Not only did Google provide us with the aforementioned book about microscopes, they also made the young mans book of amusements public to the adventurous reader.
Thanks, this is very reassuring. I long had this suspicion that from the cacophony of fortune tellers only the more hopeful voices are taken as the truth du jour about our future. I'm glad those idiots are being punished, first the ones who believed them and now the soothsayers. Politicians are voted into office, therefore the people responsible have already been punished.
Some day I hope, people will stop voting for optimists. When was the last time you guys voted for a sensible man, Carter maybe? He was depressing. Ok, this is Italy, they have way too much sun for that, no need to blame them for their fate.
Ruining somebodies life via the Internet, eh? I could say something like, "if that is possible you didn't have a life to begin with". Unfortunately, some of us are forced to use the internet via sites like Facebook and Twitter since the aggregate number of users there has become so large it has become sensible to attach your commercial interests to it.
Beyond that I do value my semi-anonymity here at slashdot and think people here are more civil than you portait them to be. I did meet bigger assholes in real life.
Now I don't have to start becoming a farmer after all. Not that it is a bad thing but starting it at mid 30 seems late in the game.
Considering that factor of 1000 sounds like a great EROI should be possible, much better than this puny cold fusion stuff.
Now if they could get rid of this metallic liner they are talking about made out of a potentially scarce resource the whole thing could look perfect once they get beyond the simulation stage.
I'm glad you people are explaining this to me. I live close to the Czech and Polish border in Germany (70km), and this border seems to me like a great rift that separates the world into the western half with articles and the eastern one without.
The slavs have many linguistical similarities beyond that one though. Ok, Russian goes the extra way and uses a different alphabet but the others have additional letters in their Latin alphabets that allow for some similar sounds.
Well and then there is Hungary, which doesn't fit in there really. The relationship between Hungarian and Finnish makes the thing look even more strange.
I'm kind of wondering whether it is more the intercourse part or the hugging and cuddling part. But never mind, whole communities have formed around this idea of yours.
You could read the paper by Prescott called "Body pleasure and the origins of violence". As far as I have followed this addiction can be one result of to little contact to people in your early life: "http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/610/1/Somatosensory-Affectional-Deprivation-Theory/Page1.html"
On the page it is stated: "CULTURES THAT PUNISH INFANTS OR REPRESS SEXUALITY ARE VIOLENT"
I would suspect that if you want to build an empire you tell your people that sex is bad for them so you can expand through violence. Maybe this is the reason that I have to point you to a German page and not an American one. You will find that this empire building idea is not that en vogue over here anymore and people actually carry their kids around with them now to simulate the natural behaviour. Interestingly there are even places around here where you can learn to massage your kids. This follows one of Prescott's suggestions.
So the negative influence of too little body contact and sex is not underestimated but not read about enough.
Beyond all that I heard that human immune systems can accommodate a number of partners with their different microbial fauna, but that there is a natural limit of around a handful. Unfortunately I can't give you a citation.
Right, the whole point of forgetting your past lives is that you can come up with a religion that can come up with the idea of past lives. Now if there wasn't the urge to somehow detect what peoples past lives were like...
I can see how people like to go with that idea, but only because the other religions suck much much more.
What is it with this green spirituality thing, it feels like there is some parallel culture out there that seems to draw people away from the the true path of engineering and other ephemeral uses of stored energy and minerals.
Anyway, I admire your decision to go a path that we should have gone half a century ago. I still don't feel ready for it.
"This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive. The relative costs of scarce and abundant metals will become even more disparate in the future on Earth as well as in space. "
Anyway, he was a key part in the opening ceremony for our pyramids, I will always remember him. Rest in Peace Mr. Armstrong.
5 years: some civilized country not in monetary problems 10 years: any country with oil/gas reserves and other resources that so far was relaxed about developing an empire in the recent past 20 years: any country with a proven track record of a reasonably stable culture (I mean stable over relevant time scales like multiples of 1000 years) that still has >50% farmers in its population and didn't experience any significant overshoot during the last 200 years of party time.
Even under the assumption that mankind finds a newer better energy source, it might take a while until full scale implementation, so even the optimists have something to worry about.
Also I assumed that when you stay in a country for 20 years you will stay there.
So far my decision is to stay where I am and take what comes my way. If I wasn't so fatalistic I would try to prepare for the 20year option which at my age ~35 would be doable but hard.
Cities aren't my thing, fringes of cities might be OK though.
Please stop calling it massage, getting an erotic massage is way more pleasant and also includes negotiations about acceptable intimacy and what to do and what not.
I do totally like it though when women tell me something along the lines of "Just do what seems right", so I have to pay attention to what she likes and don't have to worry about this or that limit when giving a massage. I feel more safe then and it seems she can sense that.
