Sort of gives a different mental image to this passage, doesn't it? "And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me."
But it does kinda reduce the likelihood that there is a PERSONAL god who is intimately concerned with all of our activities
Why?
What if the myriad quantum fluctuations that we observe as "random" are, every single one of them, directed by just such a god? What could be more "intimately concerned with all of our activities" than directing every single subatomic event?
"Random" is a description, not an explanation. What if the statistical probabilities that we observe that say that particle X will deteriorate with Y frequency are subtle indicators of a divine plan? What if the exact moment of deterioration of said particle is not in fact random, as quantum physics describes it, but precisely chosen with some consequence millennia hence in mind?
Or suppose that the apparent randomness is eventually demonstrated to be wholly explainable by strict and invariably deterministic law. What if the entire universe is wholly deterministic, without requiring the intervention moment-by-moment of any deity -- but it's that way because the deity set it up to be so, knowing full well exactly how every event, from quarks to quasars, would play itself out?
Speaking as a Christian who fully acknowledges that evolution by natural selection fits all the available evidence, I heartily applaud every elucidation of the evidence and every logically sustainable proposal to bolster the theory.
However, the likelihood that God is intimately concerned with our lives is a question completely independent of science, and cannot be considered to have been demonstrated to be more or less likely, no matter what science discovers.
From TFA: The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep. If one is awake in bed for more than 10-15 minutes, one should get up and do something non-stimulating. Listening to music or reading are excellent choices. Lying in bed and watching TV or using the laptop are the worst. These stimulate the brain to wake up even more.
So now watching TV is more stimulating than reading?!?
When the hell did that happen?
I don't know about other people, but I almost never fall asleep reading. I almost always fall asleep if all I'm doing is watching TV (as opposed to having it on the background while I read/sew buttons back on/pay bills/cook/work out/tweak the software on the laptop/play piano/do dishes/fold laundry etc.)
so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless.
One quibble -- if there is a physical attribute or pattern of development that can be correlated with a non-physical test like an IQ test, then the test is clearly measuring something, and is therefore no more "meaningless" than, say, an assessment of BMI or cholesterol levels.
That said, if by "is meaningless" you mean "doesn't adequately predict success in life" or "doesn't measure enough", then I have no quibble at all.
The guidelines that say to use trademarks only as adjectives are clearly intended to discourage the term from becoming used as a generic noun by non-trademark owners -- that is, to encourage the trademark owner to set an example to non-trademark owners, as a way of forestalling the growth of the term as a generic noun.
The trademark trial transcripts I could find all adduce examples of usage of the trademark terms as generic nouns by the general populace, not such usage by the trademark owners. My point stands.
See here for a slightly different take on the question.
This is sheer nonsense. By this logic, the slogan "Have a Coke and a smile" should have invalidated Coca-Cola's trademark to the "Coke" name.
Other examples:
"I'd walk a mile for a Camel."
"This is not your father's Oldsmobile."
"Give me a Light. A Bud Light."
"It's Slinky, it's Slinky... "
"I want my MTV."
"What do you want on your Tombstone?"
"Have you driven a Ford lately?"
"All my men wear English Leather."
"Nothing comes between me and my Calvins."
"On the next Jerry Springer..."
... and that's just off the top of my head.
IANAL, but it certainly seems to me that the use of a trademark by the trademark owner as any particular part of speech has nothing to do with whether the trademark is enforceable. Use of the trademark as a generic term by non-trademark owners has, in the past, been adduced as part of the evidence for the revocation of trademark status (aspirin, xerox, e.g., as mentioned by other posters). But the part of speech is irrelevant, and no use of the term by the trademark owner has, to my knowledge, ever been so adduced.
I have a vague memory that some other smaller comic-book publishers (?Charlton, perhaps?) were ordered in the 1970's to stop calling their superpowered heroes "superheroes", but I may be misremembering.
While I agree with your general point about formal education, I think it bears pointing out that virtually all libraries that are accessible to the general public are publicly provided. Not formal, perhaps, but definitely tax-supported, at least in the United States. There are rare exceptions (I used to work for one.) The same could be said, probably, for much of the information and infrastructure that allows you to educate yourself using the Internet. These facts don't invalidate your point about self-education, of course, but it's important to remember that the government has grown so pervasive that even the most principled libertarian will find it very difficult to avoid sucking a little at the public teat these days.
