Unfortunately, it's quite logically impossible to definitively "prove" the absence of God, since he is defined as unprovable.
Many atheists conflate their dogmatic certainty that they have "proven" a negative with their distaste for organized religion, and the result is a vitriolic attack on anybody who professes a belief in god as stupid, ignorant, and backwards. Thus it often becomes just as much of a fundamentalist 'faith' that it leaves no room for question, exploration, or discussion, and thus it ironically opens itself up to charges that it is, in and of itself, a "religion," defined by it's intolerance for and diametric opposition towards organized religions which affirm the existence of a god or gods.
Atheists believe that there is no god. They cannot offer proof, because they cannot prove the absence of God. They can merely conclude, based on the evidence that they've seen and the logical conclusions they can draw from that evidence, that it does not exist, or at least - does not exist in the form characterized by organized religions so far.
Theists believe that there is a god. They cannot offer primary proof, because they generally define God to be unknowable / unseeable / other / elsewhere from us. What is God? He is not-us, not-here, not-seen, not-touched, not-tasted, not-smelled, not-heard. They are being asked to 'prove' a negative as well: if he is all of those things, how can they prove that he exists? They believe it - they conclude, based on the secondary evidence they see around them, that he must exist. If you think the birth of a child is miraculous, how could you not see evidence of God's existence in that?
Theists look at the process, and say, "Damn, how could something like that come about through some sort of miraculous guidance and planning?" Atheists look at it and say, "It happens all the time. It's not that special, why do you call it a miracle?"
In the final analysis, atheists who believe that religion and spirituality have nothing useful to offer humanity have missed the point; Theists who cling to their beliefs in spite of overwhelming evidence that their beliefs are wrong have ALSO missed the point. A sense of spirituality need not be opposed to a sense of science and curiosity. Many of the so-called 'atheists' today would be more correctly termed "areligionists", because their ire seems mostly focused on the transgressions and mistakes of the church, most notably Christian churches, and specifically Catholic churches (where the priest abuse scandal provides a handy slogan against religion), and fundamentalist / evangelical protestant groups (where creationism also provides a handy slogan against organized religion), instead of on the claimed single point of contention, namely that God doesn't exist.
Many atheists say, "I'm an atheist!" as if that's somehow the only thing they need to prove their superiority to the great unwashed masses of believers. My response to that is, "Great, we know what you're not. Now what are you?" So, for the sake of argument - let's all agree that god doesn't exist... does that mean pedophilia and child abuse only exist if God is believed to? Demonstrably false. Does that mean that jihad, racism, sexism, and a host of other nasty human traits only exist if God does? Demonstrably false, once more. I tend to dislike the atheists-slash-comedians who seem to view their sole purpose in life as mocking believers, and for much the same reason that I tend to dislike the theists who seem to view their sole purpose in life as warning the non-believers that they're all going to hell: because I like people who are interested in building something, not tearing everything else down.
What's funny is, if you really got an atheist to describe what they think about ethics, morals, social conduct... you'd find that many of their ideas probably aren't that far off from the christian, or jewish, or muslim, or wiccan, or buddhist ideal - certainly, some details will differ, and points of disagreement would emerge, but on the whole, I think you can arrive at a very large subset of standards and principles you agree upon, with or without the involvement of scripture.
My kids(and, indeed, every single kid) were born atheists. They had no conception of a deity until it was installed in them.
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, I think the concept of a deity is something that's pretty easy to come by. Humans are capable of symbolic thought, and we are so "good" at seeing patterns that we begin to see patterns even where there aren't. We seek to impose order and structure on the world around us as an aid to understanding the world, and it's no surprise that part of that turns into a belief in some "external force or forces" (call them what you will - demons, gods, saints, spirits...) which are the cause and the guiding impulse behind what we perceive as "random events" - it's an attempt to impose a cause and effect relationship on events that we don't understand. At a very basic level, the formation of religious explanations for physical events is the beginning of a scientific impulse: "why does this happen? how can we prevent it?" The danger is in clinging to these outmoded explanations in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence explaining "why this happens" and "how can we prevent it".
If "I" am powerless to prevent lightning, then clearly something more powerful than me must be the cause: in the absence of scientific data, is it any wonder that we tend to create some sort of unseen/all-powerful actor that is the cause? Is it any wonder, furthermore, that we would then seek to find ways to please that unseen / all-powerful actor so that it would send less lightning to plague us in the future? If I am walking in the woods and find myself confronted with an angry bear, self-preservation demands that I find a way to escape being eaten. If I have a steak in my hand, perhaps it will occur to me that the bear might accept this humble offering and leave me in peace, or at least leave me to escape with my life. There, I've just canonized the bear, and appeased Ursa, the hungry Bear God through my small offering to one of her incarnations on earth.
None of this means that "gods" exist, but it certainly means that we have the capacity to create them in our own image - as the evolution of spirituality and religion across pretty much all cultures and peoples amply demonstrates. I suspect that children, left to their own devices and faced with a world they don't comprehend, would readily invent their own pantheons to explain the world around them, as well, and that, given the passage of a few generations, this would take the form of some sort of religious and symbolic practice.
The fact that other people are talking about it, but it's not true, means it's nothing but pointless gossip.
