Maybe not France, they can give up for a very low cost in defense spending.
Number of US soldiers killed before the courageous Americans cut and run from Vietnam: 47,000
Number of French soldiers killed before the army mutinied in WWI (refusing to engage in pointless offensives, fighting only to maintain defense): 978,000
Talk all you like about French cowardice, my dear armchair General, but when the going gets tough it is the Americans who get going... straight for the exits.
Letâ(TM)s do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, using the Chevy Volt as an example. In electric mode, the Volt gets about 22 kWh / 100 km, (so it is one of the least efficient electric vehicles out there⦠the best ones get 10 kWh / 100 km). Coal power generation produces about 1 kg of CO2 per kWh, so the âoeCO2 efficiencyâ of the Volt on an entirely coal-fed diet is 22 kg CO2 / 100 km.
The closest analog for the Volt that I can find is the Chevy Cruze, which the EPA rated about 9.8 L / 100 km for inner city driving. (Please feel free to correct me if you find a gasoline car which is a closer match for the size / power of the Volt). Burning gasoline produces approximately 2.4 kg of CO2 per L, so the CO2 efficiency of the Cruze is 23 kg CO2 / 100 km. Even given our unrealistic assumption of 100% coal-derived power, the electric vehicle comes out (slightly) ahead.
Keep in mind, coal accounts for only 45% of American electricity, while cleaner-burning natural gas accounts for another 23%. (The remainder comes from nuclear, hydro, wind, etc.) Natural gas produces 0.2 kg CO2 per kWh, as opposed to 1 kg, so in a more realistic calculation the Volt gets about 10 kg CO2 / 100 km, which more than twice as efficient as the gasoline car! The comparison gets even more favorable to electric when you consider other, more efficient electric cars (the Volt is one of the worst).
I should also point out one other way my quick calculation above is biased in favor of gasoline: the CO2 number for electricity includes losses due to transmission and distribution, while the number for gasoline does not (I only counted the CO2 of the gasoline that ends up in your tank.) For a true apples-to-apples comparison, we should include the considerable CO2 emissions that come with refining and shipping petrol.
Iâ(TM)ll admit my numbers are rather simplistic, so if you can point out any errors Iâ(TM)ve made I would welcome the correction. However, it seems to me pretty clear that you have no idea what you're talking about when you say it is "obvious" that electric cars are not greener than their gasoline-burning predecessors.
They conduct their launches from a marine platform that they tow out to sea using the fully functional submarine that they built for a previous project.
Also, in reply to the surprising number of negative responses questioning why a bunch of enthusiasts should build a giant rocket... a) because it's awesome, and b) because they can./. is a community of hackers (in the proper sense of the term), and building your own manned rocket qualifies as an epic hack. Technology shouldn't be just a shiny black box made by a corporation somewhere for us to consume in the approved ways... it should be something we tear apart and put back together, modify it and use it to unconventional ways that were never intended.
The world is full of black boxes, and full of people who want to tell us never to peak inside. Good on these guys for ignoring the nay-sayers and having the courage to build something awesome.
For most of human history as it turns out, women were not given much choice on who they'd have sex with, and rape was a viable and commonly-practiced method of procreation.
Now it's your turn to back up your assertions. While I agree that there has been a significant power difference between the genders for most (if not all) of human history, that is different from saying women had not much choice in the matter of who they ended up with. Humans are relatively unique among the primates in using pair-bonding as the dominant reproductive strategy (where almost every male has a chance to pass on his genes), rather than the alpha-male hierarchy seen in chimp, gorilla, and other ape societies. Genghis Khan is notable because he is the exception, rather than the rule, in our social organization.
Moreover, I would argue that human intelligence, and much of the culture that flows from it, is a sexually-selected trait, much like the feathers on a peacock's tail... females are generally attracted to men who can conspicuously show off their mental agility and creativity through displays such as music and dance, or through the accumulation of wealth. If women had no choice in who they mated with, these displays would be pointless from an evolutionary perspective. It is precisely because women had a choice in who they paired with that the selection pressure for intelligence far exceeded what was necessary for mere survival of the species.
Sorry to disappoint you, but a group cannot produce more than the sum of each person.