I'm not sure how far I would massage men, supposedly I should know better what they want. I'm certain they need more oil because they have more hair. While I do know how to massage guys dicks, I just find cum annoyingly sticky, so putting the moral standards of other people aside, I still find girls far more pleasant to massage (also these cushiony curves are great). Remarkably, not all erotic massages require guys to ejaculate to have a great experience.
But yes, once you have gotten to the lying naked on the mat stage you have already mastered the much harder initial diplomacy.
Not that I tried it but I totally agree, this safe, sane, sober, and consensual rule you have over there is quite nice and should apply to the whole of society.
The other thing I heard is that some geeks might like the control they get over someone from SM since they won't have it in real life that frequently, neither over their computers nor in their actual life. Maybe some should go and visit an SM club instead of DEFCON.
Ok, I could read your comment differently and assume you meant that few people would ever hold social sciences to such high standards. There far too many engineers, me included, that mistakenly do (did), however.
Hm, maybe I was stuck in a rut somehow. Maybe it was the AC above you that triggered my possibly misplaced reaction.
Sorry about the wired article, I didn't like some of it either, but it does highlight some of the aspects of complexity that I find interesting.
Do people live up to that standard? I don't know lets see: "A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects"
Have you been "synthesized" to similar specifications?
But this isn't the point, I was more thinking about overwhelming complexity and the following article discusses a few examples: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/ and beyond that states "Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we canâ(TM)t understand or havenâ(TM)t considered or donâ(TM)t think matter."
We build systems where we have this interconnectedness under control. Whenever you have to deal with biology you don't. Ultimately you will also be faced with the problem of explaining yourself, which sounds impossible to me, but never mind.
I didn't reenter the gun club and the ham radio club precisely because radios and guns are just the stuff of revolutions (I learn't that in school). To no avail, when I went to London when some idiot caused a bomb scare my luggage still got rerouted to the US and I got it back with a bloody TSA bandage, like I have to fly over the US when travelling directly from Germany to the UK.
Now, because of my German heritage and my security awareness I got from living with the Stasi for some time I joined Diaspora (halfhartedly, because I don't need layers and layers of crap) instead of Facebook, and now the idiots are labelling me unsafe!
I have effectively done what my government didn't explicitly ask me for, but I knew that a totalitarian regime would like to see me do.
What else do they ask of me, do I have to choose a low energy density lifestyle that includes subsistence farming and some non-agressive belief like that of some south-east-asian countries. Amusingly some of my idiotic fellow citizens in Catholicistan (also called Bavaria by some) are calling them Buddhist swine - what a joke.
Well, for a society with a massive looming energy problem and some financial fallout already on the map we are behaving predictably erratic.
I suppose I have to just let it wash over me, at some point the maddening screams of the mass media will stop, slashdot included.
Some have argued that the so called soft sciences actually have to deal with far more complex systems than humans can handle. If you compare this to engineering where you can frequently synthesize systems, some soft social science looks much harder.
Oh crap, you mean I should talk to our village nazi to make me a better engineer? Last time I saw him, he wanted to shoot me (Don't worry I'm the gun club member, he isn't).
You have to admit that while von Braun might have been a bit careless about the fate of the slave workers in Mittelbau-Dora he actually had to flee the SS that wanted to kill him and his people. He could have also fled to the Russians, so it is not as if he hadn't chosen among his options wisely.
First of all, this is giving EMP weapons more leverage if you rely too heavily on it. The ephemeral nature of security is also a problem.
I'm also reminded of some plans by some to use RFID tags to decide who is allowed to trade on the market and who is not. I'm wondering whether the efficiency gains are worth the effort. For so little privacy, I at least demand the availability of a far denser power source than diesel to me, i.e. where is my nuclear powered flying car.
Forget it, if you are having a degree that deals with a specialized field like IT, you are in a minority. The rest of the population won't stand up for you, unless you have something tangible to offer. I hear Linux doesn't quite have the market share for that.
Since you mention the familial homeland, I'm wondering whether Germany would allow Americans with a German ancestry back in, as it did with the Volga-Germans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans). They settled in Russia some 200 years earlier and were now allowed back in, because the conditions for them in Russia sucked.
Of course this requires that Germany doesn't go down the same path.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only did Google provide us with the aforementioned book about microscopes, they also made the young mans book of amusements public to the adventurous reader.
http://books.google.de/books?id=X2FLAAAAYAAJ
Thanks, this is very reassuring. I long had this suspicion that from the cacophony of fortune tellers only the more hopeful voices are taken as the truth du jour about our future. I'm glad those idiots are being punished, first the ones who believed them and now the soothsayers. Politicians are voted into office, therefore the people responsible have already been punished.