I'd say that's entirely relevant to whether or not it's "newsworthy," and speaks volumes about the lax editorial standards we've come to demand from our media.
"Who cares about actual important events happening in the world, we want to hear about those crazy Brazilians, and how backwards they (and evangelical Christians!) are for thinking the USB logo is a mark of the devil. What ignorant savages! LOL!"
The fact that it's being repeated here as anything remotely resembling 'news' only reinforces this chauvinistic and condescending viewpoint.
What train are you citing that does 574.8 km/h? Fastest reference I can find for an in-service train is the Shanghai MagLev, which reaches 431 km/h.
Also, a 737's average cruising speed is ~780 km/h. An A300 cruises at about 830 km/h. Just as a plane needs time to reach that cruising speed & altitude, a high speed train would need time to get up to speed too; I'm not sure how the acceleration of a train compares to that of a plane, but it could take some time and distance for a high speed train to reach its cruising speed, too (lengthening the duration of the trip).
Not to mention things like the mountains in the way, going around cities & other obstacles (or greatly lengthening the duration of the trip by stopping in every major city along the way, necessitating a deceleration & acceleration phase for every city), plus getting the rights to lay track across thousands of miles of somebody's property, then keeping them secured & free of obstacles and debris.
High speed train service has a lot of practical issues to be able to overcome when applied to the scale of the US. It works great in heavily populated metro areas, or as links between "close, but 4-12 hours worth of driving" metro areas, but as a long-haul transport on the scale of thousands of miles, high speed is going to have some serious drawbacks that need to be considered.
The TSA claims it is "only" the equivalent of a chest x-ray.
Point of fact - while I don't disagree with the general point of your comment, this statement is not true: they are arguing that it is a very small fraction of the radiation dose from a chest x-ray. Rough numbers, a chest x-ray will deliver ~100 microsieverts of ionizing radiation. The TSA specs say that a single scan delivers ~0.02 microsieverts. You would need to go through 5000 scans to reach the equivalent of one chest x-ray.
There are, additionally, scientists who dispute the accuracy of the 0.02mSv rating, and claim it's far higher, though I haven't seen numbers indicating exactly how much higher. Assuming it's 10x higher than the TSA published, you'd still be looking at 500 scans to achieve the amount of radiation exposure as a chest x-ray. For pilots, and other frequent fliers, this could move it into the realm of being a significant individual health concern, above and beyond the aggregate public health issues.
Even at the TSA-rated numbers, the x-ray scanners will pose an aggregate public health risk - even with a VERY low individual risk, you are multiplying this exposure across millions of passengers every year - you're going to see some non-zero number of cancer cases being triggered by the xray exposure from these devices. If the TSA-rated numbers are significantly lower than the actual radiation exposure (as some scientists are suggesting), you're looking at a ticking time-bomb, regardless of privacy issues.
They could opt for the millimeter-wave scanning devices instead, which do pretty much the same thing, but don't include the fun feature of exposing you to ionizing radiation; however, even if they moved all their scanners to that technology, that still wouldn't address the numerous legitimate privacy concerns inherent to the use of the technology in the first place, and there are some potential concerns about genetic damage caused by exposure to waves of this frequency as well.
I don't mind it so much, I'm on Facebook, and don't use it too much, but it has some nice features.
As with any piece of technology since the wheel was invented, it's how you use it that will determine whether or not it's "dangerous". Even if Facebook had the largest security breach in history, here's what they'd get from / about me:
1) A few links to youtube videos of music or interesting stuff that I thought some of my friends might be interested in seeing;
2) A few photos from a few concerts & nights out I've been to with some friends; most of them so blurry and dimly lit that you wouldn't know what you were looking at without a guided map;
3) A few "Happy birthday!" wishes from me to friends I don't see too much, or from them to me;
4) A list of people on Facebook I have friended, which includes: my family, a few friends from high school & college, a few co-workers who I socialize with, and some guys from the hockey team I play on. That's really about it. If I don't personally know (i.e., have met and spent time with that person, and consider them to be a friend) the person asking to be my friend, I ignore the request.
That's about it. I don't consider any of that to be critically sensitive data, and anything that I do consider sensitive data never gets put up on Facebook. I'm not concerned that Facebook is going to "violate my privacy," because I haven't allowed them to. If some advertiser wants to say, "Wow, you like Johnny Cash, and your birthday is coming up! We have a new CD that you'd love!", that's fine... I'm not going to get upset about that. That's about all they'd be able to glean from the information I've posted up there, though.
I'm occasionally annoyed that it creates "yet another system" I have to use to check in on some friends, but honestly, privacy concerns are the least of my worries with Facebook, because I assume everything I post up there can & will be viewed by the entire world someday -- as a result, I simply don't post anything that I want to keep the rest of the world from seeing in the first place.
No, it's the fact that the data isn't supposed to be stored. They're retaining the data illegally.
What I want to know is, if it's illegal for TSA agents to retain these images... why the fuck are they buying machines with internal storage that allows them to do so? You don't "accidentally" save 35,000 images.
And even if it's not strictly illegal to retain them, and allowing that there may be a requirement for image retention for some period of time... why is anybody who's operating the machine able to copy or access them without "super-user" style privileges? write the scans to an encrypted internal store, delete them automatically after some legislated retention requirement, and don't allow anybody to access, display, or copy them without extra privileges far beyond what the person staring at the monitor needs?
