Jihad needs scientists
in [Design]
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From: Daniel Mandic on 19 Oct 2006 18:31 Lloyd Parker wrote: > I would think an infinite god would have introduced a little variety > into his designs. Hi Lloyd! Infinite we are.... God is One. Unimaginable with a human brain. you can catch a glimpse but you cannot step the other foot... Maybe God is Time itself. That would make himher a higher form of life, indeed ;). Best Regards, Daniel Mandic
From: lucasea on 19 Oct 2006 19:02 "Jonathan Kirwan" <jkirwan(a)easystreet.com> wrote in message news:46tfj2po6543lhhatnu10q0o2t72bac2t4(a)4ax.com... > > On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:39:36 GMT, <lucasea(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote: > >>And it's been going on for at least half a century--probably since the end >>of WWII (the advent of McDonald's may be some sort of watershed here, >>actually.) I remember my dad, who worked in the electronics industry, >>carping about it in the late 60s...and that was back when US industry was >>in >>general still strong and US-based. I think he would be appalled, but not >>surprised, if he were still alive today. I don't think many people "got >>it" >>back then, but it seems like a few more are beginning to, now. > > It's a natural. As populations increase, their labor value relative > to materials decline. And exploitation of resources similarly works > to raise the value of materials. The two effects work simultaneously. > Technology works as a negative feedback to moderate the impacts, by > reducing the costs of extraction and exploitation, reducing the costs > of discovery, and finding better ways to do more with less material. Hadn't really thought about it, but it makes sense. > I suspect that we are in for a transition in our lives. Sure seems like it. > A few > millennia years ago, humans and all their domesticated livestocks > accounted for perhaps 0.1% of the total vertebrate biomass on land and > air on this planet. Today, that figure was just marked at about 98.5% > (see Paul MacCready, 2004.) We are pushing all the other animal life > forms off this planet. > > At the same time, human populations well exceed 6 billion and are > expected to rise rapidly to about 9 billion by 2040. 0.3 billion in the US alone, just this week. That's up from 0.25 billion when I was growing up. However, 20 % increase in 40 years is far, far less than the global rate of increase. > In any case, even in the US we are rapidly seeing the impacts of > growing populations and resource competition. Our system is currently > factored for maximal individual consumption (laws regarding single > family dwellings dominate across the board, preventing even parents > from living with children, unless they are granted an exception for > disability.) I suspect that is simply going to have to change for > efficiency's sake, but it's hard to say anything about when. We might > first transition into an apartment-dominated culture, first. Not > sure. Probably. May mean a return to an urban culture rather than suburban--the difference is that the former suburbs will now be full-blown cities. That may make a return to public transportation feasible, which I think would be nice. Plus, it will be really easy to subdivide the enormous mansions that are now passing as middle class and upper middle class new construction these days, into 3 or 4 spacious apartments each. That construction sure doesn't seem to be slowing down, either, anywhere that I've seen. > The over-arching effect is that the cost of tangible materials climb > faster than labor. Your time buys less raw material. Luckily for us, > technology has compensated and allowed much less to do a lot more for > us. But even with all that, we still have a growing percentage of > situations where it takes at least two workers to maintain a modest > lifestyle and one person cannot easily consider buying a home. When I > was growing up, it cost about 10% of your (tiny, in dollar figures) > income to buy a home. When I was at the age where I could consider > buying my first home, mortgage companies were already setting the > absolute limits on ratios at 28% for the secondary market products > (which account for almost every mortgage, today), so that if your home > payment exceeded that (with stringent adjustments) figure you would > NOT get a loan. Today, there are mortgage products that negatively > amortize being sold routinely, hoping that the increase in value will > exceed the growth of the loan. All bets are off. But mostly because > if they didn't do that, they wouldn't sell mortgages. A single > wage-earner can almost no longer cut it, anymore, in the US. Yeah, but on the other hand, a far larger percentage of people are buying homes now, as opposed to renting. After a recent relocation, I returned to renting after owning two different homes over the past 12 years. I actually think renting isn't such a bad thing. For one thing, a fairly small percentage actually ever pay off their mortgage and actually *own* the property. So in a sense, you're renting it from the bank until such time as you sell it and move on to "rent" another home from the bank. And unless you're going to pay on