It depends how you define the "sum", but it is very clear that some ways of organizing labor result in far more productivity than what you would get if each person on the team simply worked on their own. Adam Smith had a very memorable description of a pin factory in his book The Wealth of Nations:
"One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; [...] I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. [...] But if they had all wrought separately and independently, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day"
The division of labor, which later lead to the assembly line, was one of the key innovations behind the spectacular increases in productivity during the Industrial Revolution. Evidently there are ways of organizing teams to produce results greater than the sum of the individual contributors.
My favorite permutation of this is the 3rd party billing "feature", turned on by default by your friendly neighborhood cellular service conglomerate.
3rd party billing allows for businesses to add charges to your phone bill, and the carrier makes no effort to verify whether you actually agreed to anything. That means a crook can add arbitrary monthly charges to your bill simply by knowing your phone number and claiming you opted in. Best of all, the carrier won't reverse the charges even if you can prove you didn't request the damn thing... it's up to you to pursue the scammers for a refund.
Do yourselves a favor and tell your cellular service provider to turn off 3rd party billing, and tell them this sort of thing should be turned off by default.
From the context of his remarks, I don't think Akin was referring to false versus truthful claims of rape per se, but rather that he was referring to the distinction Republicans are trying to draw between "forcible rape" and all other forms (i.e. statutory rape, or situations where the woman is unable or unwilling to fight back against her attacker.) The Republicans tried to pass a bill with the "forcible rape" distinction, but backed down after public outcry, so Akin's remarks aren't really outside his party's official position on the matter... he's being disowned by the party only because he drew attention to their stance.
Almost all large American cities (you know, the places that tend to have the largest police forces) have "Liberal/Progressives" in power. Of the ten biggest cities in the US, only New York and San Diego have non-Democratic mayors. Quite simply, police brutality is a function of a city's size more than its politics. Thanks for trying to make a partisan issue out of it, though.
Remind me again, which party was responsible for the Willie Horton ads? Which party used false rumors about McCain having an illegitimate black baby to destroy his chances in the 2000 primaries. Which party has pursued a "Southern strategy" for the last half century to capture the white vote in the old Confederate states?
I'm sure it's pure coincidence that many of the policies promoted by that party just happen to disproportionately benefit rich white males, and disproportionately harm minorities. But sure, the real racists are the other side for occasionally calling them out on it.
If it's OK for Sony BMG to benefit from being part of the Sony brand when things are good, then it is only fair for the reverse to occur when one division behaves badly and generates bad publicity. (In Sony's case, there have been many terrible anti-consumer decisions made by multiple divisions over the years, which indicates that the source of the rot is at the top.)
Since I never bought entertainment media from Sony BMG anyway, for the purposes of my boycott I consider anything carrying the name Sony as "close enough".
I've had the privilege of meeting Steve Mann (he lectures at the University I attended, so I sat in one some of his lectures and talked to him after class a bit). He quite literally wrote the book on wearable computers (http://wearcam.org/cyborg.htm), and a good portion of the book covers the hostile reactions people have to someone wearing conspicuous recording devices.
Come to think of it, I've previously commented on/. about my gut reaction upon first encountering Steve Mann wearing his glasses (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2943031&cid=40478747). In short, I found the experience to be rather unsettling, despite the fact that Dr. Mann is a really nice guy. The cameras are mounted on the surface of his glasses right in front of his eyes, which really interferes with eye-contact. As social creatures, eye-contact is hugely important in establishing rapport... deliberately taking that away generates a surprising amount of animosity at a subconscious level.
That said, I am in no way trying to justify the actions of the thugs who assaulted Dr. Mann. I hope they get punished appropriately.
Actually, there are examples of "one off" events in early human history, such as the migration out of Africa by a subset of the ancestral human population some 50,000 years ago.
According to Nicolas Wade's fascinating book "Before the Dawn" (yes, the same Nicolas Wade from TFA), all the genetic evidence points to a single band of maybe 150 people leaving the rest of the ancestral human population behind in Africa, and populating all the rest of the world. Of course, the natural question is, why didn't other waves follow them in all the millennia since then?