It just seems like this is one of the worst-engineered solutions you could imagine. "I know, let's add some USB ports and flickr integration so it'll be super easy to share photos of all our passengers! Access to stored images should be impossible (if it's illegal - simply *do not allow* the image data to be written to a storage device), or require high-level admin privileges, access to which would be flagged to other audit personnel to make sure somebody's not "accidentally" reviewing 20 or 30 images of the prettiest young ladies to come through the line in the past 30 minutes...
Where's your fuzzy.png conversion of a fuzzy.jpg capture to provie it?
If you don't have a way of showing us a lossless image that faithfully reproduces all of the degradation of the original.jpg compression, I don't think you can expect us to get too excited about this alleged stick figure in mud.
Do you really think that a company, in the business of making money by selling a product, should announce new things like this?
"Hey guys, we've got some new stuff. But you probably won't care about it anyway, so never mind."
Or maybe, "Hey, we have some shit that's not worth your time to look at, but we'd like your money for it, please?"
"Nothing to see here, really. We have some stuff, but we don't recommend you buy it at all."
For god's sake, why would ANYBODY get upset that a company is "hyping" a new product they have for sale? I would actually PREFER that the people selling me something were happy about the product they're selling, because I'll tend to think, "Hmm, if the people making it are this excited, maybe there's something worth looking at here." These companies are not making money by being mumbling wallflowers who self-deprecate constantly - if you want that, go watch a movie with Michael Cera in it. That schtick gets tiresome fast in my opinion, but apparently there are people who wish the rest of the world would behave like him.
Just because it costs less money to deliver downloads, doesn't mean they can't charge the same or more.
Cost of creating the physical CD (i.e., putting bits on the plastic) is fairly cheap compared to the overall retail cost of the CD - a few dollars per unit, with that cost probably declining rapidly as the number of units pressed increases.
Moving to digital, you eliminate the per-unit replication cost & the shipping costs, but neither of those would really serve to reduce the price of a CD by more than a few dollars. Then you have to add back the costs of digital warehousing and distribution - cheaper, but servers, electricity, programmers' time to code a storefront & purchasing functionality, and bandwidth aren't free.
I used to see CDs retail normally for $14-17 in stores. On iTunes, they generally run ~$10. How much cheaper do you really think they should be, given that the artist still needs to be compensated, and everybody else in the chain of development, recording, production, and distribution needs a cut?
If we absolutely *must* have the best of the best of the best, the peak of human perfection in every way - what's the *point* of trying to establish a presence long term?
The point is simply this: The initial colonization effort would need quite a bit of time to reach any self-sustaining sort of level. They wouldn't have facilities or resources to devote to caring for the old and handicapped for probably several years. Remember, we're talking about building an entire self-sustaining outpost in what is - more or less - a vacuum which will kill life as we know it nearly instantly.
The initial people sent would need to be in absolute peak condition - physically, psychologically, and mentally, for a colony to even have a chance - building anything more permanent on the Martian surface that would ever approach anything big enough to house, supply, and support even a couple hundred people is going to take years of effort. If you send up people who *already* have issues, you're crippling the effectiveness of the group that's going - the more preexisting conditions you allow into the initial rounds of colonist volunteers, the more likely you are that one or more of them will have problems that make them dead weight - something any colony on another planet would likely be unable to support much of.
Of course you have to plan for the colonists getting older, but that can be provided for *after* they've scratched a survivable environment out of the surface of another planet - a process that will likely take several years. In the meantime, you send only the best & brightest, in the peak of their conditions, which allows you to minimize the medical supplies you have to ship up with you, so that you can handle the truly critical emergency issues, and not spend time worrying about whether Roberts has taken his insulin or blood pressure medication today.
Note that I am saying that the "farmhands" in this case would be compared to highly trained technical ratings in the military who receive extensive pre-fleet/deployment training and who then enhance their education while performing on the job.
There's a big difference between training as - essentially - a mechanic/support tech when you're surrounded by thousands of other people who can help you and support you, and being "one of the only two people on this rock who know anything about any of these systems, and can diagnose & repair them in an emergency."
Communications latency is between 3 and 22 minutes. When your jet's electronic system breaks down on the tarmac, and it takes 22 minutes to get somebody on the line from Raytheon to help you solve the problem, you don't generally run the risk of having your entire squadron wiped out. When some sort of electrical / mechanical malfunction occurs on Mars, with an 8 month travel delay, and a avg 12.5 minute communications delay, that 'tech support' guy could very well be the difference between the entire colony living or dying, quite literally. There would be very little room in the first few rounds of colonization for anybody who is not deeply knowledgeable in their field, and who also possesses a broad range of knowledge in other related fields.
The point of my original post is that most people responding here are, more than likely, "imaginig that they'll go and get to play Barsoom." The tone of several has been, "I hate this place anyway, there's nothing here for me, might as well go be on another planet." The tone of several more has been, "Think how cool that would be!" (with no apparent attention or care to the fact that they'd be living in quite primitive conditions for most of the rest of their natural life). It smacks of naivete and adolescent fantasy, and was intended as a reality check against those. A blunter assessment of the situation than you'd care for, perhaps, but no less true for that.
You went from "you don't need a phd to be a farmhand," to citing examples of high school students growing pot in a hydroponic culture.