Also, on a different note, the information in libraries (and on the Internet, of course) is one of the things the governments are cracking down on. I currently work in a library which is in a community near a nuclear power plant. About a year ago officials from the state version of FEMA came and removed the "Emergency Response Plan" from the library -- the one that gives recommendations and guidance for fire departments, police, hospitals, and so on, telling them what to do in case of a serious accident at the plant. They told us that the information was "no longer public information." And our administration willingly complied, over the objections of the staff. What distressed me most was that one of the things in that plan was the public evacuation routes -- the ones the citizenry should follow to minimize traffic jams and to be best able to avoid the areas directly downwind of the plant.
I don't know about you, but after seeing the way the first responders responded during Katrina, I'm not about to trust our local officials to remember to inform the general populace about how to handle such an emergency.
Please note that I said "curtail", not "eliminate". I also said that the abuse can be limited, but NOT prevented.
Power will exist, regardless of whether we instate it formally in government. But the formal instatement of power should be kept to a minimum, so as to keep to a minimum the formal instatement of abused power.
The simple assertion that powers can be abused is not of value in determining whether the powers should or should not exist.
I disagree. The assertion is not sufficient for that determination; if by The question is more nuanced than that you mean something like "Many other factors must also be considered", then you and I are in complete agreement.
But it is most definitely "of value": it is one valuable, even vital, consideration when making that determination, and it is a consideration that is often overlooked (or perhaps, if one is more paranoid, deliberately not mentioned).
I agree strongly with you in general, but I do have one quibble:
before you do business with anybody just ask them for their policy (in writing, preferably) on sharing personal information... if you don't like their policy, don't do business with them. Sorted.
As a way to stop the corporate invasion of my privacy, this is useless. There is ample evidence that many companies write and publish policies that they have no intention of actually following. There is little that I can do, as an individual, to protect myself against the abuses of a deep-pocketed artificial entity like a modern corporation, which is protected in a thousand legal and financial ways against any real accountability for its actions. Even if I were able to find proof positive that they had flouted their own policy, some middle-management type would get fired for it, and the abuse would most likely continue unabated.
While there's very little I agree with in the GP's post, I do agree with the statement that companies share our information all the time, for cash. While it isn't something I like, it isn't something I can stop either.
The danger with TIA, as with any collection of information with or without the consent of the subjects of the information, is that the power will eventually fall into the hands of someone who will abuse it. Not "might", not "will unless we're careful" -- WILL, as inevitably and certainly as death. The failure to understand this certainty is what enables this kind of creeping infringement of power. Every generation thinks that it has the savvy and the tools to prevent the abuses -- when in reality prevention of abuse is impossible.
Eisenhower's words, quoted by several other/.'ers -- The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist -- apply to more than just the "military-industrial complex". Any power will be "misplaced" as soon as just one unethical person gets his hands on it.
The only way to limit (not prevent) abuses is to severely curtail the amount of power out there to be abused.
Are people who read a lot of books addicted to books?
Funny you should ask.
When novels started becoming widely popular in Europe, there was a lot of concern about people spending too much time reading them and neglecting more important and vital aspects of life. Madame Bovary is, ironically enough, a novel that is in part about the detrimental effects of an addiction to the reading of novels; the same in a sense could be said of Don Quixote.
People always have decried whatever the "addiction" of the moment is, and they probably always will.
But it's not their fault, really. They're addicted to doing so...
Er... neither does its meaning include "controlling for bias." The original quote doesn't specify how the documents were chosen, nor any method used to control for bias. We have no way of knowing, from this press, whether bias was a factor one way or another, nor of knowing what criteria were used to select the collated documents.
It is not my intent to obstruct anything. It's not that the "entire body" (an overstatement, as I understand it) "isn't enough" -- it's that it's too much to go through. Quite frankly, I lack the time and the access to the scholarly literature to peruse 10 years' worth of literature in oceanography and atmospheric science (which is, from what I have managed to read, not altogether unanimous on this issue -- although the majority does indeed lean strongly toward the human-action explanation).
