How is what this book proposes any different from pantheism?

You should read/listen to what Einstein wrote explaining his pantheism. Neat stuff. Here's a link:

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/einstein/

And as Richard Dawkins has said (although I think he might have been quoting someone else): "Pantheism is sexed-up atheism, and deism is watered down theism". To a pantheist, the universe has no deliberate will, i.e. intelligence (and everything else) still emerges from the bottom up, and that's pretty much atheism for all effects and purposes.

As far as I can tell, people who want the universe to have a "Why", a "meaning", an existence that fulfills something other than the desires of the beings that inhabit it, need "God", and will not be satisfied by atheism (and its related systems). These people have convinced themselves that matter cannot exist without intelligence guiding its creation. And people who don't think that it makes a lot of sense to think of the universe as having a "Why", who are satisfied with "It just is", don't need a god, and tend to find theism (and its related systems) needlessly complicated. These people have convinced themselves (or, I should say, ourselves) that intelligence emerges from the behavior of matter, not the other way around.

So this neo- (or nor so neo-)pantheism described by this book should do nothing to dissuade those who want their universe to be part of a divine plan, who feel that a fundamental requirement for How Things Work is not being fulfilled unless there is a deliberate supernatural will guiding everything.

I've written a couple hundred pages on this subject. I need to start trying to get that work edited and published...

Doesn't Seinfeld have a bit about this? It goes something like: Why do we assume people who wear glasses are smarter? It's a handicap! Is it because we think they read more? It's not like we see someone with a hearing aid and go "Oooh, they must be paying real close attention and listening very closely to everything"...

And is this an inappropriate place to mention that girls with glasses are cute? (all other things being equal)

I ought to add this book to my list of "Parenting supplies with which to raise a future nerd-let": "Cosmos" box set, wires and batteries and paper-clips and magnets and light-bulbs and motors, Legos (from Duplos to Mindstorms), microscope, telescope, light microscopy and astronomy books, "The Secret Life of Machines" videos, model rockets, toy dinosaurs, toy airplanes, hot glue gun, science experiment books, Calvin & Hobbes books, Feynman books, video games with level editors... No I don't have kids yet, but when I do, even if they end up choosing to not follow a technical career, they'll have a good appreciation for (and no fear of) science and math and engineering.

I would have thought that .TV would be pretty huge.

Ceci n'est pas un post.

Apparently Florida does not have laws requiring the use of hands-free headsets for talking on your cell phone while driving multi-ton liquid-fuel rocket engines into manned spacecraft... (Look closely at picture above) ;]

@ Noen, #11:

http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html

* * *

* * *

Yeah, y'know, the ones who make a living off of James Randi's money...

If your model plane is of the flying variety, then building it can require woodworking tools quite capable of chopping your finger off. No, I agree that an Xacto knife could not cut off a fingertip without determined deliberate effort.

And while...

- ... whole fingertips can be re-grown by kids of age up to 11;
- ... scientists are currently looking into the protein paths and cell types that could allow for this sort of thing in older people,
- ... they have managed to re-grow the entire wing of a chicken embryo;
- ... many reptiles can regrow limbs and tails (including the bone structure), and adult humans can re-grow livers starting with only a small piece of a healthy liver;
- ... how bones grow (given factors like the hormones around them, age, and the loads they are under) is fairly well-understood (thus allowing most fractures to be heal-able with proper care);

... scientists have not, AFAIK, been able to lead an adult human to regrow a body part that includes bones.

References:

http://amos.indiana.edu/library/losearm.ram

http://www.bmes.org/Whitaker/ViewCourseDetail.aspx?InstID=41&CourseID=5485

Then again...

http://www.denverpost.com/healthcare/ci_5258972

http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/106787.aspx

Yep, it's a little too close to April 1st for me to believe every wild thing I read on the internet. (...unlike the rest of the year, when I respond to 419 emails, buy things that supposedly enlarge my male parts, and think that something must be true if it's on Wikipedia).

He's absolutely right about Brazil, y'know.

Just the coining of the phrase "security literacy" (which I don't know whether it was Cory's or if he got it from somewhere else) sounds like something that will be of tremendous help in the fight against security theater.

