate with more physically "attractive" people?
I agree with your reasoning. But I've also heard an alternative, wilder hypothesis which is intriguing. It begins by asking what, precisely, do we mean by "beauty?" Suppose arguendo we say "beauty" is just a measure of how close you are to some certain ideal; in other words, beauty is the inverse of how far you are from the species mean. The more "unique" you are, the uglier you are.
So then the question is: why be so intent on picking someone who looks like the species mean? Your argument (it means the genes are healthy) is one possibility, but it really only explains those who have actual deformities, e.g. cleft palate as you say. But what about people who just have a big schnoz, or flappy ears, or little piggy (but perfectly useful) eyes, men with hair coming out their ears or women with asymmetric teats? Why would we select against people who are perfectly healthy in every respect but who just look different?
Well, we know we have shared the planet with at least one other species of hominid (H. neanderthalenis). Maybe there were others! If so, consider: the most dangerous competitor you could have would be a separate species (so you can't interbreed) which is so similar that they occupy a very similar ecological niche. That means they eat the same things, like the same shady spots of real estate, and need the same materials to make their tools and huts. Possibly they even carry diseases that can infect you easily. Foreigners like this are a terrible threat, because they want to consume the same resources you need to survive, but they can't contribute anything to your gene pool, and they can't even mingle their genes with yours so you become one big happy family.
Under these conditions there might indeed be a strong selection against people whose sexual attraction wasn't specific enough. That is, if, as a young Cro-Magnon male, you routinely got as turned on by hot Neanderthal* chicks as you did by girls of your own species, you might well have a much lower reproductive success. Those who bred successfully (and became our ancestors) were then those whose sexual preferences were so narrow that they could easily distinguish between the two species, and get it on with one but be left completely cold by the other.
---------------- * "Neanderthal" is just a stand-in for an unknown competitor species with who we are not cross-fertile.
I agree this is an important caution to bear in mind. It's a variant of what I call "The Sherlock Holmes" rule:
Just because you have an explanation doesn't mean you have the explanation.
I call it the SH rule because, when you read "Sherlock Holmes" stories, you always read about these brilliant, very long chains of logic by which Holmes figures out stuff that buffaloed Lestrade of the Yard. Holmes is always right, of course (ha ha, that buffoon Lestrade), even though his logic chain is so long that its existence was entirely overlooked by everyone else, and we need Watson to exclaim "But how did you do it Holmes?" so that we can get a paragraph or so explaining it.
But there's a good reason why Holmes is fictional. In real life, very long chains of logic quite often lead to the wrong answer. Not because there's something wrong with the logic, mind you, but because there is some other chain of logic leading from a different cause to the same effect, a chain which was overlooked.
Short chains of deduction ("If I drop the vase, it will fall and break") very often admit of only one possible chain of explanation, and even when there is more than one possible explanation, it's usually easy to list and study them all, to figure out which is right. But the longer and longer the logic chain gets, the more possible explanations there are, and the easier it gets to overlook a possibility or fifty.
Which is why I'm an empiricist. An ounce of dumb measurement is worth a pound of brilliant theory any day.
I read it that they're "songs" only because they're stylized and repeated, not something created on the spot. So you could also call them "sayings" or "catch phrases" or "poems.", I suppose. I don't think it's a question of musical talent.
So why do the male mice sing to the females, eh? I mean, it's not like they need sound to find each other or tell the pitchers from the catchers -- they can sniff each other out in the total dark, et cetera.
Why would natural selection push male mice to develop this talent?
I sure don't know, but just for amusement I'll propose something along the lines of the OP's comment: suppose we argue an important characteristic of mice is that they are damn clever for their size. Seems likely they're a lot smarter, for example, than snakes or lizards or even birds of equivalent mass. Maybe they need smarts to succeed at a lifetime of scampering and hiding and thieving bits of food from larger predators.
If this is so, maybe it makes sense that the smartest males want to advertise their intelligence, and females are interested in listening to those ads, so that they can pick out good genes for the pups.
Now, clearly it takes brains to learn a complex song, spice it up with a couple of individual flourishes, and memorize it. So maybe what these mice fellas are doing by singing is advertising how smart they are. And maybe the girl mice by listening in are evaluating the sexy braininess of boy mice as it's expressed in their composition.