The studies I have managed to get my hands on do not generally take the factors I mentioned into account -- or if they do, they are using computer models of climate prediction as if they were hard data; and I have little faith in computer modeling of such a complex and chaotic system as our atmosphere. Perhaps you recall reading of an instance in which several computer models of climate prediction, when given historical data only up to a certain point in the past, failed to model even our present climatic situation accurately.
However, my failure to get my hands on studies that meet the criteria I mentioned does not mean that they exist. Thus I am asking for links to such studies. This is not obstruction, it is a request for information from people who I hope may be more familiar with the body of literature you mention than I can be.
In response, I have received a lot of browbeating, a lot of inaccurate second-guessing of my motives from people on all sides of the issue, a lot of repeating of common sound bytes, a few unwarranted pats on the back, and -- so far -- not one link to a study that meets the criteria I set out.
It wasn't an honest question. It was an attempt to distract from the actual issue by deliberately misinterpreting a few words in the writeup. If that person actually wanted to know the meaning of the phrase, he could actually, you know, Read The Fucking Research. But the idea was to discredit the study by pointing to a few words.
It was an honest question. Please refrain from leaping to conclusions about my motives. It was at worst a criticism of the poor language in the writeup, not "deliberately misinterpreting" them. It was not in any way intended to "distract from the actual issue", but merely to imply that people discussing this (or any) issue should use clear, unambiguous language and, as far as possible, define their terms.
How is it ambiguous, or require additional information? What else would it mean?
I suggested several alternative meanings (not all equally likely, I'll readily grant you, but all entirely within the realm of possibility) of "tripling" and asked for a definition of "poor harvests" -- a phrase whose meaning may seem obvious, but many terms used in the press and in science are rather less obvious than they seem.
You are putting words in my mouth and making very widely incorrect assumptions about my motives.
I have made no presumptions, nor did I say or imply anything disparaging abou the scientists who have been studying this phenomenon. What I said was that I have not yet seen any studies that took those factors I mentioned into account and still showed clear indication that human action causes global warming. I asked for links to them and said that I would very much like to read them.
I fail to see how on earth you derived your bizarre caricature of me from those statements and requests. How precisely does asking for studies to read demonstrate that I "don't care about any logic or facts"? I would have thought it demonstrated quite the opposite.
If you know where I can find the studies that show the correlations you mention, please link me to them or point me to a citation I can follow. But please refrain from making any further unwarranted generalizations about me.
Many studies (including anylising ice cores which contain atmospheric records going back millenia) have shown that CO2 has risien since the industrial revolution and temperatures have risen too. The evidence it there go and read the papers.
First off, I have read the papers.
Second, as you may have heard elsewhere, correlation is not causation.
Third, while the CO2 rises from those studies are large, they are not accompanied by a correspondingly large rise in global temperatures. In fact, I recall at least one study that expressed surprise at how small the temperature rise was compared to the rise in CO2 levels.
Fourth, the rises in temperature since the onset of the Industrial Revolution are significantly less than those (documented in those very same studies you mention) from various periods in pre-industrial and in pre-human times.
So my question remains: What evidence is there that takes the factors I mentioned into account that supports the idea that humans affect global temperatures?
It's not a question of whether or not global warming causes are natural or not. It's whether we can do anything about it.
Agreed; though these are not really two entirely separate questions. If we have caused it, then most likely we can do something about it. But if we haven't -- if the system is too large and complex for us to affect -- then it's quite possible that we cannot do anything about it, except damage control. But before we run off altering everything we do, shouldn't we first understand to what degree the things we're upset about are under our control? Otherwise action amounts to little more than superstition, and that guy's superstition about appropriate environmental behavior has no more support than my superstition about it.
I don't disagree. I moved away from the city some years ago partly for that very reason.
But my question remains: How much evidence is there (that takes those factors into account) to support the idea that humans are responsible for global warming, or that we have any power to alter its progress?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... did I just compare god to a hamburger?????
Sort of gives a different mental image to this passage, doesn't it? "And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me."