Some day I hope, people will stop voting for optimists. When was the last time you guys voted for a sensible man, Carter maybe? He was depressing. Ok, this is Italy, they have way too much sun for that, no need to blame them for their fate.
Ruining somebodies life via the Internet, eh? I could say something like, "if that is possible you didn't have a life to begin with". Unfortunately, some of us are forced to use the internet via sites like Facebook and Twitter since the aggregate number of users there has become so large it has become sensible to attach your commercial interests to it.
Beyond that I do value my semi-anonymity here at slashdot and think people here are more civil than you portait them to be. I did meet bigger assholes in real life.
Now I don't have to start becoming a farmer after all. Not that it is a bad thing but starting it at mid 30 seems late in the game.
Considering that factor of 1000 sounds like a great EROI should be possible, much better than this puny cold fusion stuff.
Now if they could get rid of this metallic liner they are talking about made out of a potentially scarce resource the whole thing
could look perfect once they get beyond the simulation stage.
I'm glad you people are explaining this to me. I live close to the Czech and Polish border in Germany (70km), and this border seems to me like a great rift that separates the world into the western half with articles and the eastern one without.
The slavs have many linguistical similarities beyond that one though. Ok, Russian goes the extra way and uses a different alphabet but the others have additional letters in their Latin alphabets that allow for some similar sounds.
Well and then there is Hungary, which doesn't fit in there really. The relationship between Hungarian and Finnish makes the thing look even more strange.
If those scientists could prove that Finno-Ugric languages don't have extra-terrestrial origin I would be glad.
I'm kind of wondering whether it is more the intercourse part or the hugging and cuddling part. But never mind, whole communities have formed around this idea of yours.
You could read the paper by Prescott called "Body pleasure and the origins of violence". As far as I have followed this addiction can be one result of to little contact to people in your early life:
"http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/610/1/Somatosensory-Affectional-Deprivation-Theory/Page1.html"
Also you can read from the following page:
http://www.violence.de/
On the page it is stated:
"CULTURES THAT PUNISH INFANTS OR REPRESS SEXUALITY ARE VIOLENT"
I would suspect that if you want to build an empire you tell your people that sex is bad for them so you can expand through violence. Maybe this is the reason that I have to point you to a German page and not an American one. You will find that this empire building idea is not that en vogue over here anymore and people actually carry their kids around with them now to simulate the natural behaviour. Interestingly there are even places around here where you can learn to massage your kids. This follows one of Prescott's suggestions.
So the negative influence of too little body contact and sex is not underestimated but not read about enough.
Beyond all that I heard that human immune systems can accommodate a number of partners with their different microbial fauna, but that there is a natural limit of around a handful. Unfortunately I can't give you a citation.
Right, the whole point of forgetting your past lives is that you can come up with a religion that can come up with the idea of past lives. Now if there wasn't the urge to somehow detect what peoples past lives were like ...
I can see how people like to go with that idea, but only because the other religions suck much much more.
What is it with this green spirituality thing, it feels like there is some parallel culture out there that seems to draw people away from the the true path of engineering and other ephemeral uses of stored energy and minerals.
Anyway, I admire your decision to go a path that we should have gone half a century ago. I still don't feel ready for it.
Favourable by whose standard and for how long?
Do philosophers count as scientists? Then maybe you have a chance. Oh, what is this true morality thing now? Is this something for scotsmen?
My favourite answer lies somewhere in the following article:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol3/pmofld1a.htm
"This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive. The relative costs of scarce and abundant metals will become even more disparate in the future on Earth as well as in space. "
Anyway, he was a key part in the opening ceremony for our pyramids, I will always remember him. Rest in Peace Mr. Armstrong.
Russians have only ever had tyrants and dictators and they have only a minority asking for something better it seems.
5 years: some civilized country not in monetary problems
10 years: any country with oil/gas reserves and other resources that so far was relaxed about developing an empire in the recent past
20 years: any country with a proven track record of a reasonably stable culture (I mean stable over relevant time scales like multiples of 1000 years) that still has >50% farmers in its population and didn't experience any significant overshoot during the last 200 years of party time.
Even under the assumption that mankind finds a newer better energy source, it might take a while until full scale implementation, so even the optimists have something to worry about.
Also I assumed that when you stay in a country for 20 years you will stay there.
So far my decision is to stay where I am and take what comes my way. If I wasn't so fatalistic I would try to prepare for the 20year option which at my age ~35 would be doable but hard.
Cities aren't my thing, fringes of cities might be OK though.
Please stop calling it massage, getting an erotic massage is way more pleasant and also includes negotiations about acceptable intimacy and what to do and what not.
I do totally like it though when women tell me something along the lines of "Just do what seems right", so I have to pay attention to what she likes and don't have to worry about this or that limit when giving a massage. I feel more safe then and it seems she can sense that.