It would be, in essence, the auditory equivalent of posting clever comments on/. and hoping horny girls mod you +5, Insightful Interesting Funny Yes Yes Oh Yes Take Me Now You Utter Stud.
What I really mean is the economic side of a socialist policy is not usually to blame, its the foolish politicians who want to kill people and settle vendettas under the veil of socialism that kill that people.
Isn't that veil pretty important? It's the existence of that pretty face that fools people into supporting the foolish (or evil) politicians. People see evil things happening, but rationalize it. "Well, it's not nice that all those people were impoverished/starved/killed, but -- it's in a good cause. The end result will be world peace/social justice/health and wealth for all, so perhaps some regrettably harsh measures can be tolerated."
Think of it as the harm done by false advertising. Why is it wicked for a pharmaceutical company to sell you sterile water and tell you it's a cure for cancer, even if they falsely believe it themselves? Because the foolish hope will make you forgo taking steps that might actually improve things, and because they should make sure their claims are correct before assuring you that they are. Delusions are expensive! I think some of the delusions offered by well-meaning socialists with a greater attachment to beautiful theories than ugly facts have been very expensive indeed.
I think a lot of the real problem is overt idealism.
Yes and no. A political leader will always tell you, and sincerely, that he is going to do wonderful things. It's just human nature, and I don't blame them. But if we as citizens get suckered into awful social experiments because we take to the bank some dingbat notion that there's a short-cut to Paradise, that no one must be poor and all men can have equally fortunate and happy lives, regardless of their character and effort -- in short, that there is such a thing as a free lunch, why then, I think the fault for the chaos and misery that results is really ours, in the end.
The beauty of amoral capitalism is that it is a very cynical system. It assumes people are mostly selfish and short-sighted, and asks how you can build a system that functions nevertheless. That means it does OK when people are selfish wretches, and does better when they are not. (No one has ever suggested capitalism prevents people from voluntarily doing good.) By contrast full-fledged socialism only works when people are saints, and becomes a hellish pit of misery when they are selfish wretches. Far riskier.
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Well, I think you're thinking "on the margin," focussing on what more you'd like to see happen -- e.g. the US use more of its wealth for remediation of the world's problems. You should every now and then think "at the mean," e.g. by asking yourself what the world would be like if the United States were replaced by a nation of equivalent wealth and power but more like, say, the Soviet Union at its peak, 18th-century Imperial Great Britain, Napoleonic France, the Roman Empire, or China in its own heyday of the Emperors. I think if you try this exercise honestly, you'll find you're pretty glad you live with the hegemon you've got.
Sure, the US causes problems. Sure, there can be improvement in its foreign policy, domestic priorities, yadda yadda. What else is new? Human beings are imperfect. But to say, as you do, that the US is a greater global problem than solution is excessive.
Why is smallpox no longer around? Of what nationality was the guy who invented the vaccine, and which nation supplied the bulk of the money to give it to all the children worldwide? Polish? Burmese? Not!
Why do we talk world-wide about "individual rights" like free speech, a free press, one-man-one-vote, stuff like that? Did these things grow out of Islamic or Confucian tradition? Nope, they didn't.
Why is there any hope at all for AIDS victims worldwide? How come there exists a drug called AZT that's fairly cheap and can dramatically reduce the incidence of mother to infant AIDS transmission? Would it be because of all the amazing anti-viral research done in, say, Malaysia or North Korea? Er, no.
Think solar power should replace coal? Think the Internet is enabling democratic "people power" grassroots organization all over the world? Well, we need the whole technology of semiconductors for that, don't we, which was developed in...um, Japan? India? Bolivia? Alas, no.
We could go on and on. Want to make a few side bets on what nation will generate, oh, 80% of new therapies for victims of heart disease over the next ten years? Where, if anywhere, a vaccine for AIDS or a cure for breast cancer might come from? Where gene therapy to cure cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell anemia might be developed?
What's happening, I think, is that you are simply taking for granted all the technological (and political) progress that the US has generated over its history. It just sort of seems like the world's inheritance now. No need to inquire where it came from (or where any future inheritance might come from). I'm reminded of the scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" where Reg asks what the Romans have done for the Jews. "Well, yeah, but aside from better sanitation, clean water, peace and a measure of justice, good roads, protection from bandits, et cetera, what have the Romans done for us lately?"
