The Denver Post: "Horsing around"
If hard work were all it took to make $250,000, more than 19 out of 20 people would manage it. Education doesn't come free, and it gets further away from free for people like me every moment.
If you work hard, you can get somewhere. But ambition alone doesn't determine things. It never has. Hard work alone doesn't determine things. It never has.
It helps to have a good start.
What's at work now is not envy. Oh that envy was the worst thing we felt. How about resentment? How about betrayal? How about a complete lack of patience with an agenda that has continually rewarded hard work less and less, with the promise that one day things would turn around and we'd prosper more. It's a mark of the two-faced nature of such "conservative" policies that even in the best of recent times, people were again and again on the receiving end of pink slips, even while executive compensation skyrocketed. If there is envy, it's generated by a system that seems purpose built to put more and more distance between the average person and the top.
These brilliant people, who earn every dollar, somehow managed to destroy the financial industry. Despite everything they promised, their leadership, their guidance led us down the garden path to ruin. It's not envy, it's anger. We've got our own interests, just as the rich do, and while they've been pissed off, with Limbaugh's help, at how terribly high the taxes are today (look in a history book folks, it's been much, much worse.), and how much regulation they suffer under, they've been transgressing against those interests time and time again, supposedly for our own good. And yet, the eventual result, the sum total of years worth of our sacrifice to them has been economic disaster. After all the chances we gave them to make their brand of laissez faire capitalism work, they've utterly failed to deliver to us the real returns on our investment that we worked our asses off for them to get.
This is not about envy, or not earning our way up in life. Quite the opposite. This about looking after our own interests, rather than sticking with a system where envy is all you've got, that and an empty stomach. We don't want what they have half as much as we want what we've earned, what we deserve from business and government alike.
The folks at AIG didn't earn those bonuses, not in any real sense of the term. They failed, and that failure would have been punished with the loss of their jobs, if we, the people they transgressed against, time and again, hadn't stepped in. If it weren't for our generosity, they'd be out of work. And now, they repay our generosity, by rewarding themselves for a nonexistent success.
Rush, your people have worn our patience down considerably, to the point where we stopped buying into your party's platforms. People have gone back to liberalism because they see no profit in continuing to support an agenda where the primary direction of envy is of the top for the resources we on the bottom still have.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Putting more "Africa" in Your Computer
This seems to be a very promising kind of technology. What he's talking about in terms of the protein gates might not be 100% correct, but what's actually happening is that the transistors are getting so small that electrons can take quantum leaps (the literal, not Scott Bakula kind) across the transistor's setup, which essentially defeats the purpose of the device, which is supposed to act like a gate for current (sort of like people jumping over your fencegate defeats that devices purpose).
The Backbone of Modern Civilization.
Popular Science: "Who Protects The Internet?"
A good article on the Physical infrastructure that supports the internet (with photos of the intertubez to boot!).
A good article on the Physical infrastructure that supports the internet (with photos of the intertubez to boot!).
They're not confronting it...
Creationist Students Take Trip to Evolution Headquarters: The Smithsonian - washingtonpost.com: "The Genesis of a Debate"
They think they're confronting what evolution says, but they're not. They believe one thing, and will not be persuaded- at least that's what they hope.
The question we deal with in science is whether what we imagine to be true is supportable by what can be demonstrated to be true. If we move past scientific answers to the question of origins, as a matter of natural philosophy, we end up dealing with a world where anything arguable can be held to be true, where Hindus, Japanese Animists, and others have equal claim, along with everybody else, including the advocates of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The question of whose hand, essence, or noodle is in creation becomes a matter for a debate that no human being has the capability to successfully conclude.
Science's usefulness comes from its ability to draw different scholars into more symmetric debates about what's going on. Better yet, much of that symmetry is based on a mapping, a pegging of the premises of that debate to reliable information and theory about the world itself. The solution of the puzzle, too is based upon these shared premises.
So there are two important parts here to what's going on: there are convergence encouraging standards at work here, and those standards are based upon the interpretation of reality, as we are able to sense and perceive it. There is resolution to such arguments, or at least turns on the path of theory that can lead it to better approximation of reality.
Religion, though, always has been, and always remains about things beyond that reality, beyond provability, beyond comprehension. The bible itself says God is out of our league, and it must be true if we're talking about a God capable of setting in motion, much less understanding the complexity of the world we're struggling to only begin to understand, and which single persons can spend careers, lifetimes even, studying one aspect of. The folks on this trip scoff at science, but I think of science as a sort of humility, in terms of scholarship.
Let's say they're right, and divine fingerprints can be seen, and the bible can be used as a basis for paleontology, and other deep-time related fields. What keeps somebody from attributing the explained phenomena to events or concepts in the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, or the Norse Legends of a slaughtered, primal Ice Giant? Nothing really. Everybody's free to interpret, because nothing symmetrically observable or testable exists binds those interpretations, proves it false or true in any way. Some want that freedom, but it's not really useful for coming up with and refining dependable theories about the way the world works. A theory of that kind, to be most valid, must be lead to conform to the shape of the real world. The less the distinctions of the observable, testable real world matter, the more unanchored, out to sea, the theories a person will be able to come up with.
They think they're confronting what evolution says, but they're not. They believe one thing, and will not be persuaded- at least that's what they hope.