I think we can all agree that no one is ever truly "forced" to sign a contract, and that the sensible thing in this situation would have been for her to negotiate the contract rather than just modify it and sign it. Then again, if she has been modifying and signing this same contract this same way over and over and no one ever gave her a hard time about it, it might be reasonable for her to assume that her employer agreed with her modification. If her assumption was incorrect, I don't see why her employer did not just invite her to renegotiate the contract, rather than fire her, assuming that they ideally wanted her to work for them.

Now, as a humanist, I am all for the separation of church and state. However, when one's religious practices get in the way of performing a job, I think it's ok for the employer to make the applicant choose between those religious practices and the job. You are free to believe you should not do X Y and Z, and I am free to not hire you for a job that requires one to do X Y or Z. That's not "discrimination", it's choosing the most capable applicant. This should not impact a Quaker applying to be a teacher, but it should impact a Quaker applying to be a security guard, nightclub bouncer, rugby player, law enforcement officer, soldier, etc.

And if some law or requirement or something dictates that all employees have to sign this agreement with no room whatsoever even for insubstantial changes, then that may sound crappy, but it's arguably the most cost-effective way for an organization to ensure a standard of quality. Negotiations can be expensive. Are they worth it? It's up to the employer to decide. Unlike many people (e.g. Cory) I do not think people have an inalienable right to negotiate all the contracts they are offered (e.g. by software companies, websites, media distributors, etc). I can see how sometimes it's reasonable for an organization to say "Here's the contract, take it or leave it, lawyers are too expensive for me to pay mine to sit down with yours to negotiate this". A negotiable contract is like one of those features that would be really expensive to develop but that only a handful of users would even notice.

I've used the one in Twin Peaks about 4 years ago I think, and I don't recall it smelling badly. In fact I think I was very impressed by the self-cleaning, like "I wish my bathroom could do that". I say, we need more self-cleaning things.

It's ok, they built a second one in Hokkaido...

I LOLed at "I don't approve of violence. This is just symbolic".

#1: "I just stumbled across this great LJ entry..."

Just this image summarizes the whole situation beautifully :]

A problem was raised, they solved it. Get over yourselves.

No, DOZENS of problems have been raised over the years. A handful of the least frustrating ones have been addressed.

We need to keep complaining, to keep compiling our experiences and thoughts that reveal the arbitrary (and arguably unconstitutional) "security theater" nature of the TSA, before the US has things like a secret police that abruptly kidnaps people for years for no reason and then lies about it. Oh wait...

The movie was shot just before the F-14 was retired.

I'm surprised it hasn't come out yet. I've been hearing about it for a year and a half. Wasn't it released on DVD like a year ago?

Too bad the screening closest to me is on the same day as the first Blue Angels airshow of the year, otherwise I'd totally be there. I guess I'll have to wait for a later screening. Or just buy the DVD...

More info on Fischer-Tropsch fuels in case anyone cares, from the C-17 article:

Fischer-Tropsch fuel can be synthesized from any carbon-based material, he said. "The process starts with carbon-based 'feedstock' -- this could be coal, natural gas or any other carbon-based material. Ultimately, it could be bio-mass or even trash"...

A Fischer-Tropsch fuel mix has the potential to burn cleaner than JP-8, he said. "During the process of creating the organic soup, you don't introduce a lot of particulates and unwanted materials like sulfur compounds"...

"In (the B-52 engine) tests, the use of the alternative fuel blend was found to reduce soot emissions by 30 percent at max power and by 60 percent at idle," said Dr. Tim Edwards, a senior chemical engineer for the Air Force Research Laboratory's Fuels Branch. "Sulfur emissions were reduced by 50 percent. These emissions reductions are due to the very high quality of the Fischer-Tropsch fuel blend component"...

"The goal is to make the cost of synthetic fuel comparable to buying JP-8".

"I'd like to see an evaluation of the impact of switching fuel on the amount of CO2 that is released per passenger per kilometer, compared to traditional passenger planes, train and cars...

Well, if the fuel was made by plants TAKING carbon dioxide OUT OF the atmosphere to begin with (rather than by digging carbon up out of the ground), then the emissions of the overall process are zero...