You're suggesting that a level of education far closer to "migrant worker" than "phd" is sufficient and appropriate for a mars colonization effort. I'm saying that a colonization effort based on those standards is a disaster waiting to happen, and that you might as well just line the volunteers up in front of a firing squad, as it would be cheaper to achieve the same outcome.
And if you call that response "screeching," you're entirely too sensitive to be in this discussion.
"Passionately incorrect" is not science. You don't get to take poetic license with facts, or you shouldn't be calling it science if you are.
Dispassionate agnosticism is pretty much the basis for scientific inquiry. When you are so passionately invested in proving what you believe, scientific method takes a back seat to creative interpretation of data, resulting in shitty hack science, or pseudo-mystic bullshit.
IICV is right, the poster isn't displaying enthusiasm for science, he's displaying enthusiasm for generating support for his theory, with limited and apparently contradictory facts (detegents aren't acidic, for instance, and tap water could be mildly acidic or basic - where's his pH readings?) This is not a language that "science" may properly speak.
A farmhand *didn't* need a PhD when we were colonizing north america. Do you think we're really going to spend billions of dollars launching a colonization effort which involves shipping a couple hundred manual laborers up to Mars?
The people who would have to establish that colony are going to need extraordinarily deep and broad vocational preparation. If you think that establishing a mars colony is going to happen by sending a bunch of uneducated migrant workers along with 2 or 3 "smart administrators," you're foolish. "Qualifying over time" when dozens or hundreds of lives are on the line is a recipe for disaster - when one error means the entire operation is destroyed, do you really think there's room for a trial and error approach?
As to the physical conditioning, you're kidding, right?
Not in the least. You're aware that "physical condition" also includes genetics, current health issues, eyesight, blood pressure, and pretty much any other health condition you can name that might incapacitate you, or would require ongoing medication to control... right? Sending someone on a one-way trip..to establish a martian colony would require a bit more than "can march 10 miles with a 50 pound pack, do 50 pushups, 80 situps, and 10 pullups." There's a reason why being an astronaut is so competitive now, and those are for short, round-trip missions.
I'm absolutely certain that we would have several thousand who would be more than capable of handling it and thriving.
And you are, most likely, wrong. Very few military personnel are sufficiently educated and physically capable to make it in the space program. Many people don't have perfect eyesight (you going to ship an endless supply of contact lenses or glasses?), who have chronic conditions that require medication (little hypertension? sorry, right out. High cholesterol? no-go. Diabetes? Try again in another life.)
We are talking about "once you leave, you're gone for good" space travel. This means that every person on that colony ship must be in absolutely perfect physical condition, incredibly well-trained to handle any unexpected malfunction in the systems and roles they are responsible for, and psychologically rock-solid. As far as your commentary on PhD farmhand, what's funny is that the "farmers" in any colonization effort would very likely be well-trained botanists, agricultural scientists, and robotics/mechanical engineers. Do you really think they're going to be planting and managing things by hand? Your commentary about "high school dropouts managing to grow weed" simply exposes your naivete -- high school dropouts are not doing so in the vacuum of space, in an environment that is absolutely hostile to life. There's a big difference between "I can follow these instructions I read on the internet to grow dope in my closet," and "I can build, maintain, and operate an agricultural operation that will feed and meet the entire nutritional needs of dozens of colonists in a low-gravity vacuum environment."
Your argument is like saying that having removed the patient's Funny Bone once in the game of Operation means you could totally handle trauma surgery, or you're at least smart enough to "just learn it as you go."
(since you can never permanently guarantee that someone, somewhere won't tag you in a photo or share their address book, and you can't opt out until someone has "suggested" you be opted in).
But this has been the case since long before facebook was a glimmer in Zuckerberg's eye. I could upload photos of you (or purporting to be you) to Flickr, Yahoo, Webshots, or any number of other sites. I could add your name to a chain letter and forward it to a million other people.
Yes, people can do the same thing on Facebook.
No, it's nothing new that Facebook allows to be possible.
And I sincerely doubt that people are sitting around "beating you" in order to get you to join facebook with them. If they are, get new friends.
There are approximately 7 billion people currently living on earth.
The population density of New York City - quite livable, if crowded, and a traffic nightmare - is ~27,532 per square mile.
At half that population density (13,766/sq mile), you could fit the entire population of earth into an area ~508,500 square miles.
Or, roughly, an area slightly smaller than 2 times the size of Texas (268,581 sq. miles)
Leaving EVERY OTHER PLACE ON EARTH uninhabitated by humans, for use as: farmland, parks, nature preserves, resource extraction, and so on.
"living space" is not the problem in any sense of the word. Wise use of resources & the problem of fueling industry for that many people is the issue.
Heck, let people spread out to cover the entire area of the US, and you have a population density of ~1850 per square mile - roughly the poopulation density of Montreal, which is a lovely, and quite livable, city. That leaves the rest of North America, and the remainder of every other continent, free for farmland, etc.
Again: Living space is not the problem in any sense of the word. Our issue is sustainable resource usage, and none of that will be helped, ameliorated, or solved by colonizing Mars.
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Different axes? Or simply different points along the line with one endpoint at atheism, and the other at theism?