*looks over shoulder, expecting a thunderbolt*
But it does kinda reduce the likelihood that there is a PERSONAL god who is intimately concerned with all of our activities
Why?
What if the myriad quantum fluctuations that we observe as "random" are, every single one of them, directed by just such a god? What could be more "intimately concerned with all of our activities" than directing every single subatomic event?
"Random" is a description, not an explanation. What if the statistical probabilities that we observe that say that particle X will deteriorate with Y frequency are subtle indicators of a divine plan? What if the exact moment of deterioration of said particle is not in fact random, as quantum physics describes it, but precisely chosen with some consequence millennia hence in mind?
Or suppose that the apparent randomness is eventually demonstrated to be wholly explainable by strict and invariably deterministic law. What if the entire universe is wholly deterministic, without requiring the intervention moment-by-moment of any deity -- but it's that way because the deity set it up to be so, knowing full well exactly how every event, from quarks to quasars, would play itself out?
Speaking as a Christian who fully acknowledges that evolution by natural selection fits all the available evidence, I heartily applaud every elucidation of the evidence and every logically sustainable proposal to bolster the theory.
However, the likelihood that God is intimately concerned with our lives is a question completely independent of science, and cannot be considered to have been demonstrated to be more or less likely, no matter what science discovers.
From TFA: The bed should only be used for two things-sex and sleep. If one is awake in bed for more than 10-15 minutes, one should get up and do something non-stimulating. Listening to music or reading are excellent choices. Lying in bed and watching TV or using the laptop are the worst. These stimulate the brain to wake up even more.
So now watching TV is more stimulating than reading?!?
When the hell did that happen?
I don't know about other people, but I almost never fall asleep reading. I almost always fall asleep if all I'm doing is watching TV (as opposed to having it on the background while I read/sew buttons back on/pay bills/cook/work out/tweak the software on the laptop/play piano/do dishes/fold laundry etc.)
so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless.
One quibble -- if there is a physical attribute or pattern of development that can be correlated with a non-physical test like an IQ test, then the test is clearly measuring something, and is therefore no more "meaningless" than, say, an assessment of BMI or cholesterol levels.
That said, if by "is meaningless" you mean "doesn't adequately predict success in life" or "doesn't measure enough", then I have no quibble at all.
"a person is a person through other persons"
... no matter how small.
(With apologies to Dr. Seuss)
No what I mean?
So you're an omniscient deity who doesn't "no" how to spell?
The guidelines that say to use trademarks only as adjectives are clearly intended to discourage the term from becoming used as a generic noun by non-trademark owners -- that is, to encourage the trademark owner to set an example to non-trademark owners, as a way of forestalling the growth of the term as a generic noun.
The trademark trial transcripts I could find all adduce examples of usage of the trademark terms as generic nouns by the general populace, not such usage by the trademark owners. My point stands.
See here for a slightly different take on the question.
This is sheer nonsense. By this logic, the slogan "Have a Coke and a smile" should have invalidated Coca-Cola's trademark to the "Coke" name.
Other examples:
IANAL, but it certainly seems to me that the use of a trademark by the trademark owner as any particular part of speech has nothing to do with whether the trademark is enforceable. Use of the trademark as a generic term by non-trademark owners has, in the past, been adduced as part of the evidence for the revocation of trademark status (aspirin, xerox, e.g., as mentioned by other posters). But the part of speech is irrelevant, and no use of the term by the trademark owner has, to my knowledge, ever been so adduced.
I have a vague memory that some other smaller comic-book publishers (?Charlton, perhaps?) were ordered in the 1970's to stop calling their superpowered heroes "superheroes", but I may be misremembering.
publically provided formal education ... libraries
While I agree with your general point about formal education, I think it bears pointing out that virtually all libraries that are accessible to the general public are publicly provided. Not formal, perhaps, but definitely tax-supported, at least in the United States. There are rare exceptions (I used to work for one.) The same could be said, probably, for much of the information and infrastructure that allows you to educate yourself using the Internet. These facts don't invalidate your point about self-education, of course, but it's important to remember that the government has grown so pervasive that even the most principled libertarian will find it very difficult to avoid sucking a little at the public teat these days.