Criticism at the margin makes perfect sense. There's plenty the US does wrong, and I certainly agree it should take heat for those errors, plenty of it. When you've got a lot of power you've got a lot of responsibility. But to go over the top and say that the whole nation is a plague and should be replaced with, uh China? Brazil? South Africa? -- seems to me myopic and historically ignorant.
As for your initial point...
If America spent a significant portion of its wealth on research to end or reduce pollution, this would indeed be likely to massively help.
C'mon, dude. Check out funding opportunities for chemical engineers at the DOE, EPA or NSF. There's millions offered by the government to fund research on remediation, pollution control engineering, and so forth. What do you think the AQMD board does in SoCal? Why do we have catalytic converters, and who invented 'em? What's with all this EPA-mandated fiddling with gasoline reformulation to reduce emissions? Do you happen to know who figured out where most of the air pollution in Mexico City comes from, and what the government could do about it? (I do. He's an American, a Nobel p
I don't know, but I have a guess based on tangential conversations with biologists: see, the problem is, how do you tell the cells, even if they're willing to divide and grow, to organize themselves into some macroscopic shape, like a sac with tubes and various layers? They don't response to yelled commands, you know. And each cell doesn't exactly have a Master Blueprint in its DNA with its own role marked off in red ink.
As much as I can tell, large organ growth in the living organism is directed by complex gradients of growth factors (chemicals), e.g. a low-to-high concentration of growth factor foo along a finger bud causes the bud to preferentially grow in the direction of the steepest increase in foo concentration -- i.e. along the long axis of the bud -- so the bud grows longer and not wider, all without any mythical "central authority" actually coordinating the activity of the cells.
But if you're trying to grow an organ in a tank, without any surrounding complex bath of growth factors et cetera, it's not likely the environment will be right to direct the growth of the cells, so you're just going to get a pile of unorganized flesh, not a fresh gleaming liver ready to plug in.
What I think they're doing here is figuring a way to direct the growth more or less by "lithography," i.e. by laying down one tiny layer at a time. You lay down a support matrix in the pattern you want the cells to form in this layer, let them grow, add another layer, rinse, repeat....by and by, you can construct any larger organized structure you want, layer by tiny layer. That's the point, I'm guessin.
I'm going to argue that my viewpoint is based on statistical probability, instead of worst-case or best-case scenarios, or other frankly irrelevant stuff.
It's not irrationally optimistic to believe that solutions to social problems generally go along with economic success. If this were not true, how could anyone rationally argue that the United States is the nation that is best-positioned to solve global problems? When people say the US should shoulder substantial fractions of the world's problems, they implicitly acknowledge that as the major economic power the US is best positioned to solve those problems. How could it be otherwise? You need wealth and leisure to solve knotty problems. If you're scratching for survival, you haven't time or energy to tackle long-range subtle issues, which global pollution problems mostly are.
So all I've done is assume that if the Chinese became as economically successful as the US, then in addition to their increased pollution we could reasonably expect a greatly increased power to solve such problems.
Does the ability to solve pollution problems run ahead of the rate of creation of such problems, when an economy is successfully growing? Of course. The historical record is clear. The US and Europe certainly have the most stringent pollution-control laws on the books, the most advanced pollution-control technology, the best record at actually solving pollution problems (e.g. compare Los Angeles air quality in 2005 to 1970, or note the fact that you can swim in Boston's Back Bay now, where you couldn't in 1980, or note the substitution of wind-power using sophisticated computer-controlled turbines with fancy composite material blades for fossil fuels in Europe and the US). Places like China and Mexico are sinks of filth on a per-polluter (e.g. per automobile) comparison, and have no hope of deploying cool high-tech clean power real soon. Why is this? Well, duh, we have the wealth and technology to do it and they don't. As any number of UN agencies and NGOs will tell you, when they ask for a substantial chunk of US change to lend to the efforts of poorer countries. In addition, places that have fallen on hard time economically -- Russia springs to mind, of course -- have lost ground on pollution control.