Agnostics don't sound like they're on a different axis at all, it sounds like shades of gray on the continuum between theism and atheism, to me.
Unfortunately, it's quite logically impossible to definitively "prove" the absence of God, since he is defined as unprovable.
Many atheists conflate their dogmatic certainty that they have "proven" a negative with their distaste for organized religion, and the result is a vitriolic attack on anybody who professes a belief in god as stupid, ignorant, and backwards. Thus it often becomes just as much of a fundamentalist 'faith' that it leaves no room for question, exploration, or discussion, and thus it ironically opens itself up to charges that it is, in and of itself, a "religion," defined by it's intolerance for and diametric opposition towards organized religions which affirm the existence of a god or gods.
Atheists believe that there is no god. They cannot offer proof, because they cannot prove the absence of God. They can merely conclude, based on the evidence that they've seen and the logical conclusions they can draw from that evidence, that it does not exist, or at least - does not exist in the form characterized by organized religions so far.
Theists believe that there is a god. They cannot offer primary proof, because they generally define God to be unknowable / unseeable / other / elsewhere from us. What is God? He is not-us, not-here, not-seen, not-touched, not-tasted, not-smelled, not-heard. They are being asked to 'prove' a negative as well: if he is all of those things, how can they prove that he exists? They believe it - they conclude, based on the secondary evidence they see around them, that he must exist. If you think the birth of a child is miraculous, how could you not see evidence of God's existence in that?
Theists look at the process, and say, "Damn, how could something like that come about through some sort of miraculous guidance and planning?" Atheists look at it and say, "It happens all the time. It's not that special, why do you call it a miracle?"
In the final analysis, atheists who believe that religion and spirituality have nothing useful to offer humanity have missed the point; Theists who cling to their beliefs in spite of overwhelming evidence that their beliefs are wrong have ALSO missed the point. A sense of spirituality need not be opposed to a sense of science and curiosity. Many of the so-called 'atheists' today would be more correctly termed "areligionists", because their ire seems mostly focused on the transgressions and mistakes of the church, most notably Christian churches, and specifically Catholic churches (where the priest abuse scandal provides a handy slogan against religion), and fundamentalist / evangelical protestant groups (where creationism also provides a handy slogan against organized religion), instead of on the claimed single point of contention, namely that God doesn't exist.
Many atheists say, "I'm an atheist!" as if that's somehow the only thing they need to prove their superiority to the great unwashed masses of believers. My response to that is, "Great, we know what you're not. Now what are you?" So, for the sake of argument - let's all agree that god doesn't exist... does that mean pedophilia and child abuse only exist if God is believed to? Demonstrably false. Does that mean that jihad, racism, sexism, and a host of other nasty human traits only exist if God does? Demonstrably false, once more. I tend to dislike the atheists-slash-comedians who seem to view their sole purpose in life as mocking believers, and for much the same reason that I tend to dislike the theists who seem to view their sole purpose in life as warning the non-believers that they're all going to hell: because I like people who are interested in building something, not tearing everything else down.
What's funny is, if you really got an atheist to describe what they think about ethics, morals, social conduct... you'd find that many of their ideas probably aren't that far off from the christian, or jewish, or muslim, or wiccan, or buddhist ideal - certainly, some details will differ, and points of disagreement would emerge, but on the whole, I think you can arrive at a very large subset of standards and principles you agree upon, with or without the involvement of scripture.
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, I think the concept of a deity is something that's pretty easy to come by. Humans are capable of symbolic thought, and we are so "good" at seeing patterns that we begin to see patterns even where there aren't. We seek to impose order and structure on the world around us as an aid to understanding the world, and it's no surprise that part of that turns into a belief in some "external force or forces" (call them what you will - demons, gods, saints, spirits...) which are the cause and the guiding impulse behind what we perceive as "random events" - it's an attempt to impose a cause and effect relationship on events that we don't understand. At a very basic level, the formation of religious explanations for physical events is the beginning of a scientific impulse: "why does this happen? how can we prevent it?" The danger is in clinging to these outmoded explanations in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence explaining "why this happens" and "how can we prevent it".
If "I" am powerless to prevent lightning, then clearly something more powerful than me must be the cause: in the absence of scientific data, is it any wonder that we tend to create some sort of unseen/all-powerful actor that is the cause? Is it any wonder, furthermore, that we would then seek to find ways to please that unseen / all-powerful actor so that it would send less lightning to plague us in the future? If I am walking in the woods and find myself confronted with an angry bear, self-preservation demands that I find a way to escape being eaten. If I have a steak in my hand, perhaps it will occur to me that the bear might accept this humble offering and leave me in peace, or at least leave me to escape with my life. There, I've just canonized the bear, and appeased Ursa, the hungry Bear God through my small offering to one of her incarnations on earth.
None of this means that "gods" exist, but it certainly means that we have the capacity to create them in our own image - as the evolution of spirituality and religion across pretty much all cultures and peoples amply demonstrates. I suspect that children, left to their own devices and faced with a world they don't comprehend, would readily invent their own pantheons to explain the world around them, as well, and that, given the passage of a few generations, this would take the form of some sort of religious and symbolic practice.
The fact that other people are talking about it, but it's not true, means it's nothing but pointless gossip.
I'd say that's entirely relevant to whether or not it's "newsworthy," and speaks volumes about the lax editorial standards we've come to demand from our media.