Also, on a different note, the information in libraries (and on the Internet, of course) is one of the things the governments are cracking down on. I currently work in a library which is in a community near a nuclear power plant. About a year ago officials from the state version of FEMA came and removed the "Emergency Response Plan" from the library -- the one that gives recommendations and guidance for fire departments, police, hospitals, and so on, telling them what to do in case of a serious accident at the plant. They told us that the information was "no longer public information." And our administration willingly complied, over the objections of the staff. What distressed me most was that one of the things in that plan was the public evacuation routes -- the ones the citizenry should follow to minimize traffic jams and to be best able to avoid the areas directly downwind of the plant.
I don't know about you, but after seeing the way the first responders responded during Katrina, I'm not about to trust our local officials to remember to inform the general populace about how to handle such an emergency.
"Question everything"? Why? ;-)
You mean somewhere in the Caribeban?
Please note that I said "curtail", not "eliminate". I also said that the abuse can be limited, but NOT prevented.
Power will exist, regardless of whether we instate it formally in government. But the formal instatement of power should be kept to a minimum, so as to keep to a minimum the formal instatement of abused power.
The simple assertion that powers can be abused is not of value in determining whether the powers should or should not exist.
I disagree. The assertion is not sufficient for that determination; if by The question is more nuanced than that you mean something like "Many other factors must also be considered", then you and I are in complete agreement.
But it is most definitely "of value": it is one valuable, even vital, consideration when making that determination, and it is a consideration that is often overlooked (or perhaps, if one is more paranoid, deliberately not mentioned).
I agree strongly with you in general, but I do have one quibble:
before you do business with anybody just ask them for their policy (in writing, preferably) on sharing personal information... if you don't like their policy, don't do business with them. Sorted.
As a way to stop the corporate invasion of my privacy, this is useless. There is ample evidence that many companies write and publish policies that they have no intention of actually following. There is little that I can do, as an individual, to protect myself against the abuses of a deep-pocketed artificial entity like a modern corporation, which is protected in a thousand legal and financial ways against any real accountability for its actions. Even if I were able to find proof positive that they had flouted their own policy, some middle-management type would get fired for it, and the abuse would most likely continue unabated.
While there's very little I agree with in the GP's post, I do agree with the statement that companies share our information all the time, for cash. While it isn't something I like, it isn't something I can stop either.
Let them keep hitting us and hitting us and smile back and let them hit us again.
Are you volunteering to be the next person hit?
The danger with TIA, as with any collection of information with or without the consent of the subjects of the information, is that the power will eventually fall into the hands of someone who will abuse it. Not "might", not "will unless we're careful" -- WILL, as inevitably and certainly as death. The failure to understand this certainty is what enables this kind of creeping infringement of power. Every generation thinks that it has the savvy and the tools to prevent the abuses -- when in reality prevention of abuse is impossible.
/.'ers -- The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist -- apply to more than just the "military-industrial complex". Any power will be "misplaced" as soon as just one unethical person gets his hands on it.
Eisenhower's words, quoted by several other
The only way to limit (not prevent) abuses is to severely curtail the amount of power out there to be abused.
Are people who read a lot of books addicted to books?
...
Funny you should ask.
When novels started becoming widely popular in Europe, there was a lot of concern about people spending too much time reading them and neglecting more important and vital aspects of life. Madame Bovary is, ironically enough, a novel that is in part about the detrimental effects of an addiction to the reading of novels; the same in a sense could be said of Don Quixote.
People always have decried whatever the "addiction" of the moment is, and they probably always will.
But it's not their fault, really. They're addicted to doing so
Bravo, well said!
Giving is well and good. But without people who actually produce, we'd have nothing to give.
Er ... neither does its meaning include "controlling for bias." The original quote doesn't specify how the documents were chosen, nor any method used to control for bias. We have no way of knowing, from this press, whether bias was a factor one way or another, nor of knowing what criteria were used to select the collated documents.
