It'd be great if a curriculum genuinely taught critical thinking and the scientific method, along with the reality check that real scientists have disputes, personal ambitions, and moments of stupidity. Unfortunately, this school decision and ones like it seem to be meant to single out evolution as "a theory in crisis." In reality, even "proven" "laws" like gravity are the subject of ongoing study and debate.
If you're looking at science only long enough to hear about evolution, you might get the mistaken impression that evolution is the only area where there's still any uncertainty. It does kids little good to imply that there's Solid Science and that evolution is on some lower tier of reliability. And even less good to write curriculum language like this, and then use it as an excuse to pick on the one theory that most directly contradicts your specific religious beliefs. Note from the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document" that those guys are gunning for evolution specifically because it's so central to the scientific, rational understanding of reality. Eliminate evolution as an accepted theory, and reality looks more like an incomprehensible chaos where reason is helpless and only mystical insight is trustworthy. Put out the brightest light, and there's more darkness to sneak around in.
A few people, notably Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have been trying to start a movement to oppose current abuses of power. To some extent they're still wedded to the Republican Party, which has not shown itself to be a friend of small government or the Constitution.
Because the Congress is in fact doing whatever is necessary to buy votes, it's hard to unseat anyone even if they're violating their oath of office. For that reason, it's time to start considering a wider range of (peaceful) options.
Property and free market rights should only exist to the extent they lead to the efficient use of society's resources.
Think about the implications of that philosophy, though. Though the other guy was talking specifically about land ownership, "property and free market rights" include things like the ability to choose where to work, where to live, and what to do for a living. They also include the right to keep the wealth created with your own hands. If someone proved to you that it would make society more efficient to chain up your family and force them to pick cotton, would you happily accept that? May I pick your pocket if an economist tells me I can use your cash more productively than you? That is what you seem to be saying -- no property rights except where society finds them efficient. Last century we saw plenty of examples where that same idea got applied to life as well as economic liberty, and people got massacred for being the way of somebody's grand plan.
I'd say instead that resources, including human labor, belong to people, not to society and some central planning board. Even if it were true that violating people's rights made things fairer, or more efficient or something, that wouldn't make it moral.
Where's the legal authority for federal funding of an interstate highway system? Which power of Congress authorizes that? This is a separate question from whether it might be useful to grant the federal government that authority.
My role-playing group has taken the opposite extreme: no system whatsoever. We started with a fantasy setting described online, describing characters in general terms. We've managed to run everything from combat to encounters with gods without needing explicit stats or dice. (Okay, I did roll a few dice occasionally for a general random good/bad result.) I'm not sure that a system is really necessary, and would rather focus on the storytelling aspect. Still, I understand that some people are more interested in the details of combat.
To deal with some awkward situations, next time I might try something like the "Everway" system of having a few very general stats and specialties. Or the "BESM" concept of rating items as trivial, minor or major for purposes of shopping.
It was never "handed over to private interests" in the US, because it was always in private hands and hasn't been forcibly taken away. Yet. Partially.
There's no legal authority for the US federal government to be providing, funding, or controlling medical care, so any debate about expanding its role ought to focus on whether to amend the Constitution to allow it.
I'm interested in the idea of procedurally generated RPG content too. There's a guy who's set out to post Three Hundred game ideas, and devotes many of the current 99 to procedural generation in the Roguelike style. Because I'm mainly interested in building a "real" history for a game world as opposed to a set of dungeons, I don't completely agree with his approach, but the site is definitely worth browsing.
On the topic of how a computer could possibly judge what makes a "good" game world/level/whatever when that's a highly subjective judgment, have you heard of the AI research of Douglas Hofstadter? His book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" describes his 90s-era research into how a computer program can display a form of creativity and aesthetic judgment. There's a description with code (tricky to get running) of his group's project "Metacat," which solves letter-related puzzles with no objectively right answer. I could see a similar system judging aspects of a game world.