"Who cares about actual important events happening in the world, we want to hear about those crazy Brazilians, and how backwards they (and evangelical Christians!) are for thinking the USB logo is a mark of the devil. What ignorant savages! LOL!"
The fact that it's being repeated here as anything remotely resembling 'news' only reinforces this chauvinistic and condescending viewpoint.
What train are you citing that does 574.8 km/h? Fastest reference I can find for an in-service train is the Shanghai MagLev, which reaches 431 km/h.
Also, a 737's average cruising speed is ~780 km/h. An A300 cruises at about 830 km/h. Just as a plane needs time to reach that cruising speed & altitude, a high speed train would need time to get up to speed too; I'm not sure how the acceleration of a train compares to that of a plane, but it could take some time and distance for a high speed train to reach its cruising speed, too (lengthening the duration of the trip).
Not to mention things like the mountains in the way, going around cities & other obstacles (or greatly lengthening the duration of the trip by stopping in every major city along the way, necessitating a deceleration & acceleration phase for every city), plus getting the rights to lay track across thousands of miles of somebody's property, then keeping them secured & free of obstacles and debris.
High speed train service has a lot of practical issues to be able to overcome when applied to the scale of the US. It works great in heavily populated metro areas, or as links between "close, but 4-12 hours worth of driving" metro areas, but as a long-haul transport on the scale of thousands of miles, high speed is going to have some serious drawbacks that need to be considered.
Point of fact - while I don't disagree with the general point of your comment, this statement is not true: they are arguing that it is a very small fraction of the radiation dose from a chest x-ray. Rough numbers, a chest x-ray will deliver ~100 microsieverts of ionizing radiation. The TSA specs say that a single scan delivers ~0.02 microsieverts. You would need to go through 5000 scans to reach the equivalent of one chest x-ray.
There are, additionally, scientists who dispute the accuracy of the 0.02mSv rating, and claim it's far higher, though I haven't seen numbers indicating exactly how much higher. Assuming it's 10x higher than the TSA published, you'd still be looking at 500 scans to achieve the amount of radiation exposure as a chest x-ray. For pilots, and other frequent fliers, this could move it into the realm of being a significant individual health concern, above and beyond the aggregate public health issues.
Even at the TSA-rated numbers, the x-ray scanners will pose an aggregate public health risk - even with a VERY low individual risk, you are multiplying this exposure across millions of passengers every year - you're going to see some non-zero number of cancer cases being triggered by the xray exposure from these devices. If the TSA-rated numbers are significantly lower than the actual radiation exposure (as some scientists are suggesting), you're looking at a ticking time-bomb, regardless of privacy issues.
They could opt for the millimeter-wave scanning devices instead, which do pretty much the same thing, but don't include the fun feature of exposing you to ionizing radiation; however, even if they moved all their scanners to that technology, that still wouldn't address the numerous legitimate privacy concerns inherent to the use of the technology in the first place, and there are some potential concerns about genetic damage caused by exposure to waves of this frequency as well.
I guess you could crap on the floor next time a TSA agent asks to give you a patdown? Make it a really memorable occasion for the two of you?
Post CCTV video of it on youtube - "Two girls, one backscatter x-ray machine"
So his name means he wasn't joking?
MightyMartian's the one who got all wound up about perceived "astroturfing," SeriouslyNoClue is the one who made the joke in the first place.
It's subtle if you just skim the post, but it's most definitely a joke.
I don't mind it so much, I'm on Facebook, and don't use it too much, but it has some nice features.
As with any piece of technology since the wheel was invented, it's how you use it that will determine whether or not it's "dangerous". Even if Facebook had the largest security breach in history, here's what they'd get from / about me:
1) A few links to youtube videos of music or interesting stuff that I thought some of my friends might be interested in seeing;
2) A few photos from a few concerts & nights out I've been to with some friends; most of them so blurry and dimly lit that you wouldn't know what you were looking at without a guided map;
3) A few "Happy birthday!" wishes from me to friends I don't see too much, or from them to me;
4) A list of people on Facebook I have friended, which includes: my family, a few friends from high school & college, a few co-workers who I socialize with, and some guys from the hockey team I play on. That's really about it. If I don't personally know (i.e., have met and spent time with that person, and consider them to be a friend) the person asking to be my friend, I ignore the request.
That's about it. I don't consider any of that to be critically sensitive data, and anything that I do consider sensitive data never gets put up on Facebook. I'm not concerned that Facebook is going to "violate my privacy," because I haven't allowed them to. If some advertiser wants to say, "Wow, you like Johnny Cash, and your birthday is coming up! We have a new CD that you'd love!", that's fine... I'm not going to get upset about that. That's about all they'd be able to glean from the information I've posted up there, though.
I'm occasionally annoyed that it creates "yet another system" I have to use to check in on some friends, but honestly, privacy concerns are the least of my worries with Facebook, because I assume everything I post up there can & will be viewed by the entire world someday -- as a result, I simply don't post anything that I want to keep the rest of the world from seeing in the first place.
What I want to know is, if it's illegal for TSA agents to retain these images... why the fuck are they buying machines with internal storage that allows them to do so? You don't "accidentally" save 35,000 images.