I'm not sure how far I would massage men, supposedly I should know better what they want. I'm certain they need more oil because they have more hair. While I do know how to massage guys dicks, I just find cum annoyingly sticky, so putting the moral standards of other people aside, I still find girls far more pleasant to massage (also these cushiony curves are great). Remarkably, not all erotic massages require guys to ejaculate to have a great experience.
But yes, once you have gotten to the lying naked on the mat stage you have already mastered the much harder initial diplomacy.
Not that I tried it but I totally agree, this safe, sane, sober, and consensual rule you have over there is quite nice and should apply to the whole of society.
The other thing I heard is that some geeks might like the control they get over someone from SM since they won't have it in real life that frequently, neither over their computers nor in their actual life. Maybe some should go and visit an SM club instead of DEFCON.
Ok, I could read your comment differently and assume you meant that few people would ever hold social sciences to such high standards. There far too many engineers, me included, that mistakenly do (did), however.
Hm, maybe I was stuck in a rut somehow. Maybe it was the AC above you that triggered my possibly misplaced reaction.
Sorry about the wired article, I didn't like some of it either, but it does highlight some of the aspects of complexity that I find interesting.
Well you didn't seem to be interested in the rest of my comment did the first part distract you too much?
Then again I don't know enough about social sciences to compare confidence intervals.
Will progess stop 10 years from now?
Do people live up to that standard? I don't know lets see:
"A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects"
Have you been "synthesized" to similar specifications?
But this isn't the point, I was more thinking about overwhelming complexity and the following article discusses a few examples:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/
and beyond that states "Even when a system is dissected into its basic parts, those parts are still influenced by a whirligig of forces we canâ(TM)t understand or havenâ(TM)t considered or donâ(TM)t think matter."
We build systems where we have this interconnectedness under control. Whenever you have to deal with biology you don't. Ultimately you will also be faced with the problem of explaining yourself, which sounds impossible to me, but never mind.
There are certain silicon based lubricants that could potentially be used both ways.
Here is an example [NSFW]:
http://www.viamax.pt/en/silicon.asp
I always thought I'm suspicious.
I didn't reenter the gun club and the ham radio club precisely because radios and guns are just the stuff of revolutions (I learn't that in school). To no avail, when I went to London when some idiot caused a bomb scare my luggage still got rerouted to the US and I got it back with a bloody TSA bandage, like I have to fly over the US when travelling directly from Germany to the UK.
Now, because of my German heritage and my security awareness I got from living with the Stasi for some time I joined Diaspora (halfhartedly, because I don't need layers and layers of crap) instead of Facebook, and now the idiots are labelling me unsafe!
I have effectively done what my government didn't explicitly ask me for, but I knew that a totalitarian regime would like to see me do.
What else do they ask of me, do I have to choose a low energy density lifestyle that includes subsistence farming and some non-agressive belief like that of some south-east-asian countries. Amusingly some of my idiotic fellow citizens in Catholicistan (also called Bavaria by some) are calling them Buddhist swine - what a joke.
Well, for a society with a massive looming energy problem and some financial fallout already on the map we are behaving predictably erratic.
I suppose I have to just let it wash over me, at some point the maddening screams of the mass media will stop, slashdot included.
Some have argued that the so called soft sciences actually have to deal with far more complex systems than humans can handle. If you compare this to engineering where you can frequently synthesize systems, some soft social science looks much harder.
Oh crap, you mean I should talk to our village nazi to make me a better engineer? Last time I saw him, he wanted to shoot me (Don't worry I'm the gun club member, he isn't).
You have to admit that while von Braun might have been a bit careless about the fate of the slave workers in Mittelbau-Dora he actually had to flee the SS that wanted to kill him and his people. He could have also fled to the Russians, so it is not as if he hadn't chosen among his options wisely.
First of all, this is giving EMP weapons more leverage if you rely too heavily on it. The ephemeral nature of security is also a problem.
I'm also reminded of some plans by some to use RFID tags to decide who is allowed to trade on the market and who is not. I'm wondering whether the efficiency gains are worth the effort. For so little privacy, I at least demand the availability of a far denser power source than diesel to me, i.e. where is my nuclear powered flying car.
Forget it, if you are having a degree that deals with a specialized field like IT, you are in a minority. The rest of the population won't stand up for you, unless you have something tangible to offer. I hear Linux doesn't quite have the market share for that.
Since you mention the familial homeland, I'm wondering whether Germany would allow Americans with a German ancestry back in, as it did with the Volga-Germans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans). They settled in Russia some 200 years earlier and were now allowed back in, because the conditions for them in Russia sucked.
Of course this requires that Germany doesn't go down the same path.