I'm wondering about the timeline for having space colonies. According to Wikipedia, NASA doesn't plan to send humans to Mars till at least 2030, and I think NASA has said even a return to the Moon won't happen till the 2020s. And that's assuming a rosy economic picture. So, it seems very fictional to portray any significant human presence on the Moon, let alone Mars, in a game set in 2035. And as long as we're heavily fictionalizing the experience, how about throwing in some Orc shamans?
You might be surprised about the party-line thing. I heard about the UN Law of the Sea Treaty (v3) from John Norton Moore, one of the people who negotiated it. According to him, UNCLOS III had the support of most of the Senate, Bush, and a coalition of scientific, industrial and environmental groups, with only conspiracy theorists having any objection to it. Never mind the still-odious seabed mining provisions, which basically grant ownership of the world's ocean metal/fossil fuel deposits to the UN! Moore described the treaty being held up, as of a few years ago, in committee.
It should be interesting to see whether the treaty is ratified in this new administration. One point to consider for its fate is Moore's argument that Iran, also not a party to the treaty, could continue to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. We're also seeing the attempt to use UNCLOS' provisions about continental ridges used to justify territorial claims in the Arctic Ocean.
Incidentally, I would be strongly in support of allowing legal recognition of such "seasteading" plans. However, the best chance for legal independence is to go at least 200 nautical miles offshore, outside the UNCLOS' "exclusive economic zone."
The question is: should we use organized violence (law) to force companies to produce products at a loss? Or: where exactly is a drug company supposed to make the profits that it needs to stay in business and expand, if we demand that it give away free stuff to the poor and not jack up its rates for the rich countries to compensate? Or: as much as we'd like to help the world's poor, have they got a right to force us to help them, as opposed to us trying to get rich and then generously giving them stuff of our own free will?
I'd like to try a free market in health care. That's definitely not what we have now. We have two large federal health care systems (Medicare and Medicaid), not to mention the VA system, which have grown even under Bush. The states have their own bureaucracies, including decidedly non-free laws such as Massachusetts' law ordering citizens to buy health insurance. (Would you say we had a free market in automobiles if everyone were forced to buy them?) So wouldn't it be fairer to say that our current system of moderate socialism has failed, with the question being whether we need more freedom or less?
Economic freedom requires getting government out of the way, not creating government "competitors" subsidized by taxpayers and tangling the private interests with heavy regulation. Ditto for our housing mess: we created two giant federal housing banks, ordered the private banks to make bad loans, then blamed "the free market" when things went south. By the same logic of "free markets" being proven failures, Mike Tyson is a lousy boxer because if you drug him, chain him up, and give me a baseball bat, even I could beat him up.
Here in the US, we had a Constitution that restricted what our federal government was allowed to do, to a specific list of tasks. Under that law it didn't matter how wonderful our people thought national socialist medicine would be; it simply wasn't something the central government had authority to do.
We've dispensed with that limitation, but some of us still believe that it's wrong to force people to pay for services unrelated to the protection of their rights against aggression.
Look at the by-county map of the 2008 Presidential election. It's highly polarized within some of the states. (Disclaimer: percentage maps are far more purple.) For instance, Pennsylvania has a blue blip in the west (Pittsburgh) and a region in the east (Philadelphia) with nearly every other county going red. Obama took the state because those blips are the big cities. Without a clear definition of what a "fair result" would be, I can't say whether that's "fair." But it does go against the original compromise on the federal level, which was meant to protect the interests of small states by giving them more influence per capita than large states. Going to a direct popular vote (emulated, the way this article proposes) would promote the "decisive blips" type of result on the national scale. The interests of the largest cities, because of their sheer population, would dominate.
The question of whether this is a good thing involves at least two factors. One is whether we want representation of interests like "the west," "the farmers," and even "Alaska," as opposed to "the majority." The other is what happens if we keep getting results like what happened in 2008, where the majority of territory went Republican and some states like Virginia look strongly red, yet were tipped to blue by a few counties. In a way a popular vote would actually reduce that situation. If I'm a Republican in Pennsylvania or a Democrat in Texas, my vote has zero effect on the national election right now. Is that good or bad?