It is not my intent to obstruct anything. It's not that the "entire body" (an overstatement, as I understand it) "isn't enough" -- it's that it's too much to go through. Quite frankly, I lack the time and the access to the scholarly literature to peruse 10 years' worth of literature in oceanography and atmospheric science (which is, from what I have managed to read, not altogether unanimous on this issue -- although the majority does indeed lean strongly toward the human-action explanation).
The studies I have managed to get my hands on do not generally take the factors I mentioned into account -- or if they do, they are using computer models of climate prediction as if they were hard data; and I have little faith in computer modeling of such a complex and chaotic system as our atmosphere. Perhaps you recall reading of an instance in which several computer models of climate prediction, when given historical data only up to a certain point in the past, failed to model even our present climatic situation accurately.
However, my failure to get my hands on studies that meet the criteria I mentioned does not mean that they exist. Thus I am asking for links to such studies. This is not obstruction, it is a request for information from people who I hope may be more familiar with the body of literature you mention than I can be.
In response, I have received a lot of browbeating, a lot of inaccurate second-guessing of my motives from people on all sides of the issue, a lot of repeating of common sound bytes, a few unwarranted pats on the back, and -- so far -- not one link to a study that meets the criteria I set out.
It wasn't an honest question. It was an attempt to distract from the actual issue by deliberately misinterpreting a few words in the writeup. If that person actually wanted to know the meaning of the phrase, he could actually, you know, Read The Fucking Research. But the idea was to discredit the study by pointing to a few words.
It was an honest question. Please refrain from leaping to conclusions about my motives. It was at worst a criticism of the poor language in the writeup, not "deliberately misinterpreting" them. It was not in any way intended to "distract from the actual issue", but merely to imply that people discussing this (or any) issue should use clear, unambiguous language and, as far as possible, define their terms.
How is it ambiguous, or require additional information? What else would it mean?
I suggested several alternative meanings (not all equally likely, I'll readily grant you, but all entirely within the realm of possibility) of "tripling" and asked for a definition of "poor harvests" -- a phrase whose meaning may seem obvious, but many terms used in the press and in science are rather less obvious than they seem.
You are putting words in my mouth and making very widely incorrect assumptions about my motives.
I have made no presumptions, nor did I say or imply anything disparaging abou the scientists who have been studying this phenomenon. What I said was that I have not yet seen any studies that took those factors I mentioned into account and still showed clear indication that human action causes global warming. I asked for links to them and said that I would very much like to read them.
I fail to see how on earth you derived your bizarre caricature of me from those statements and requests. How precisely does asking for studies to read demonstrate that I "don't care about any logic or facts"? I would have thought it demonstrated quite the opposite.
If you know where I can find the studies that show the correlations you mention, please link me to them or point me to a citation I can follow. But please refrain from making any further unwarranted generalizations about me.
Many studies (including anylising ice cores which contain atmospheric records going back millenia) have shown that CO2 has risien since the industrial revolution and temperatures have risen too. The evidence it there go and read the papers.
First off, I have read the papers.
Second, as you may have heard elsewhere, correlation is not causation.
Third, while the CO2 rises from those studies are large, they are not accompanied by a correspondingly large rise in global temperatures. In fact, I recall at least one study that expressed surprise at how small the temperature rise was compared to the rise in CO2 levels.
Fourth, the rises in temperature since the onset of the Industrial Revolution are significantly less than those (documented in those very same studies you mention) from various periods in pre-industrial and in pre-human times.
So my question remains: What evidence is there that takes the factors I mentioned into account that supports the idea that humans affect global temperatures?
It's not a question of whether or not global warming causes are natural or not. It's whether we can do anything about it.
Agreed; though these are not really two entirely separate questions. If we have caused it, then most likely we can do something about it. But if we haven't -- if the system is too large and complex for us to affect -- then it's quite possible that we cannot do anything about it, except damage control. But before we run off altering everything we do, shouldn't we first understand to what degree the things we're upset about are under our control? Otherwise action amounts to little more than superstition, and that guy's superstition about appropriate environmental behavior has no more support than my superstition about it.
I don't disagree. I moved away from the city some years ago partly for that very reason.
But my question remains: How much evidence is there (that takes those factors into account) to support the idea that humans are responsible for global warming, or that we have any power to alter its progress?