(... well, other than for the emissions generated by processing the fuel, which are non-trivial, but are still less than they would be if all that carbon was extracted from the ground and then burned, which is the case with nearly all energy used in transportation today).

The US Air Force has been experimenting with alternative for a while. They have a half-kerosene-half-synthetic mix that seems to work as well as regular jet fuel and be cheaper. They are in the process of certifying all their aircraft to be fueled by it, a process that should take about 3-4 years. The B-52 is already certified, the C-17 is well on its way, and the B-1 is next.

And yes, the Fischer-Tropsch mix is currently derived from other fossil fuels, but it shows that the huge amount of fuel used by the aviation world could change towards some alternative if only someone big (like the USAF) takes the initiative.

Congratulations on the arrival of the latest member of your boingboinging, videogaming, copyfighting, linux-using, high-altitude-balloon-blogging family!

airshowfan.com/babys-first-photoshop.jpg

BNM

More than anything else, I was surprised and impressed that Dane Cook knows what a Bézier curve is (or so one might guess from the previous episode).

I flew LAX-SEA on the 20th and back on the 27th. Laptop came out of the bag, other electronics and cables did not.

And while #25 (looking at a page on the TSA website and finding that it says the opposite of what has been observed at airports) deserves a thumbs-up, somehow I doubt that showing a print-out of the webpage to the security people would make them go "Oh, yeah, sorry, you're right, my bad. Go on through".

I went through a similar experience with the "Norton protected recycle bin". In at least some versions of Norton's antivirus/antispyware products, Norton actually keeps whatever you delete (such as files too big for the recycle bin, or the contents of the recycle bin when you empty it) into a hidden "protected recycle bin". This was never too much of a problem, since I have loads of HD space and don't delete lots of stuff (files either sit on my computer and are updated once in a while, or are saved somplace external to begin with). But when I started ripping DVDs (and saving the ISOs to my hard drive before moving them elsewhere), I noticed that my HD space started getting lower and lower, even though I (as far as I knew) deleted each ISO after moving it somewhere else. Some searches for things like "emptying recycle bin does not free up hard drive space" led me to the answer, and all of a sudden I had dozens and dozens of gigs, more free space than I ever had before (since first installing Norton, the same day the computer came out of the box). Now THERE's an annoying default.

(Another annoying default is that my computer's Windows' display setting is set to a lower DPI than what the monitor has, so while all letters and window edges looked sharp, all icons and images looked like crap. Beyond making sure that the screen resolution matched the LCD's resolution, for a long time (minutes) I could not figure out why all images looked like they had been increased in size through crappy interpolation. I eventually clicked on Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced and found the stupid DPI setting, and sighed with relief when changing it caused everything to look nice and smooth again. Why on earth would they set the default DPI to a setting where all images - even buttons in programs - look like crap?)

I think it's OBVIOUS that the dance sequence at the end of Napoleon Dynamite was from the PAST!

Can't wait to see someone make a video mashup!

The VTOL flying car is too cool an idea for people to give up on it. I think Paul Moller is still trying, although his car can't do much more than hover at low altitudes either. (The flying-saucer-shaped one did go above ground effect, but it's pretty much just a seat surrounded by engines, i.e. not a very practical transport from the point of view of payload or fuel efficiency). Besides, as someone wise has once said, "The way people drive, you want them all FLYING?!". Moller bypasses this by suggesting that the aircraft be completely computer-controlled, like modern UAVs where you select a point on a map and it just goes there by autopilot. I'm not sure I'd like to be transported by a vehicle I could not operate myself in the case of an autopilot failure...

And while VTOL does have a painful almost-60-year history with many many failed prototypes, many crashes, and many lives lost, the X/F-35 is far from its first success, and modern materials and computer controls give VTOL technologies what I think could be a bright future. The Harrier has been in service for a long time. Tilt-rotors had some bumpy years but the V-22 is now in Iraq (and its speed, range, altitude, and payload, all wildly exceed those of the CH-46 it is replacing). Soon the JSF will be flown by many air forces all over the world. The Bell-Augusta 609 will soon make tilt-rotor technology (i.e. helicopter-like VTOL but much greater range and speed) available to most of the functions currently dominated by helicopters such as air ambulances, law enforcement, news gathering, short-distance executive transport, and transport of people and supplies to remote locations, oil rigs, etc. And with the technologies being developed in the A160 program, conventional helicopters could, in 10 or 20 years, see drastic improvements in fuel economy, giving them greater range and endurance almost matching those of equivalent-sized airplanes.