The answer is, in part, that the first migrants already blocked the exits. The original departure from Africa was less a migration than it was an expansion... individuals tended to live in roughly the area they were born, and it was only the ever-growing population numbers that drove the advancing wave of modern humans through Asia and Europe generation after generation. The modern humans had a strong advantage (probably language) over the archaic hominids already occupying the new lands, but the human population in Africa had no such advantage over their brethren once the first wave spread out past the Red Sea. Hence, the migration out of Africa appears to have been a one-time event of the type you so quickly derided as nonsense.
I would argue that on top of the sectarian issues in this particular case, there is a major lack scientific achievement in that region of the world. Dr. Abdus Salam is one of only two Nobel laureates from a Muslim country. Islamic Universities have a shockingly low output (only 300 out of the 1800 universities in the region have even _one_ faculty member who has ever published anything. Compare that to Western Universities where typically every faculty member will have publications.)
Part of the problem might be the rote learning paradigm that dominates in the middle east. Free inquiry and critical thinking are probably discouraged in a region dominated by so many authoritarian regimes. However, I would argue that one of the main reasons science has failed to flourish in Arab-Islamic countries is the legacy of one man: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.
Al-Ghazali helped codify and unify several competing schools of Islamic thought, binding them around the central premise of rejecting outside influences to concentrate on spiritualism and devotion to God. While European philosophy focused on understanding the material world, al-Ghazali focused instead on the supernatural. After the Crusades destroyed the Islamic world's scientific Golden Age, al-Ghazadi's anti-scientific philosophy held sway and kept the region from experiencing the kind of Renaissance that moved Europe out of the dark ages.
Tell that to the lawyers working for the EFF. In case you didn't notice, they did an admirable job defending The Oatmeal in this case, and your rights online in general.
When I went through the process of registering as a professional engineer, one of the requirements was to pass an exam on legal theory (focusing mostly on contract law). Studying for that test was a real eye-opener for me. I had been expecting to be horrified by how disconnected and counter-intuitive the legal system was, but instead I was surprised by how reasonable the rules were. There is a strong emphasis on fairness, clear language, and preventing the litigants from using the legal system as a bludgeon. (Damages in a contract dispute, for example, are supposed to be calculated based on the actual cost of remediation, as opposed to "some arbitrarily large penalty.")
Naturally, like any large and complex system, the legal system is susceptible to hacking and abuse... but for every crooked lawyer concerned only with making money, I'd argue that there are dozens of others genuinely concerned with serving society... you just don't hear about them because only the most outrageous cases make it into the news. If anything, I believe more technical and computer-savvy people should pursue careers in the legal system, to better protect the our rights in the digital age.
That would be cool, at least until the computer misinterprets a standard blink as a click and I screw the system up in the blink of an eye, as it were.
Or I suppose you could only count single-eye winks, which runs the risk some humorous misunderstandings / beatings, depending on who is in the vicinity.
You could use motion sensitive rings on your fingers to sense input, but then you run the risk of looking like a moron playing with imaginary sock puppets: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-10-12/
Too true... I remember when TLC first started, it was pure awesomeness: it had programs like Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, all sorts of history and science documentaries.
I would happily pay double to get TLC, Discovery, Scifi, and other channels back to the quality they used to have, but apparently the majority has decided that every channel must produce reality show crap instead.
The decision to go with the asymmetric design is quite unfortunate... it calls to mind "Locutus of Borg" more than it does "acceptable eye-wear".
My first in-person experience with this kind of technology was about ten years ago. One of the professors at my University was a pioneer in the field of wearable computers (http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/), so out of curiosity I sat in on one of his lectures. He was wearing a set of glasses (one of his earlier prototypes) that had some display mechanisms mounted right over the middle of the lens. It was incredibly distracting... I had a hard time focusing on anything he said. (After the lecture I had a short chat with him... he's a really nice guy.)
Afterwards, I tried to figure out what it was about those glasses that made them so unnerving, and I suspect it has to do with the importance of eye-contact. As humans, we possess an uncanny ability to calculate the position of another person's eyes with incredible position... you can instantly tell if the person you're talking to is paying attention, or if their mind is focused on other things, even if the difference between the two eye positions is less than a millimeter. Putting something right in the path between your eyes and theirs obstructs this ability, and gives the constant impression that the person wearing the obstruction is not really giving you their attention.