But in any event, I suggest the notion that increased wealth, broader education, and more leisure time creates more problems (even for the environment) than it solves is what really needs proving. Even the Marxists never went so far as to argue that the solution to human problems is to be found in increased poverty, a higher fraction of human time devoted to pure survival, and a reduction in the spread of technology.
Newsflash: the chinese economy is already gigantic, they already have first-world class researchers, they already have plenty of money to invest in cleaning up their habits. Have we seen anything approaching what you're insisting is going to happen? Nope... not yet....
Well, that would be the difference between being gigantic and being gigantic on a per-capita basis, right? While China's economy is certainly substantial in an absolute sense, it is still way smaller than the US economy on a per-person basis.
It says "don't worry, we're smart and creative, we'll think of something".
Not quite. First of all, I've never said "don't worry." I just pointed out that when one tries to guess what might happen if the Chinese started to act like Americans (the OP's point), you've got to include the productive aspects of a far bigger Chinese economy as well as the consumptive. They go along together.
Secondly, just as there's a difference between mindless boosterism and rational optimism, there's a difference between mindless negativism and rational caution.
If every chinese started behaving like the average American already do behave, that would lead to a huge increase in pollution.
Hmmm. Seems to me you've only done half the thought experiment. You've imagined increasing the amount of pollution the average Chinese generates to what the average American generates and said, yuck, blech!
But what you've forgotten to do is also increase the amount of economic value the average Chinese generates to what the average American generates. If you did that, then the world economy would have $50 trillion more to devote to remediating pollution, not to mention the fact that it would have three or four times as many highly-trained scientists and engineers working in well-funded First-World-quality research institutes to invent dazzling new efficient technologies to solve those pollution problems.
You might as well have said that if each Chinese farmer eats as much as an American farmer, the world will run out of food, forgetting that if each Chinese farmer also grows as much food as an American farmer, no such thing will happen.
People are producers as well as consumers, eh? And, generally speaking, people in more technologically advanced nations consume more because they also produce more.
Damfino. For all I know a hydrino could be a hydrangea in a dehydrated state.
Hmmm. And the reason it's no longer happening would be...?
Also, I thought "dark matter" was dark in part because it doesn't emit or absorb light.
Ordinary hydrogen, as we know, readily absorbs light. Then, after a short time as an excited atom, it re-emits the light, producing a beautiful red glowing nebula in the sky whenever clouds of hydrogen are found near light sources, e.g. stars.
So, why would hydrogen atoms when they fall to the "true" ground state suddenly stop acting like ordinary hydrogen atoms, and refuse to absorb any light? Why don't we see glowing nebulae whenever these clouds of hydrinos are located near stars?
Hmmm. It sounds like you're saying what most bugs you about my smoking is the effects it has on you, the non-smoker. You don't actually give a damn what happens to me, and, I suppose, if I confined myself to a hermetically-sealed box and smoked myself to death with zero effect on you or anyone else you wouldn't care.
One would think you'd agree with my thought, then: that the objectionable part of being a polluting country is forcing the citizens of other countries to experience your pollution.
There's nothing magical about integers in quantum mechanics. Whether the energy gap between electron orbits is 1 or 1/3 or 0.4456788897 is just a question of what units of energy you use. Nor are the energy gaps guaranteed to be equally spaced. In fact, only in the unusual case of a harmonic potential does that happen. Usually they are unequally spaced.
What QM says that is strongly in disagreement with classical mechanics is that the observable energy of any degree of freedom that is confined (like an electron confined to an atom) must be discontinuous -- i.e., energy gaps must open up between the states, and in particular between the energy of any confined state and the unconfined state. Formally, this means that the set of all possible states, which can be mapped to the set of all real numbers in classical mechanics, can be mapped to the set of all integers in quantum mechanics. This is actually the only way in which "integers" are a necessary part of QM.
Furthermore, and this is where it gets interesting for electrons in atoms, the size of the energy gaps grows with increasing confinement. In other words, the smaller the volume of space to which the particle is confined, the larger grow the gaps between allowed states. Now think this out for the atom: as we confine the electron to smaller and smaller volumes, closer and closer to the nucleus, the gap between energy levels grows and grows. Furthermore, the gap between the energy of the unconfined electron and the lowest-energy confined state grows and grows.