At least two designers have realized that, if a successful flying car is at all possible, then VTOL is probably not the way to go. We'll see how they do. I'm not really sure why they think they'll do any better than similar past efforts, but who knows.

It's like the personal platform (Bell Rocketpack, Hiller Platform, DeLackner HZ-1 AeroCycle, XFV Exoskeleton): When you make an aircraft small enough to be a convenient part of a normal person's life (i.e. not requiring long runways or huge hangars), this will probably make it VERY fuel-inefficient, and also very expensive (and probably unreliable) since the components have to be built to be small, precisely shaped, tough, and light. So the only aircraft I think we will see in a lot of garages are builders' RV kitplanes and the like. Then again, I could be wrong.

As for this particular auction... I've been doing enough research about VTOL technology (such as uncovering video footage and design details of pretty much all of these) that I really think I would have heard of the vehicle in this auction if it had even shown any serious potential, or if anyone as big as Boeing had ever had something to do with it. But, despite (or perhaps because of) my arrogance, I guess it's possible there might be something out there I missed.

You can see why my friends try to stay away from bringing up aviation when I'm in the room ;)

I guess people are no longer fooled by the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast...

"... abandoning potential containers... (e.g. vehicles...)"

So if you park your car somewhere and walk away (which I do a couple times a day), you can expect that you'll return to see the whole block cordoned off and a bomb-squad unit about to blow your car up?

I'm all for Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Open-Source Software. These things are all snowballing into huge sources of great stuff that rival the best commercially-produced stuff out there. And of course Network Neutrality is immensely important.

However, some people want to make money online. Can you blame them? Why is that evil? Why is it so bad for me to offer to sell you something?

If you visit a site, it logs what you request of it. It might use those requests to figure out which kinds of ads you're more likely to like. Is that so bad? When I actively log on to a site and voluntarily supply information, the site remembering what I do can HARDLY be equated with "aggressively invading my privacy"! That'd be like me saying "Hey, you remembered something I told you yesterday! That is an invasion of my privacy!"

Hosting and bandwidth cost money. Some people display adds on their site so that their site stays up. How is that different from any TV station, radio station, newspaper, or magazine? Not everyone wants to pay out of their own pockets in order to be able to broadcast their content.

And if I set up a site where I am willing to host other people's content, I am free to add any terms of service I want, such as "I own anything you upload into my server". I'd be a jerk if I did it, but everyone is free to turn down my offer of hosting their stuff. I'm not holding anyone at gunpoint and telling them they must upload their pictures into my site and hand me the rights.

It's great that dedicated hobbyists are willing to spend serious effort making cool stuff and then making it libre and/or gratis. It really is. I am using Firefox right now, I have Ubuntu on my other computer, and I use open-source software on this windows machine to help me manage my music and transcode video. But if someone thinks they can make money by selling non-free content that they think is superior to the free stuff, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with supporting a website by using ads? What's wrong with remembering your users' requests? Why must the web be walled off from people selling what they have made?

There is a great Half Life mod for Rio de Janeiro. There might be more than one, but the one I have seen takes place in the labyrinthine alleyways and buildings (and occasional open spaces, used (naturally) as soccer fields) of a slum on the side of the Corcovado mountain. The Christ statue looms overhead, and downhill is a view of Rio's Lagoon and, a little beyond that, beaches including Ipanema. This captures both Rio's stunning beauty and its sad poverty.

Unlike the Toronto mod, the locations of the Rio mod are, however, semi-imaginary; while a real slum exists only two or three miles east along that mountain's southern slope, the area where the mod seems to be located (as far as one can tell by the view from there) is not (yet) inhabited, and particularly steep.

I love video game levels that take place in realistic representations of real locations. I remember a light-gun arcade game, about 10 years aho, where the user aimed a turret-mounted machine gun (which vibrated in a satisfying way) while being flown in an imaginary attack helicopter through very accurate representations of locations in Manhattan, including Times Square and Battery Park.