Good luck with that... according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, immigrants concentrate heavily at the bottom of the income distribution (about $24k per year) and illegal immigrants (with their vulnerable position and zero bargaining power) almost certainly make less than that.
So sure, blame your problems on the despised underclass... it amuses the rich to see the poor fighting each other for the scraps under the table.
The degradation of the Borg started earlier, with the movie First Contact and the introduction of the stupid Borg queen concept. They went from being an adaptive collective consciousness that could keep going after taking enormous damage, to a bunch of mindless morons with a massive single-point-of-failure. I'm guessing the writers simply did not know how to handle such an awesome enemy realistically after The Best of Both Worlds, so they resorted to making them dumb and adding a giant Achilles heel.
The trend nowadays is very much in the opposite direction: separate specialty devices merging into a single multifunction device. Hell, I no longer even wear a wrist watch anymore... my phone has taken over that role, along with browsing the web, reading ebooks, listening to music, watching movies, managing my calendar, taking photos, and (of course) making calls.
Separate specialty devices still do some of these functions better (I still keep a camera around for when I care about taking good quality photographs), but my phone manages to do most of them well enough, with the added convenience of portability and only having to carry one device.
Too bad the actual data doesn't support what you're saying. From the CDC website: "The South has the highest prevalence of obesity (29.4%) followed by the Midwest (28.7%), Northeast (24.9%) and the West (24.1%)."
Not that any region in the States should get too smug... the obesity rate in the Switzerland is 8.2%
Your post is an excellent summary of everything that is wrong with American foreign policy. :
- "He's an SOB, but he's our SOB"... which has resulted in us abandoning our democratic ideals to support dictators who murder, torture, and rape their own countrymen. Besides, having the ruler of a country on our side doesn't mean when it comes to terrorism... most of the 9/11 hijackers came from our "ally" Saudi Arabia. - "Invade only, no nation-building necessary"... so in other words, kill a bunch of people and destroy their critical infrastructure, and then leave a power vacuum and simply hope it gets filled by someone better for us than the previous leader. - "Maintain a healthy level of fear of our power"... because ruling via a climate of fear worked so well for the USSR, whose example we want to emulate in the worst possible way, right? Plus, fear doesn't work so well against terrorists who glorify martyrdom.
Remember, the attacks on our soil weren't perpetrated by Iraq, or any other nation-state... they were the work of a terrorist network spanning multiple countries, most of which are our nominal allies. The old foreign policy paradigms are worse than useless in this war... they are ultimately self-defeating. Propping up dictators, leaving power vacuums in destroyed countries, and trying to rule through fear will only serve to inflame more anti-American sentiment--more terrorists, and more terrorist supporters helping to hide them.
Bitter experience has taught us that abandoning our principles in the pursuit of temporary foreign policy goals is a losing strategy. Being the "good guy", hard as that is, is the only way to win.
Me too! I find navigating by GPS is an inversion of the ideal human / machine relationship, where the person does the creative thinking and the machine does all the boring labor. Turn-by-turn GPS strips away all the fun planning and exploring from driving, and leaves you with only the mindlessly mechanical task of pressing the gas and turning the wheel when prompted.
If you want to get a sense of how low that orbit is, fire up your favorite paint program and draw a circle 1000 px wide, representing the moon's average diameter (3,475 km). The circle representing the orbit is only 1013 px wide, just six pixels above the average surface and only two pixels away from the highest features.
Looking at this another way, the ratio of the craft's average altitude to the moon's diameter is slightly less than the ratio of an egg shell to the diameter of that egg.
Go ahead and wait, while those who are more adventurous get to live on the edge and pursue their dreams. By the time the nice, safe, comfortable version of civilian space-flight gets rolled out by some mega-corporation, a good portion of the excitement and romance will be gone. There's a reason why the names Wilbur Wright, Chuck Yeager, Yuri Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong are remembered, while no-one will remember my name despite flying multiple times on commercial aircraft.
Don't get me wrong... I like my safe, comfortable life. However, I also admire the resourcefulness and courage shown by a bunch of hobbyists who decided to do more than just wait to pursue their dreams.
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Maybe not France, they can give up for a very low cost in defense spending.