For a while, the extra energy needed to confine the electron is more than supplied by the energy released by allowing the electron to fall closer to the nucleus, to which it's attracted by the Coulomb force.
However, eventually we reach a volume of confinement where the least amount of energy we need to confine the electron to this volume exceeds what we can get by allowing the electron to get that close to the nucleus. This is the ground state. We can't confine the electron to smaller volumes, because the energy of attraction to the nucleus isn't enough to supply the energy necessary to confine the electron.
A more conventional way of putting this is that over-confining the electron drives its kinetic energy so high that the potential energy of attraction to the nucleus is insufficient to make the total energy lower than that of the free electron, so the electron always escapes.
Would your answer change if I swore never to touch Medicare? Just curious.
Why don't you add every chemical reaction to your list of what QM explains? You do realize, I hope, that the exact structure of the Periodic Table of Elements, and all it implies about chemical reactivity, is a direct result of quantum mechanics?
Exemplii gratia, it is no accident that the first row of the Periodic Table holds two elements and the first electron shell holds two electrons, that the second row of the Table holds eight elements and the second electron shell holds eight electrons, and so on. Furthermore, because QM predicts that the second shell will be more stable when exactly filled with eight electrons we can predict that hydrogen (one outer electron) and oxygen (six) will form a compound with the formula H2O.
If we follow the implications out further, as legions of teenagers are taught to do in high school and their first year of college, we can go on to predict that carbon will form a compound with hydrogen with the formula CH4 (methane), and that this compound will combine with oxygen gas (i.e. burn) to produce CO2 and H2O, a fact which everyone verifies for himself daily, when he turns on the gas stove to cook dinner.
Hey, shouldn't people be allowed to produce pollution they breathe themselves? Do you care if I smoke and ruin my own lungs, so long as you don't have to breathe it? That is, doesn't the offense of pollution, if offense there be, come from producing pollution that other people have to breathe?
In which case, the way to measure the obnoxiousness of pollution by country X is just to divide the pollution by the population of the rest of the world, everybody except those who live in X.
By this standard, the Chinese may not do so well, because the non-Chinese population of the world (everybody but the Chinese) is much smaller than the non-US (everybody but the Americans), non-Canadian, non-Australian, et cetera. That is, the amount of US pollution the average non-US citizen must breathe might be less than the amount of Chinese pollution the average non-Chinese citizen must breathe. Oh well.
I think this guy has focussed on the big and sexy issue of QM and whether it's the Last Word because it's a dazzling distraction. The real hard-to-swallow issue here is thermodynamic. Namely, how is that almost every atom in the Universe has, from the Big Bang right up until 2005 and Dr. Mills' clever insight, remained conveniently "stuck" in a high-energy state?
Frankly, I would more easily believe QM is rubbish than believe that. He's asking us to believe nearly every atom in the universe is not in its lowest energy state. Well, why not? What pushed all of them up there? Why have they stayed up there for umpty billion years, and, for that matter, continue to stay up there everywhere in the Cosmos except for the environs of 493 Old Trenton Road, Cranbury, NJ, 08512?
It's not that it would be hard to know if atoms occasionally fell down into states lower than the "lowest" predicted by QM. When they did, if they did, then as Doc Mills says they would emit visible photons. That is, they'd broadcast their activity far and wide: "Yoo hoo! Here I am! Falling to a lower orbit than you thought existed! Whee.....!" The light from this process could hardly be missed by all those folks with giant telescopes peering into the heavens.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Doc Mills has stolen a march on Wolfgang Pauli and assorted quantum mechanics. They're only human. But...believe he's discovered a natural process that just happens to not occur anywhere else in the Universe, and just happens to have not happened here on Earth any time from 4,500,000 BC right up until Mills filed his patent? Erg, that's a bit much to swallow.
My recommendation on Blacklight stock would be Hold, at best.
Not in the least. Jews would be hiding in attics because they were hiding from deliberate attacks from other humans. A "test" to find them would be a betrayal of them to their attackers.
Down's Syndrome is not a deliberate attack on babies by anything. It's just a tragic accident when the DNA doesn't divide right. So a test to detect it isn't a betrayal of the child to his attackers.