Unfortunately, most video games set in real locations aim to capture only their look and feel, and maybe the specific features and locations of a handful of famous landmarks. I too wish that more people would make mods that would make even local residents appreciate how well their home areas are reproduced in-game. This is probably more realistic for parks, large buildings, and maybe a few square blocks' worth of area, rather than a whole city. In a whole-city game you'd probably have to wander (or fly) around too much, making it harder to appreciate small details, but when your level is a couple of blocks, designers could put a lot of effort into small details.

You know what this reminds me of...

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cokelore.asp

I think it's worth $400 just because of how super-tiny it is, and because it's a laptop with a long battery life.

JBelkin #12: "The Earth would violently wobble and spin as we rotated so we would move from pole to equator to another pole, etc"

Right, so the moon is responsible for stabilizing climate, i.e. for ensuring that the cold places stay cold and the warm places stay warm.

I wonder how fast that would change without the moon. I mean, without the moon, how long would it take for the axis of the earth to move from a currently-polar area to a currently-equatorial area? If it takes millions of years, then such climate change is slow enough for life to migrate and evolve to keep up (there are other climate change forces that act even faster). But if it takes thousands of years, then it could indeed have scrubbed the world clean of life pretty fast. If nothing else it would freeze or dry up any primordial life before it had a chance to swim/crawl away!

Sweep's post #9 comes close to my view on this.

IMHO there are three levels of altruism. In the order of how primitive and primal they are:

Level One altruism is genetic. Even some species of bacterium have genes that will cause some bacteria in a large group to commit suicide if resources start to run thin. Most animals have genes that trigger behavior for helping one's family/herd/pack. Groups with such genes tend to last longer and preserve themselves better than groups where each individual hoards resources, does not feel the urge to help a sick/injured relative, etc.

Level Two altruism is Machiavellian and calculated. Since we are intelligent, we can figure out when "being good" can help us get what we want. We are nice to people who will benefit us. We kiss up to our bosses, are friendly to our neighbors, act nice to important people who have the power to give us opportunities that will help us reach our goals. We network. We contribute to political campaigns. Carl Sagan wrote a great article called "The Rules Of The Game" (Google it!) where the mathematics of game theory show that, in many situations, some amount of cooperation and forgiveness led to better individual success than just being as selfish as you can all the time. He went through a few alterations of the Golden Rule and how they did in those experiments, and in the end "Do unto others as you would have done unto you, unless someone screws you over at which point act selfish towards them, unless they act nice again in which case forgive them and help them again" did the best. (This mathematical demonstration illustrates how natural selection might have come to favor the genes that lead to Level One altruism. The difference here is that now we are intelligent enough to understand the mechanisms and to tweak our own "being nice" characteristics for maximum gain, if we so wish).

Level Three is the conscience, it's "true" altruism, it's feeling bad when you know you caused or helped to cause suffering. To be perfectly honest, I think the conscience coalesces out of rules of thumb we develop as kids to help us automatically do Level Two behavior. It's conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs. After observing something like "When we do things that cause people to suffer or that cause people injustice, those people get mad at us" (this is when we are little kids), we form rules of thumb that say "Doing things that cause others to suffer and that cause injustice is BAD", and our animal-level brain eventually turns this repeated rule of thumb into something like an instinct, into making is actually FEEL BAD when we contemplate doing something that leads to suffering and injustice. The same way that, if you yell at or lightly hit/shock a dog every time he pees in the living room, he will eventually feel bad when he contemplates peeing in the living room, and if he does pee in the living room he will approach you with ears and tail lowered as if saying "I feel I did something bad". After a childhood of being punished for causing suffering and injustice, we are conditioned to want to avoid that. And, since we are self-aware, we can sense a part of the brain (the angel on the other shoulder) that says "Don't do it!" or "Help the poor!", and we call that a conscience. Animals might have a don't-pee-on-the-carpet circuit in their brain, but they are not self-aware enough to realize it for what it is, and they are not complex enough (nor do we have high enough expectations of them) to be conditioned against all "bad" behavior (like barking late at night, playing in the dirt, etc).