Number of US soldiers killed before the courageous Americans cut and run from Vietnam: 47,000
Number of French soldiers killed before the army mutinied in WWI (refusing to engage in pointless offensives, fighting only to maintain defense): 978,000
Talk all you like about French cowardice, my dear armchair General, but when the going gets tough it is the Americans who get going... straight for the exits.
Letâ(TM)s do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, using the Chevy Volt as an example. In electric mode, the Volt gets about 22 kWh / 100 km, (so it is one of the least efficient electric vehicles out there⦠the best ones get 10 kWh / 100 km). Coal power generation produces about 1 kg of CO2 per kWh, so the âoeCO2 efficiencyâ of the Volt on an entirely coal-fed diet is 22 kg CO2 / 100 km.
The closest analog for the Volt that I can find is the Chevy Cruze, which the EPA rated about 9.8 L / 100 km for inner city driving. (Please feel free to correct me if you find a gasoline car which is a closer match for the size / power of the Volt). Burning gasoline produces approximately 2.4 kg of CO2 per L, so the CO2 efficiency of the Cruze is 23 kg CO2 / 100 km. Even given our unrealistic assumption of 100% coal-derived power, the electric vehicle comes out (slightly) ahead.
Keep in mind, coal accounts for only 45% of American electricity, while cleaner-burning natural gas accounts for another 23%. (The remainder comes from nuclear, hydro, wind, etc.) Natural gas produces 0.2 kg CO2 per kWh, as opposed to 1 kg, so in a more realistic calculation the Volt gets about 10 kg CO2 / 100 km, which more than twice as efficient as the gasoline car! The comparison gets even more favorable to electric when you consider other, more efficient electric cars (the Volt is one of the worst).
I should also point out one other way my quick calculation above is biased in favor of gasoline: the CO2 number for electricity includes losses due to transmission and distribution, while the number for gasoline does not (I only counted the CO2 of the gasoline that ends up in your tank.) For a true apples-to-apples comparison, we should include the considerable CO2 emissions that come with refining and shipping petrol.
Iâ(TM)ll admit my numbers are rather simplistic, so if you can point out any errors Iâ(TM)ve made I would welcome the correction. However, it seems to me pretty clear that you have no idea what you're talking about when you say it is "obvious" that electric cars are not greener than their gasoline-burning predecessors.
They conduct their launches from a marine platform that they tow out to sea using the fully functional submarine that they built for a previous project.
Also, in reply to the surprising number of negative responses questioning why a bunch of enthusiasts should build a giant rocket... /. is a community of hackers (in the proper sense of the term), and building your own manned rocket qualifies as an epic hack. Technology shouldn't be just a shiny black box made by a corporation somewhere for us to consume in the approved ways... it should be something we tear apart and put back together, modify it and use it to unconventional ways that were never intended.
a) because it's awesome, and
b) because they can.
The world is full of black boxes, and full of people who want to tell us never to peak inside. Good on these guys for ignoring the nay-sayers and having the courage to build something awesome.
For most of human history as it turns out, women were not given much choice on who they'd have sex with, and rape was a viable and commonly-practiced method of procreation.
Now it's your turn to back up your assertions. While I agree that there has been a significant power difference between the genders for most (if not all) of human history, that is different from saying women had not much choice in the matter of who they ended up with. Humans are relatively unique among the primates in using pair-bonding as the dominant reproductive strategy (where almost every male has a chance to pass on his genes), rather than the alpha-male hierarchy seen in chimp, gorilla, and other ape societies. Genghis Khan is notable because he is the exception, rather than the rule, in our social organization.
Moreover, I would argue that human intelligence, and much of the culture that flows from it, is a sexually-selected trait, much like the feathers on a peacock's tail... females are generally attracted to men who can conspicuously show off their mental agility and creativity through displays such as music and dance, or through the accumulation of wealth. If women had no choice in who they mated with, these displays would be pointless from an evolutionary perspective. It is precisely because women had a choice in who they paired with that the selection pressure for intelligence far exceeded what was necessary for mere survival of the species.
Sorry to disappoint you, but a group cannot produce more than the sum of each person.