Unless you are saying that a child's parents should generally be regarded as its attackers, because they will kill him if they can find a reason why he isn't perfect. In that case a test for Down's does betray the child to its attackers -- its own parents. And in that case, your analogy is apt.
I think you're wrong. Because of the test, parents have a choice. Parents who choose not to abort believe they have taken a deeply meaningful step, made a profound act of affirmation of life and hope for the future. They have freely chosen to accept the child as he is, knowing his handicaps. Their act would be less meaningful, less an act of grace, if it were not the free choice which the genetic test makes it.
Well, the reason you can do heart, liver, kidney et cetera transplants successfully is because of the anti-rejection drugs developed in the United States.
The reason you can tell whether your child will have Down's syndrome in time to abort and try again is because of genetic analysis developed in the United States.
The reason you solve certain crimes is because of DNA analysis invented by an American scientist.
The reason people with diabetes can have more normal lives is because of recombinant human insulin produced in bacteria colonies, a method developed in the United States.
The reason AIDS is not automatically a death sentence anymore is because of powerful antiviral therapies developed in the United States.
The reason breast cancer survival rates are far higher than they were 20 years ago is because of new chemotherapies, including tamoxifen and herceptin, developed in the US.
And, finally, the reason you can ask this question and get an answer is because of a nifty idea called the Internet, invented in...well, you get the idea.
The Chinese...are on their way to becoming a Superpower....
Wait a minute....didn't the Chinese start out as a superpower, say about 800 years ago or so? I'm always hearing that the Chinese were civilized and inventing paper and fire and logic and stuff when my ancestors were grunting around a campfire eating raw antelope with their fingers.
Well said.
Luckily, we have a biosphere that continually turns sunlight into fuel. It's mostly just a question of processing, you know. It's convenient to have the hydrocarbons reduced to an easily pumpable fluid, but it isn't strictly necessary. When the time comes, it will be easy enough to grow plants and convert them to various forms of chemical fuel.
I would think that, when the time comes, when there are enough people, then it would be those folks living on the Moon who would want to create their government. And they're not likely to be asking us for any advice.
Why do people want to mate with more physically "attractive" people?
I agree with your reasoning. But I've also heard an alternative, wilder hypothesis which is intriguing. It begins by asking what, precisely, do we mean by "beauty?" Suppose arguendo we say "beauty" is just a measure of how close you are to some certain ideal; in other words, beauty is the inverse of how far you are from the species mean. The more "unique" you are, the uglier you are.
So then the question is: why be so intent on picking someone who looks like the species mean? Your argument (it means the genes are healthy) is one possibility, but it really only explains those who have actual deformities, e.g. cleft palate as you say. But what about people who just have a big schnoz, or flappy ears, or little piggy (but perfectly useful) eyes, men with hair coming out their ears or women with asymmetric teats? Why would we select against people who are perfectly healthy in every respect but who just look different?
Well, we know we have shared the planet with at least one other species of hominid (H. neanderthalenis). Maybe there were others! If so, consider: the most dangerous competitor you could have would be a separate species (so you can't interbreed) which is so similar that they occupy a very similar ecological niche. That means they eat the same things, like the same shady spots of real estate, and need the same materials to make their tools and huts. Possibly they even carry diseases that can infect you easily. Foreigners like this are a terrible threat, because they want to consume the same resources you need to survive, but they can't contribute anything to your gene pool, and they can't even mingle their genes with yours so you become one big happy family.
Under these conditions there might indeed be a strong selection against people whose sexual attraction wasn't specific enough. That is, if, as a young Cro-Magnon male, you routinely got as turned on by hot Neanderthal* chicks as you did by girls of your own species, you might well have a much lower reproductive success. Those who bred successfully (and became our ancestors) were then those whose sexual preferences were so narrow that they could easily distinguish between the two species, and get it on with one but be left completely cold by the other.
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* "Neanderthal" is just a stand-in for an unknown competitor species with who we are not cross-fertile.
I have built a woofer that produces sound at zero hertz! It operates on very little power, too.
I agree this is an important caution to bear in mind. It's a variant of what I call "The Sherlock Holmes" rule:
Just because you have an explanation doesn't mean you have the explanation.