Sorry about the huge comment. I just finished writing a book about this so it's all very fresh in my mind... The book is about the atheism-religion debate, and one chapter goes over the above points to show that Richard Dawkins is right when he says "Religious people think that they get their morals from religion, but they don't. 'Where do atheist get their morals?' - From the same place religious people do!".

If six degrees gets you to anyone in the world, three degrees does not get you half the planet's population. It gets you (population^(3/6)), or sqrt(population), which is about 77,500. That's if you assume a non-overlapping tree, since an overlapping tree would have to grow faster than (population^(1/6)) with each initial degree (to make up for the slower-growing subsequent degrees), but given that you have 6 steps to get to a few billion people, the total effect of the last three steps can easily be way more than just doubling. (The first three steps surely will be!).

Sorry, I'm in a nitpicky mood. Yes, what AT&T did was wrong and they should not get away with it. I am as worried about our increasingly fascist government as anyone else (including, for example, Naomi Wolf; Surveillance is step 4 out of 10, right?)

For a while I've been thinking I want to get a second computer. My "desktop replacement" Vaio laptop is very fast, can burn DVDs and edit dozens of 8-megapixel images at the same time, edit video, play Halo, all that good stuff. It's also huge and has a battery life of about half an hour (no exaggeration) and no wireless capabilities (something that would come in handy more and more often during trips... I should just get a wireless card). After 4 years it still runs like new, and I'm starting to wonder for how long that will be true. Given all the terrible things I keep hearing about Vista, I want to make my Vaio last for as long as I possibly can. This will probably involve me getting a "secondary" laptop to use for everyday web surfing, watching small videos, writing, working on my website, traveling, and maybe editing pictures. It would ideally be a small, cheap Linux machine with long battery life, barely powerful enough to play a full-screen video. (These requirements were in part crystallized by the release of the One Laptop Per Child laptop). The big Vaio would only be used to edit videos and audio, to transcode videos (between DVD, PSP, iPod, YouTube, and DivX/Xvid formats), to burn DVDs, to manage my iTunes, and maybe to record streaming media and edit pictures if the little Linux laptop can't do those things well enough.

So I've been looking around the websites of companies that sell laptops with Linux pre-loaded (since I don't want this whole Linux thing to be too much of a hassle), and they're all more powerful than I need them to be, and thus pretty expensive (almost half the cost of something like my Vaio, but still almost twice what I think I should be able to pay for a slow Linux machine).

Then this EEE PC 701 thing comes along. It's perfect. PERFECT. There are even some for sale on eBay already! I'm totally getting one. I can't wait! I'm really excited about this. I'll give it a little while so that any major problems have time to make themselves known, but by Christmas I want to get my hands on one of these.

I just landed at LAX an hour ago. From a couple thousand feet up, those fires sure looked scary. The giant wall of smoke blowing out over the Pacific when I took off on Sunday morning was also

This is only my second autumn as a resident of LA. Not all years see this many huge fires, right?

MSV and Boeing are working on creating a satphone network which will be able to use phones that are the same size as current cell phones. How will the satellite be able to talk with such a small handset antenna? Well, it will help to have the largest reflector dish ever put in orbit (over 20 meters in diameter) which also happens to be one of the most efficient in capturing and emitting signals:

http://www.msvlp.com/media/press-releases-view.cfm?id=84&yr=2006

Once this is done, the hope is that these phones will use cellular networks most of the time, and only talk to the satellite when in areas where cell signal is poor. To the user, of course, it will just seem like a cell phone that works everywhere. This will be particularly handy in areas that are too sparsely populated for telecommunications companies to want to build cell towers (i.e. no one wants to build a cell tower someplace so sparsely populated, only 10 people will ever use that tower. No matter how many minutes they use up, the tower won't pay for itself), such as the rural US and the deserts of the Middle East. In fact a smaller version of such a satphone network is already in place in the middle east, although the not-quite-so-huge reflector on that satellite means the satphones are not quite cellphone-tiny (but they are the smallest satphones in the world, and probably will be until the MSV ones come out):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuraya

http://www.thuraya.com/content/flexible-dual-mode-technology.html