And even if it's not strictly illegal to retain them, and allowing that there may be a requirement for image retention for some period of time... why is anybody who's operating the machine able to copy or access them without "super-user" style privileges? write the scans to an encrypted internal store, delete them automatically after some legislated retention requirement, and don't allow anybody to access, display, or copy them without extra privileges far beyond what the person staring at the monitor needs?
It just seems like this is one of the worst-engineered solutions you could imagine. "I know, let's add some USB ports and flickr integration so it'll be super easy to share photos of all our passengers! Access to stored images should be impossible (if it's illegal - simply *do not allow* the image data to be written to a storage device), or require high-level admin privileges, access to which would be flagged to other audit personnel to make sure somebody's not "accidentally" reviewing 20 or 30 images of the prettiest young ladies to come through the line in the past 30 minutes...
Where's your fuzzy .png conversion of a fuzzy .jpg capture to provie it?
If you don't have a way of showing us a lossless image that faithfully reproduces all of the degradation of the original .jpg compression, I don't think you can expect us to get too excited about this alleged stick figure in mud.
Do you really think that a company, in the business of making money by selling a product, should announce new things like this?
"Hey guys, we've got some new stuff. But you probably won't care about it anyway, so never mind."
Or maybe, "Hey, we have some shit that's not worth your time to look at, but we'd like your money for it, please?"
"Nothing to see here, really. We have some stuff, but we don't recommend you buy it at all."
For god's sake, why would ANYBODY get upset that a company is "hyping" a new product they have for sale? I would actually PREFER that the people selling me something were happy about the product they're selling, because I'll tend to think, "Hmm, if the people making it are this excited, maybe there's something worth looking at here." These companies are not making money by being mumbling wallflowers who self-deprecate constantly - if you want that, go watch a movie with Michael Cera in it. That schtick gets tiresome fast in my opinion, but apparently there are people who wish the rest of the world would behave like him.
Cost of creating the physical CD (i.e., putting bits on the plastic) is fairly cheap compared to the overall retail cost of the CD - a few dollars per unit, with that cost probably declining rapidly as the number of units pressed increases.
Moving to digital, you eliminate the per-unit replication cost & the shipping costs, but neither of those would really serve to reduce the price of a CD by more than a few dollars. Then you have to add back the costs of digital warehousing and distribution - cheaper, but servers, electricity, programmers' time to code a storefront & purchasing functionality, and bandwidth aren't free.
I used to see CDs retail normally for $14-17 in stores. On iTunes, they generally run ~$10. How much cheaper do you really think they should be, given that the artist still needs to be compensated, and everybody else in the chain of development, recording, production, and distribution needs a cut?
The point is simply this: The initial colonization effort would need quite a bit of time to reach any self-sustaining sort of level. They wouldn't have facilities or resources to devote to caring for the old and handicapped for probably several years. Remember, we're talking about building an entire self-sustaining outpost in what is - more or less - a vacuum which will kill life as we know it nearly instantly.
The initial people sent would need to be in absolute peak condition - physically, psychologically, and mentally, for a colony to even have a chance - building anything more permanent on the Martian surface that would ever approach anything big enough to house, supply, and support even a couple hundred people is going to take years of effort. If you send up people who *already* have issues, you're crippling the effectiveness of the group that's going - the more preexisting conditions you allow into the initial rounds of colonist volunteers, the more likely you are that one or more of them will have problems that make them dead weight - something any colony on another planet would likely be unable to support much of.
Of course you have to plan for the colonists getting older, but that can be provided for *after* they've scratched a survivable environment out of the surface of another planet - a process that will likely take several years. In the meantime, you send only the best & brightest, in the peak of their conditions, which allows you to minimize the medical supplies you have to ship up with you, so that you can handle the truly critical emergency issues, and not spend time worrying about whether Roberts has taken his insulin or blood pressure medication today.
There's a big difference between training as - essentially - a mechanic/support tech when you're surrounded by thousands of other people who can help you and support you, and being "one of the only two people on this rock who know anything about any of these systems, and can diagnose & repair them in an emergency."
Communications latency is between 3 and 22 minutes. When your jet's electronic system breaks down on the tarmac, and it takes 22 minutes to get somebody on the line from Raytheon to help you solve the problem, you don't generally run the risk of having your entire squadron wiped out. When some sort of electrical / mechanical malfunction occurs on Mars, with an 8 month travel delay, and a avg 12.5 minute communications delay, that 'tech support' guy could very well be the difference between the entire colony living or dying, quite literally. There would be very little room in the first few rounds of colonization for anybody who is not deeply knowledgeable in their field, and who also possesses a broad range of knowledge in other related fields.
The point of my original post is that most people responding here are, more than likely, "imaginig that they'll go and get to play Barsoom." The tone of several has been, "I hate this place anyway, there's nothing here for me, might as well go be on another planet." The tone of several more has been, "Think how cool that would be!" (with no apparent attention or care to the fact that they'd be living in quite primitive conditions for most of the rest of their natural life). It smacks of naivete and adolescent fantasy, and was intended as a reality check against those. A blunter assessment of the situation than you'd care for, perhaps, but no less true for that.
You went from "you don't need a phd to be a farmhand," to citing examples of high school students growing pot in a hydroponic culture.