It depends how you define the "sum", but it is very clear that some ways of organizing labor result in far more productivity than what you would get if each person on the team simply worked on their own. Adam Smith had a very memorable description of a pin factory in his book The Wealth of Nations:
The division of labor, which later lead to the assembly line, was one of the key innovations behind the spectacular increases in productivity during the Industrial Revolution. Evidently there are ways of organizing teams to produce results greater than the sum of the individual contributors.
My favorite permutation of this is the 3rd party billing "feature", turned on by default by your friendly neighborhood cellular service conglomerate.
3rd party billing allows for businesses to add charges to your phone bill, and the carrier makes no effort to verify whether you actually agreed to anything. That means a crook can add arbitrary monthly charges to your bill simply by knowing your phone number and claiming you opted in. Best of all, the carrier won't reverse the charges even if you can prove you didn't request the damn thing... it's up to you to pursue the scammers for a refund.
Do yourselves a favor and tell your cellular service provider to turn off 3rd party billing, and tell them this sort of thing should be turned off by default.
From the context of his remarks, I don't think Akin was referring to false versus truthful claims of rape per se, but rather that he was referring to the distinction Republicans are trying to draw between "forcible rape" and all other forms (i.e. statutory rape, or situations where the woman is unable or unwilling to fight back against her attacker.) The Republicans tried to pass a bill with the "forcible rape" distinction, but backed down after public outcry, so Akin's remarks aren't really outside his party's official position on the matter... he's being disowned by the party only because he drew attention to their stance.
Almost all large American cities (you know, the places that tend to have the largest police forces) have "Liberal/Progressives" in power. Of the ten biggest cities in the US, only New York and San Diego have non-Democratic mayors. Quite simply, police brutality is a function of a city's size more than its politics. Thanks for trying to make a partisan issue out of it, though.
Remind me again, which party was responsible for the Willie Horton ads? Which party used false rumors about McCain having an illegitimate black baby to destroy his chances in the 2000 primaries. Which party has pursued a "Southern strategy" for the last half century to capture the white vote in the old Confederate states?
I'm sure it's pure coincidence that many of the policies promoted by that party just happen to disproportionately benefit rich white males, and disproportionately harm minorities. But sure, the real racists are the other side for occasionally calling them out on it.
If it's OK for Sony BMG to benefit from being part of the Sony brand when things are good, then it is only fair for the reverse to occur when one division behaves badly and generates bad publicity. (In Sony's case, there have been many terrible anti-consumer decisions made by multiple divisions over the years, which indicates that the source of the rot is at the top.)
Since I never bought entertainment media from Sony BMG anyway, for the purposes of my boycott I consider anything carrying the name Sony as "close enough".
I've had the privilege of meeting Steve Mann (he lectures at the University I attended, so I sat in one some of his lectures and talked to him after class a bit). He quite literally wrote the book on wearable computers (http://wearcam.org/cyborg.htm), and a good portion of the book covers the hostile reactions people have to someone wearing conspicuous recording devices.
Come to think of it, I've previously commented on /. about my gut reaction upon first encountering Steve Mann wearing his glasses (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2943031&cid=40478747). In short, I found the experience to be rather unsettling, despite the fact that Dr. Mann is a really nice guy. The cameras are mounted on the surface of his glasses right in front of his eyes, which really interferes with eye-contact. As social creatures, eye-contact is hugely important in establishing rapport... deliberately taking that away generates a surprising amount of animosity at a subconscious level.
That said, I am in no way trying to justify the actions of the thugs who assaulted Dr. Mann. I hope they get punished appropriately.
Actually, there are examples of "one off" events in early human history, such as the migration out of Africa by a subset of the ancestral human population some 50,000 years ago.
According to Nicolas Wade's fascinating book "Before the Dawn" (yes, the same Nicolas Wade from TFA), all the genetic evidence points to a single band of maybe 150 people leaving the rest of the ancestral human population behind in Africa, and populating all the rest of the world. Of course, the natural question is, why didn't other waves follow them in all the millennia since then?
The answer is, in part, that the first migrants already blocked the exits. The original departure from Africa was less a migration than it was an expansion... individuals tended to live in roughly the area they were born, and it was only the ever-growing population numbers that drove the advancing wave of modern humans through Asia and Europe generation after generation. The modern humans had a strong advantage (probably language) over the archaic hominids already occupying the new lands, but the human population in Africa had no such advantage over their brethren once the first wave spread out past the Red Sea. Hence, the migration out of Africa appears to have been a one-time event of the type you so quickly derided as nonsense.