I'd like to say that a third factor is whether either party intends to uphold the Constitutional limits on government, but that's not really a question of electoral politics anymore.
Marxist? This ardent capitalist can agree that having laws that exist mainly to forcibly extract money out of people who violated no one's rights is wrong. Doesn't matter whether the goal is to "protect children" or "protect our vital industries."
In the case of Cambridge's cameras, it's also worth asking about the fate of the city's private security cameras. For instance, how many does MIT have now? The Media Lab FoodCam was probably one of the first culinary surveillance devices out there.
I'm a little disappointed by that aspect though (see comment below). It seems like a direct nerve link is more elegant, and more likely to restore sensation. Hopefully the research will get to that phase at some point. Human hand transplants seem to prove that hooking up nerves to after-market hardware is possible.
I see that this project still involves the kludge of having sensors reading muscle contractions, rather than a direct interface between the leftover nerves and a nerve-sensor of some kind. A direct connection makes more sense if you can make it work, partly because it allows for sensation as well as motion.
Is there more research going on in that direction? It seemed as though DARPA's "Proto" arm series was moving towards a direct nerve interface.
Meanwhile, human hand transplants have had some success at establishing two-way nerve connections between nerves that weren't originally part of the same body. (Actually the info readily available isn't clear on the "two-way" part.) So, the theory that you can basically "hook up the wires" and have a working replacement limb seems proven; it's just not practical yet.
If communism is so far from practicality that it's never really been practiced, and in reality all large-scale attempts at it turn into mass-murdering dictatorships, that says something about the ideology itself, doesn't it? Not that that's the only thing one can say against it.
Especially when the method of provoking empathy is a threat of violence, such as making them think he's gone nuts and is trying to infect them with a disease.
Slashdot Mirror
Gravity is just a theory! This site also has graphics illustrating the real Periodic Table of the Four Elements and so on.
It'd be great if a curriculum genuinely taught critical thinking and the scientific method, along with the reality check that real scientists have disputes, personal ambitions, and moments of stupidity. Unfortunately, this school decision and ones like it seem to be meant to single out evolution as "a theory in crisis." In reality, even "proven" "laws" like gravity are the subject of ongoing study and debate.
If you're looking at science only long enough to hear about evolution, you might get the mistaken impression that evolution is the only area where there's still any uncertainty. It does kids little good to imply that there's Solid Science and that evolution is on some lower tier of reliability. And even less good to write curriculum language like this, and then use it as an excuse to pick on the one theory that most directly contradicts your specific religious beliefs. Note from the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document" that those guys are gunning for evolution specifically because it's so central to the scientific, rational understanding of reality. Eliminate evolution as an accepted theory, and reality looks more like an incomprehensible chaos where reason is helpless and only mystical insight is trustworthy. Put out the brightest light, and there's more darkness to sneak around in.
A few people, notably Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have been trying to start a movement to oppose current abuses of power. To some extent they're still wedded to the Republican Party, which has not shown itself to be a friend of small government or the Constitution.
Because the Congress is in fact doing whatever is necessary to buy votes, it's hard to unseat anyone even if they're violating their oath of office. For that reason, it's time to start considering a wider range of (peaceful) options.
Property and free market rights should only exist to the extent they lead to the efficient use of society's resources.
Think about the implications of that philosophy, though. Though the other guy was talking specifically about land ownership, "property and free market rights" include things like the ability to choose where to work, where to live, and what to do for a living. They also include the right to keep the wealth created with your own hands. If someone proved to you that it would make society more efficient to chain up your family and force them to pick cotton, would you happily accept that? May I pick your pocket if an economist tells me I can use your cash more productively than you? That is what you seem to be saying -- no property rights except where society finds them efficient. Last century we saw plenty of examples where that same idea got applied to life as well as economic liberty, and people got massacred for being the way of somebody's grand plan.
I'd say instead that resources, including human labor, belong to people, not to society and some central planning board. Even if it were true that violating people's rights made things fairer, or more efficient or something, that wouldn't make it moral.
Where's the legal authority for federal funding of an interstate highway system? Which power of Congress authorizes that? This is a separate question from whether it might be useful to grant the federal government that authority.