You're suggesting that a level of education far closer to "migrant worker" than "phd" is sufficient and appropriate for a mars colonization effort. I'm saying that a colonization effort based on those standards is a disaster waiting to happen, and that you might as well just line the volunteers up in front of a firing squad, as it would be cheaper to achieve the same outcome.
And if you call that response "screeching," you're entirely too sensitive to be in this discussion.
"Passionately incorrect" is not science. You don't get to take poetic license with facts, or you shouldn't be calling it science if you are.
Dispassionate agnosticism is pretty much the basis for scientific inquiry. When you are so passionately invested in proving what you believe, scientific method takes a back seat to creative interpretation of data, resulting in shitty hack science, or pseudo-mystic bullshit.
IICV is right, the poster isn't displaying enthusiasm for science, he's displaying enthusiasm for generating support for his theory, with limited and apparently contradictory facts (detegents aren't acidic, for instance, and tap water could be mildly acidic or basic - where's his pH readings?) This is not a language that "science" may properly speak.
No. It is an impact crater. That conclusion is the only one we may reach, all others fail to account for the scientifically described "weird vibe."
It needs to get past Godzilla first.
Defense spending and research predated the Bush administration by centuries, friend.
Sure - people who are okay with living on a submarine that will never return to the surface or let people off for the rest of their natural lives.
A farmhand *didn't* need a PhD when we were colonizing north america. Do you think we're really going to spend billions of dollars launching a colonization effort which involves shipping a couple hundred manual laborers up to Mars?
The people who would have to establish that colony are going to need extraordinarily deep and broad vocational preparation. If you think that establishing a mars colony is going to happen by sending a bunch of uneducated migrant workers along with 2 or 3 "smart administrators," you're foolish. "Qualifying over time" when dozens or hundreds of lives are on the line is a recipe for disaster - when one error means the entire operation is destroyed, do you really think there's room for a trial and error approach?
Not in the least. You're aware that "physical condition" also includes genetics, current health issues, eyesight, blood pressure, and pretty much any other health condition you can name that might incapacitate you, or would require ongoing medication to control... right? Sending someone on a one-way trip. .to establish a martian colony would require a bit more than "can march 10 miles with a 50 pound pack, do 50 pushups, 80 situps, and 10 pullups." There's a reason why being an astronaut is so competitive now, and those are for short, round-trip missions.
And you are, most likely, wrong. Very few military personnel are sufficiently educated and physically capable to make it in the space program. Many people don't have perfect eyesight (you going to ship an endless supply of contact lenses or glasses?), who have chronic conditions that require medication (little hypertension? sorry, right out. High cholesterol? no-go. Diabetes? Try again in another life.)
We are talking about "once you leave, you're gone for good" space travel. This means that every person on that colony ship must be in absolutely perfect physical condition, incredibly well-trained to handle any unexpected malfunction in the systems and roles they are responsible for, and psychologically rock-solid. As far as your commentary on PhD farmhand, what's funny is that the "farmers" in any colonization effort would very likely be well-trained botanists, agricultural scientists, and robotics/mechanical engineers. Do you really think they're going to be planting and managing things by hand? Your commentary about "high school dropouts managing to grow weed" simply exposes your naivete -- high school dropouts are not doing so in the vacuum of space, in an environment that is absolutely hostile to life. There's a big difference between "I can follow these instructions I read on the internet to grow dope in my closet," and "I can build, maintain, and operate an agricultural operation that will feed and meet the entire nutritional needs of dozens of colonists in a low-gravity vacuum environment."
Your argument is like saying that having removed the patient's Funny Bone once in the game of Operation means you could totally handle trauma surgery, or you're at least smart enough to "just learn it as you go."
But this has been the case since long before facebook was a glimmer in Zuckerberg's eye. I could upload photos of you (or purporting to be you) to Flickr, Yahoo, Webshots, or any number of other sites. I could add your name to a chain letter and forward it to a million other people.
Yes, people can do the same thing on Facebook.
No, it's nothing new that Facebook allows to be possible.
And I sincerely doubt that people are sitting around "beating you" in order to get you to join facebook with them. If they are, get new friends.
In fairness, the inclusion of Pauly Shore is about the only thing that made that abomination of a movie remotely watchable.
He's awful, but you can't stop looking at the train wreck.
There are approximately 7 billion people currently living on earth.
The population density of New York City - quite livable, if crowded, and a traffic nightmare - is ~27,532 per square mile.
At half that population density (13,766/sq mile), you could fit the entire population of earth into an area ~508,500 square miles.
Or, roughly, an area slightly smaller than 2 times the size of Texas (268,581 sq. miles)
Leaving EVERY OTHER PLACE ON EARTH uninhabitated by humans, for use as: farmland, parks, nature preserves, resource extraction, and so on.
"living space" is not the problem in any sense of the word. Wise use of resources & the problem of fueling industry for that many people is the issue.
Heck, let people spread out to cover the entire area of the US, and you have a population density of ~1850 per square mile - roughly the poopulation density of Montreal, which is a lovely, and quite livable, city. That leaves the rest of North America, and the remainder of every other continent, free for farmland, etc.
Again: Living space is not the problem in any sense of the word. Our issue is sustainable resource usage, and none of that will be helped, ameliorated, or solved by colonizing Mars.
Of course, what else would the Kraken feed on when there are no boats around to swallow whole?