I would argue that on top of the sectarian issues in this particular case, there is a major lack scientific achievement in that region of the world. Dr. Abdus Salam is one of only two Nobel laureates from a Muslim country. Islamic Universities have a shockingly low output (only 300 out of the 1800 universities in the region have even _one_ faculty member who has ever published anything. Compare that to Western Universities where typically every faculty member will have publications.)
Part of the problem might be the rote learning paradigm that dominates in the middle east. Free inquiry and critical thinking are probably discouraged in a region dominated by so many authoritarian regimes. However, I would argue that one of the main reasons science has failed to flourish in Arab-Islamic countries is the legacy of one man: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.
Al-Ghazali helped codify and unify several competing schools of Islamic thought, binding them around the central premise of rejecting outside influences to concentrate on spiritualism and devotion to God. While European philosophy focused on understanding the material world, al-Ghazali focused instead on the supernatural. After the Crusades destroyed the Islamic world's scientific Golden Age, al-Ghazadi's anti-scientific philosophy held sway and kept the region from experiencing the kind of Renaissance that moved Europe out of the dark ages.
Tell that to the lawyers working for the EFF. In case you didn't notice, they did an admirable job defending The Oatmeal in this case, and your rights online in general.
When I went through the process of registering as a professional engineer, one of the requirements was to pass an exam on legal theory (focusing mostly on contract law). Studying for that test was a real eye-opener for me. I had been expecting to be horrified by how disconnected and counter-intuitive the legal system was, but instead I was surprised by how reasonable the rules were. There is a strong emphasis on fairness, clear language, and preventing the litigants from using the legal system as a bludgeon. (Damages in a contract dispute, for example, are supposed to be calculated based on the actual cost of remediation, as opposed to "some arbitrarily large penalty.")
Naturally, like any large and complex system, the legal system is susceptible to hacking and abuse... but for every crooked lawyer concerned only with making money, I'd argue that there are dozens of others genuinely concerned with serving society... you just don't hear about them because only the most outrageous cases make it into the news. If anything, I believe more technical and computer-savvy people should pursue careers in the legal system, to better protect the our rights in the digital age.
That would be cool, at least until the computer misinterprets a standard blink as a click and I screw the system up in the blink of an eye, as it were.
Or I suppose you could only count single-eye winks, which runs the risk some humorous misunderstandings / beatings, depending on who is in the vicinity.
You could use motion sensitive rings on your fingers to sense input, but then you run the risk of looking like a moron playing with imaginary sock puppets: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-10-12/
Too true... I remember when TLC first started, it was pure awesomeness: it had programs like Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, all sorts of history and science documentaries.
After tuning out for a few years, I was blown over by how the programming on that channel has turned to garbage: http://www.cracked.com/article_18449_the-tlc-experiment-just-how-dumb-learning-channel.html
I would happily pay double to get TLC, Discovery, Scifi, and other channels back to the quality they used to have, but apparently the majority has decided that every channel must produce reality show crap instead.
The decision to go with the asymmetric design is quite unfortunate... it calls to mind "Locutus of Borg" more than it does "acceptable eye-wear".
My first in-person experience with this kind of technology was about ten years ago. One of the professors at my University was a pioneer in the field of wearable computers (http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/), so out of curiosity I sat in on one of his lectures. He was wearing a set of glasses (one of his earlier prototypes) that had some display mechanisms mounted right over the middle of the lens. It was incredibly distracting... I had a hard time focusing on anything he said. (After the lecture I had a short chat with him... he's a really nice guy.)
Afterwards, I tried to figure out what it was about those glasses that made them so unnerving, and I suspect it has to do with the importance of eye-contact. As humans, we possess an uncanny ability to calculate the position of another person's eyes with incredible position... you can instantly tell if the person you're talking to is paying attention, or if their mind is focused on other things, even if the difference between the two eye positions is less than a millimeter. Putting something right in the path between your eyes and theirs obstructs this ability, and gives the constant impression that the person wearing the obstruction is not really giving you their attention.