I call it the SH rule because, when you read "Sherlock Holmes" stories, you always read about these brilliant, very long chains of logic by which Holmes figures out stuff that buffaloed Lestrade of the Yard. Holmes is always right, of course (ha ha, that buffoon Lestrade), even though his logic chain is so long that its existence was entirely overlooked by everyone else, and we need Watson to exclaim "But how did you do it Holmes?" so that we can get a paragraph or so explaining it.
But there's a good reason why Holmes is fictional. In real life, very long chains of logic quite often lead to the wrong answer. Not because there's something wrong with the logic, mind you, but because there is some other chain of logic leading from a different cause to the same effect, a chain which was overlooked.
Short chains of deduction ("If I drop the vase, it will fall and break") very often admit of only one possible chain of explanation, and even when there is more than one possible explanation, it's usually easy to list and study them all, to figure out which is right. But the longer and longer the logic chain gets, the more possible explanations there are, and the easier it gets to overlook a possibility or fifty.
Which is why I'm an empiricist. An ounce of dumb measurement is worth a pound of brilliant theory any day.
I read it that they're "songs" only because they're stylized and repeated, not something created on the spot. So you could also call them "sayings" or "catch phrases" or "poems.", I suppose. I don't think it's a question of musical talent.
So why do the male mice sing to the females, eh? I mean, it's not like they need sound to find each other or tell the pitchers from the catchers -- they can sniff each other out in the total dark, et cetera.
/. and hoping horny girls mod you +5, Insightful Interesting Funny Yes Yes Oh Yes Take Me Now You Utter Stud.
Why would natural selection push male mice to develop this talent?
I sure don't know, but just for amusement I'll propose something along the lines of the OP's comment: suppose we argue an important characteristic of mice is that they are damn clever for their size. Seems likely they're a lot smarter, for example, than snakes or lizards or even birds of equivalent mass. Maybe they need smarts to succeed at a lifetime of scampering and hiding and thieving bits of food from larger predators.
If this is so, maybe it makes sense that the smartest males want to advertise their intelligence, and females are interested in listening to those ads, so that they can pick out good genes for the pups.
Now, clearly it takes brains to learn a complex song, spice it up with a couple of individual flourishes, and memorize it. So maybe what these mice fellas are doing by singing is advertising how smart they are. And maybe the girl mice by listening in are evaluating the sexy braininess of boy mice as it's expressed in their composition.
It would be, in essence, the auditory equivalent of posting clever comments on
Fair enough. Just two more points, then:
What I really mean is the economic side of a socialist policy is not usually to blame, its the foolish politicians who want to kill people and settle vendettas under the veil of socialism that kill that people.
Isn't that veil pretty important? It's the existence of that pretty face that fools people into supporting the foolish (or evil) politicians. People see evil things happening, but rationalize it. "Well, it's not nice that all those people were impoverished/starved/killed, but -- it's in a good cause. The end result will be world peace/social justice/health and wealth for all, so perhaps some regrettably harsh measures can be tolerated."
Think of it as the harm done by false advertising. Why is it wicked for a pharmaceutical company to sell you sterile water and tell you it's a cure for cancer, even if they falsely believe it themselves? Because the foolish hope will make you forgo taking steps that might actually improve things, and because they should make sure their claims are correct before assuring you that they are. Delusions are expensive! I think some of the delusions offered by well-meaning socialists with a greater attachment to beautiful theories than ugly facts have been very expensive indeed.
I think a lot of the real problem is overt idealism.
Yes and no. A political leader will always tell you, and sincerely, that he is going to do wonderful things. It's just human nature, and I don't blame them. But if we as citizens get suckered into awful social experiments because we take to the bank some dingbat notion that there's a short-cut to Paradise, that no one must be poor and all men can have equally fortunate and happy lives, regardless of their character and effort -- in short, that there is such a thing as a free lunch, why then, I think the fault for the chaos and misery that results is really ours, in the end.
The beauty of amoral capitalism is that it is a very cynical system. It assumes people are mostly selfish and short-sighted, and asks how you can build a system that functions nevertheless. That means it does OK when people are selfish wretches, and does better when they are not. (No one has ever suggested capitalism prevents people from voluntarily doing good.) By contrast full-fledged socialism only works when people are saints, and becomes a hellish pit of misery when they are selfish wretches. Far riskier.