the mortgage for something like 7 years, all the closing costs mean that renting truly is less expensive. This is all particularly true with peoples' mobility these days. In some fields, especially a lot of technical fields, switching jobs every few years (which is supposedly the norm now) means moving every few years unless you happen to live in a hotbed of your particular field (Silicon Valley or Seattle for electronics, New Jersey or Houston for chemicals, Boston, SF or SD for biotech, etc.) That tends to be much more true for the higher level professionals in any field, but as one moves up in any field, the choices for where you can live and earn the same money as you currently do, become fewer. > Globalization and the transfer of manufacturing offshore the US has > put additional pressure on the wages, too. Well, I view that as more of an equalization across the globe. Presumably the average standard of living across the world is increasing (yes, that's an assumption), but we won't see it because we've been riding on top for so long, that the only place we can possibly go is down--and I'm inclined to think *way* down. When I hear that chemists in India make $200 a month if they're lucky, and when I think there are over a billion of them and only 0.3 billion of us, I think my salary is going to end up much closer to that $200 a month than what it is now. > Education costs society a LOT OF MONEY. It is very expensive. Yeah, but I don't understand why. Using your model, teaching is based on the inexpensive labor part of the equation, not the expensive raw materials. Why has educa
From: Eeyore on 19 Oct 2006 19:33 mmeron(a)cars3.uchicago.edu wrote: > "MooseFET" <kensmith(a)rahul.net> writes: > > > >A concentrated police action against Al Queda hasn't really been tried > >yet. In the US the Mafai was defeated by police activity. It was an > >organization of some considerable size and ceertainly not a small > >isolated group. > > Was samll enoug and isolated enough and operating over a limited > territory. Take an loose organization with tens of thousands of people > being involved over an unbounded territory and try. Good luck. How > much progress has been made in the war on drugs, so far? What makes you think Al Qaeda even exists as a cohesive entity let alone have tens of thousand of members ? All the evidence to date about European Islamist terrorism is that these are small independent groups of between say 5 and 20 ppl. Graham
From: JoeBloe on 20 Oct 2006 02:02 On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:23:04 +0100, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations(a)hotmail.com> Gave us: >Actually you tried that and it failed ! Bullshit.
From: |||newspam||| on 20 Oct 2006 03:58
T Wake wrote: > "John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message > news:p0mdj29rrhlrl7g74vu9kkqsg2ib9d0lb9(a)4ax.com... > > On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:56:56 +0100, "T Wake" > > <usenet.es7at(a)gishpuppy.com> wrote: > > > >>One thing I find odd, is that you don't think DNA/RNA mutation and > >>evolution > >>is amazing and wonderful in itself. Isn't it amazing how four bases can > >>produce such variety? > > > > The four bases are a programming language. The *programs* and their > > high-level structure will turn out to be astonishing in their own > > right. > > It is already astonishing that ACGT can spell out a human and a fruit fly. > The analogy of a programming language may be accurate, and is certainly > attractive, but answers nothing. The four bases form a natural binary code and DNA is a storage medium that is capable of being copied and duplicated. It can represent anything or nothing. You get a 4 way branch with a quantum mechanical comparison statement so that an exact match between ACGT can occur in a single step during strand replication. The interpretation from messenger RNA (where the base Uridine substitutes Thymidine) into amino acids is done by considering triplets. This is the programming language if you want to think of it that way. Decoding tables are well known and are almost identical for all organisms - archaic and extremely isolated bacteria have minor differences (both in coding and choice of amino acids). http://library.thinkquest.org/20465/table.html http://algoart.com/help/bioeditor/aatable.htm There is a conjecture that the 20 amino acids used for proteins represents another QM boundary by being the result of 3 nested comparisons. It is an appealing idea but AFAIK not yet proven. The hypothetical RNA world model is still the most plausible root from chemical soup to self organising and replicating catalytic reactions. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/articles/altman/index.html The simplest known self organising (inorganic) chemical reaction is the BZ autocatalytic oxidation of malonic acid by bromate in the presence of cerium salts. eg. http://www.rose-hulman.edu/mathjournal/archives/2002/vol3-n1/paper1/v3n1-1pd.pdf The discoverer had a lot of trouble getting his work published. But none of this requires a designed universe- everything stems from a few fundemental constants. Having an intelligent designer just gets you into the "who designed the designer" trap. Regards, Martin Brown |