Good luck with that... according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, immigrants concentrate heavily at the bottom of the income distribution (about $24k per year) and illegal immigrants (with their vulnerable position and zero bargaining power) almost certainly make less than that.
So sure, blame your problems on the despised underclass... it amuses the rich to see the poor fighting each other for the scraps under the table.
The degradation of the Borg started earlier, with the movie First Contact and the introduction of the stupid Borg queen concept. They went from being an adaptive collective consciousness that could keep going after taking enormous damage, to a bunch of mindless morons with a massive single-point-of-failure. I'm guessing the writers simply did not know how to handle such an awesome enemy realistically after The Best of Both Worlds, so they resorted to making them dumb and adding a giant Achilles heel.
The trend nowadays is very much in the opposite direction: separate specialty devices merging into a single multifunction device. Hell, I no longer even wear a wrist watch anymore... my phone has taken over that role, along with browsing the web, reading ebooks, listening to music, watching movies, managing my calendar, taking photos, and (of course) making calls.
Separate specialty devices still do some of these functions better (I still keep a camera around for when I care about taking good quality photographs), but my phone manages to do most of them well enough, with the added convenience of portability and only having to carry one device.
Too bad the actual data doesn't support what you're saying. From the CDC website: "The South has the highest prevalence of obesity (29.4%) followed by the Midwest (28.7%), Northeast (24.9%) and the West (24.1%)."
Not that any region in the States should get too smug... the obesity rate in the Switzerland is 8.2%
Your post is an excellent summary of everything that is wrong with American foreign policy. :
- "He's an SOB, but he's our SOB"... which has resulted in us abandoning our democratic ideals to support dictators who murder, torture, and rape their own countrymen. Besides, having the ruler of a country on our side doesn't mean when it comes to terrorism... most of the 9/11 hijackers came from our "ally" Saudi Arabia.
- "Invade only, no nation-building necessary"... so in other words, kill a bunch of people and destroy their critical infrastructure, and then leave a power vacuum and simply hope it gets filled by someone better for us than the previous leader.
- "Maintain a healthy level of fear of our power"... because ruling via a climate of fear worked so well for the USSR, whose example we want to emulate in the worst possible way, right? Plus, fear doesn't work so well against terrorists who glorify martyrdom.
Remember, the attacks on our soil weren't perpetrated by Iraq, or any other nation-state... they were the work of a terrorist network spanning multiple countries, most of which are our nominal allies. The old foreign policy paradigms are worse than useless in this war... they are ultimately self-defeating. Propping up dictators, leaving power vacuums in destroyed countries, and trying to rule through fear will only serve to inflame more anti-American sentiment--more terrorists, and more terrorist supporters helping to hide them.
Bitter experience has taught us that abandoning our principles in the pursuit of temporary foreign policy goals is a losing strategy. Being the "good guy", hard as that is, is the only way to win.
Me too! I find navigating by GPS is an inversion of the ideal human / machine relationship, where the person does the creative thinking and the machine does all the boring labor. Turn-by-turn GPS strips away all the fun planning and exploring from driving, and leaves you with only the mindlessly mechanical task of pressing the gas and turning the wheel when prompted.
Turn off the GPS... fight the machine!
If you want to get a sense of how low that orbit is, fire up your favorite paint program and draw a circle 1000 px wide, representing the moon's average diameter (3,475 km). The circle representing the orbit is only 1013 px wide, just six pixels above the average surface and only two pixels away from the highest features.
Looking at this another way, the ratio of the craft's average altitude to the moon's diameter is slightly less than the ratio of an egg shell to the diameter of that egg.
Go ahead and wait, while those who are more adventurous get to live on the edge and pursue their dreams. By the time the nice, safe, comfortable version of civilian space-flight gets rolled out by some mega-corporation, a good portion of the excitement and romance will be gone. There's a reason why the names Wilbur Wright, Chuck Yeager, Yuri Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong are remembered, while no-one will remember my name despite flying multiple times on commercial aircraft.
Don't get me wrong... I like my safe, comfortable life. However, I also admire the resourcefulness and courage shown by a bunch of hobbyists who decided to do more than just wait to pursue their dreams.