The question we deal with in science is whether what we imagine to be true is supportable by what can be demonstrated to be true. If we move past scientific answers to the question of origins, as a matter of natural philosophy, we end up dealing with a world where anything arguable can be held to be true, where Hindus, Japanese Animists, and others have equal claim, along with everybody else, including the advocates of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The question of whose hand, essence, or noodle is in creation becomes a matter for a debate that no human being has the capability to successfully conclude.
Science's usefulness comes from its ability to draw different scholars into more symmetric debates about what's going on. Better yet, much of that symmetry is based on a mapping, a pegging of the premises of that debate to reliable information and theory about the world itself. The solution of the puzzle, too is based upon these shared premises.
So there are two important parts here to what's going on: there are convergence encouraging standards at work here, and those standards are based upon the interpretation of reality, as we are able to sense and perceive it. There is resolution to such arguments, or at least turns on the path of theory that can lead it to better approximation of reality.
Religion, though, always has been, and always remains about things beyond that reality, beyond provability, beyond comprehension. The bible itself says God is out of our league, and it must be true if we're talking about a God capable of setting in motion, much less understanding the complexity of the world we're struggling to only begin to understand, and which single persons can spend careers, lifetimes even, studying one aspect of. The folks on this trip scoff at science, but I think of science as a sort of humility, in terms of scholarship.
Let's say they're right, and divine fingerprints can be seen, and the bible can be used as a basis for paleontology, and other deep-time related fields. What keeps somebody from attributing the explained phenomena to events or concepts in the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, or the Norse Legends of a slaughtered, primal Ice Giant? Nothing really. Everybody's free to interpret, because nothing symmetrically observable or testable exists binds those interpretations, proves it false or true in any way. Some want that freedom, but it's not really useful for coming up with and refining dependable theories about the way the world works. A theory of that kind, to be most valid, must be lead to conform to the shape of the real world. The less the distinctions of the observable, testable real world matter, the more unanchored, out to sea, the theories a person will be able to come up with.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Awesome Beyond Comprehension
Why compressive sensing will change the world
How about this: Compressive sensing takes a couple of lenses, a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), and a single Photodiode, and resolves an image that would otherwise require hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pixels to resolve. I don't pretend to understand the math, but this has the potential to vastly increase the resolution of just about anything you could think of, and even revolutionize the way we deal with security, medicine, and Astronomy.
That, or be a very interesting curiosity. You know how science goes.
How about this: Compressive sensing takes a couple of lenses, a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), and a single Photodiode, and resolves an image that would otherwise require hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pixels to resolve. I don't pretend to understand the math, but this has the potential to vastly increase the resolution of just about anything you could think of, and even revolutionize the way we deal with security, medicine, and Astronomy.
That, or be a very interesting curiosity. You know how science goes.
Not a God of the Gaps, But Man in the Valley of the Knowable
Quantum Physicist Wins $1.4M Templeton Prize For Work on “Veiled Reality”
This was my comment on that Blog:
Essentially, I believe in God, and that he is responsible for the design of the world. However, I don't believe looking at the world in terms of human notions of design is appropriate, and I don't think we're competent to analyze design that takes place on levels that far beyond ours. So, at the end of the day, we should use scientific methods out of humility for our own limited understanding of the world.
This was my comment on that Blog:
I think if you think about it for a moment, there’s some value in his approach, because it puts the emphasis on the limitations of the human mind and human methods, which is really what science is all about dealing with.
If we were perfect at dealing cognitively with the environment, we would not need scientific methods to to clear away potential explanations. We’d just get it right the first time.
Intelligent Design advocates take an approach that tries to push God into the framework by saying we can puzzle out what was just randomly allowed to happen, and what is so improbable that it requires God’s hand. But their primary error is that it’s difficult to establish what is likely or unlikely if you do not know all things. Worse, they insist upon the notion that God’s design itself, created by a being able to perfectly understand all the complexities individuals struggle to understand just parts of imperfectly, is distinguishable from nature to folks like us.
If you believe in a Christian-Style God who created everything, you run into what can only be termed a figure-ground problem: how do you tell one creation from another. Furthermore, if we’re dealing with a perfect God, why the need for the do-over? A perfect God, we can reason, would be capable of engineering the world so that these things would come about spontaneously from the complex processes of nature itself.
To get around such questions, ID advocates take the position that the scientific doctrine of natural materialism, that is trying to explain nature without positing supernatural explanations, is somehow wrong, and needs to be superceded by ID theory’s supernatural framework.
But why do we stick with natural materialism in the first place?
There’s one simple reason: it’s what we’re competent to deal with. I can philosophize about God’s role in the universe, but I’m not capable of creating an experiment that can distinguish the right or wrong of my position in any fashion beyond that of oh-so fallible rhetoric. Real scientists, dealing with what they deal with can design observations and experiments to look for the signs of whether one theory approximates reality or diverges from it. They can say “this means that A must be true, rather than B.”, and others can cross check this position.
We deal with the world we can deal with, and leave the rest to priests and philosophers.
Essentially, I believe in God, and that he is responsible for the design of the world. However, I don't believe looking at the world in terms of human notions of design is appropriate, and I don't think we're competent to analyze design that takes place on levels that far beyond ours. So, at the end of the day, we should use scientific methods out of humility for our own limited understanding of the world.
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