My role-playing group has taken the opposite extreme: no system whatsoever. We started with a fantasy setting described online, describing characters in general terms. We've managed to run everything from combat to encounters with gods without needing explicit stats or dice. (Okay, I did roll a few dice occasionally for a general random good/bad result.) I'm not sure that a system is really necessary, and would rather focus on the storytelling aspect. Still, I understand that some people are more interested in the details of combat.
To deal with some awkward situations, next time I might try something like the "Everway" system of having a few very general stats and specialties. Or the "BESM" concept of rating items as trivial, minor or major for purposes of shopping.
It was never "handed over to private interests" in the US, because it was always in private hands and hasn't been forcibly taken away. Yet. Partially.
There's no legal authority for the US federal government to be providing, funding, or controlling medical care, so any debate about expanding its role ought to focus on whether to amend the Constitution to allow it.
Maybe, to take trillions of dollars from those who earn them, and redesign the global economy to one with centralized planning of major industries?
Japan, 1853.
I'm interested in the idea of procedurally generated RPG content too. There's a guy who's set out to post Three Hundred game ideas, and devotes many of the current 99 to procedural generation in the Roguelike style. Because I'm mainly interested in building a "real" history for a game world as opposed to a set of dungeons, I don't completely agree with his approach, but the site is definitely worth browsing.
On the topic of how a computer could possibly judge what makes a "good" game world/level/whatever when that's a highly subjective judgment, have you heard of the AI research of Douglas Hofstadter? His book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" describes his 90s-era research into how a computer program can display a form of creativity and aesthetic judgment. There's a description with code (tricky to get running) of his group's project "Metacat," which solves letter-related puzzles with no objectively right answer. I could see a similar system judging aspects of a game world.
From the article: "One of the story arcs that will take place over the course of the game's first year is the very real threat of global warming."
I'm wondering about the timeline for having space colonies. According to Wikipedia, NASA doesn't plan to send humans to Mars till at least 2030, and I think NASA has said even a return to the Moon won't happen till the 2020s. And that's assuming a rosy economic picture. So, it seems very fictional to portray any significant human presence on the Moon, let alone Mars, in a game set in 2035. And as long as we're heavily fictionalizing the experience, how about throwing in some Orc shamans?
Legally, there's a specific list of things the federal government may do. Building MMORPGs is not one of them.
It's wrong because there are very few ways for the government to spend taxpayers' money that is justifiable...
I'm sure it's in the Constitution that Congress can fund MMORPGs! It's right there next to pensions and health care.
You might be surprised about the party-line thing. I heard about the UN Law of the Sea Treaty (v3) from John Norton Moore, one of the people who negotiated it. According to him, UNCLOS III had the support of most of the Senate, Bush, and a coalition of scientific, industrial and environmental groups, with only conspiracy theorists having any objection to it. Never mind the still-odious seabed mining provisions, which basically grant ownership of the world's ocean metal/fossil fuel deposits to the UN! Moore described the treaty being held up, as of a few years ago, in committee.
It should be interesting to see whether the treaty is ratified in this new administration. One point to consider for its fate is Moore's argument that Iran, also not a party to the treaty, could continue to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. We're also seeing the attempt to use UNCLOS' provisions about continental ridges used to justify territorial claims in the Arctic Ocean.
Incidentally, I would be strongly in support of allowing legal recognition of such "seasteading" plans. However, the best chance for legal independence is to go at least 200 nautical miles offshore, outside the UNCLOS' "exclusive economic zone."
The question is: should we use organized violence (law) to force companies to produce products at a loss? Or: where exactly is a drug company supposed to make the profits that it needs to stay in business and expand, if we demand that it give away free stuff to the poor and not jack up its rates for the rich countries to compensate? Or: as much as we'd like to help the world's poor, have they got a right to force us to help them, as opposed to us trying to get rich and then generously giving them stuff of our own free will?
I'd like to try a free market in health care. That's definitely not what we have now. We have two large federal health care systems (Medicare and Medicaid), not to mention the VA system, which have grown even under Bush. The states have their own bureaucracies, including decidedly non-free laws such as Massachusetts' law ordering citizens to buy health insurance. (Would you say we had a free market in automobiles if everyone were forced to buy them?) So wouldn't it be fairer to say that our current system of moderate socialism has failed, with the question being whether we need more freedom or less?
Economic freedom requires getting government out of the way, not creating government "competitors" subsidized by taxpayers and tangling the private interests with heavy regulation. Ditto for our housing mess: we created two giant federal housing banks, ordered the private banks to make bad loans, then blamed "the free market" when things went south. By the same logic of "free markets" being proven failures, Mike Tyson is a lousy boxer because if you drug him, chain him up, and give me a baseball bat, even I could beat him up.
Here in the US, we had a Constitution that restricted what our federal government was allowed to do, to a specific list of tasks. Under that law it didn't matter how wonderful our people thought national socialist medicine would be; it simply wasn't something the central government had authority to do.
We've dispensed with that limitation, but some of us still believe that it's wrong to force people to pay for services unrelated to the protection of their rights against aggression.
Look at the by-county map of the 2008 Presidential election. It's highly polarized within some of the states. (Disclaimer: percentage maps are far more purple.) For instance, Pennsylvania has a blue blip in the west (Pittsburgh) and a region in the east (Philadelphia) with nearly every other county going red. Obama took the state because those blips are the big cities. Without a clear definition of what a "fair result" would be, I can't say whether that's "fair." But it does go against the original compromise on the federal level, which was meant to protect the interests of small states by giving them more influence per capita than large states. Going to a direct popular vote (emulated, the way this article proposes) would promote the "decisive blips" type of result on the national scale. The interests of the largest cities, because of their sheer population, would dominate.
The question of whether this is a good thing involves at least two factors. One is whether we want representation of interests like "the west," "the farmers," and even "Alaska," as opposed to "the majority." The other is what happens if we keep getting results like what happened in 2008, where the majority of territory went Republican and some states like Virginia look strongly red, yet were tipped to blue by a few counties. In a way a popular vote would actually reduce that situation. If I'm a Republican in Pennsylvania or a Democrat in Texas, my vote has zero effect on the national election right now. Is that good or bad?
I'd like to say that a third factor is whether either party intends to uphold the Constitutional limits on government, but that's not really a question of electoral politics anymore.
Marxist? This ardent capitalist can agree that having laws that exist mainly to forcibly extract money out of people who violated no one's rights is wrong. Doesn't matter whether the goal is to "protect children" or "protect our vital industries."
In the case of Cambridge's cameras, it's also worth asking about the fate of the city's private security cameras. For instance, how many does MIT have now? The Media Lab FoodCam was probably one of the first culinary surveillance devices out there.
I'm a little disappointed by that aspect though (see comment below). It seems like a direct nerve link is more elegant, and more likely to restore sensation. Hopefully the research will get to that phase at some point. Human hand transplants seem to prove that hooking up nerves to after-market hardware is possible.
I see that this project still involves the kludge of having sensors reading muscle contractions, rather than a direct interface between the leftover nerves and a nerve-sensor of some kind. A direct connection makes more sense if you can make it work, partly because it allows for sensation as well as motion.
Is there more research going on in that direction? It seemed as though DARPA's "Proto" arm series was moving towards a direct nerve interface.
Meanwhile, human hand transplants have had some success at establishing two-way nerve connections between nerves that weren't originally part of the same body. (Actually the info readily available isn't clear on the "two-way" part.) So, the theory that you can basically "hook up the wires" and have a working replacement limb seems proven; it's just not practical yet.
If communism is so far from practicality that it's never really been practiced, and in reality all large-scale attempts at it turn into mass-murdering dictatorships, that says something about the ideology itself, doesn't it? Not that that's the only thing one can say against it.
Especially when the method of provoking empathy is a threat of violence, such as making them think he's gone nuts and is trying to infect them with a disease.
Lancaster County, PA has a population of about 500K people, most of whom are not Amish.