bascule

As more regional climate vulnerabilities are exposed people will begin looking for regional level solutions. Right now people are relatively unaffected by both regional and global warming effects, and therefore while alarmism runs strong very little is actually done in terms of moving to a solution.

Well, uhh, breaking the rules a little here, but: Re: ecoli - Andy Warhol rocks!

Here's a book starbug1 needs to read:

Yes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity

This is awesome: http://www-ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/index1.html Seventh graders were asked to draw a picture and write a description of a scientist. After doing so, their class visited Fermilab. Following their visit, they were asked to draw another picture and write another description. It makes for quite the juxtaposition... as you might be able to guess their perceptions were radically altered by real-world interaction with scientists, rather than what the media and movies have always told them they were supposed to believe scientists were.

Oh for the love of... READ: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html Look, I can make cut and paste responses to all of this bullshit. Maybe you should actually read that. Eye Witness Testimony Lets look at some eye witness testimony sticking only to people who saw a plane hit the building, and not look at people who saw an airliner, but didn't see an airplane hit the building because they looked away or were too far away (behind a hill, behind a building, etc) to see it actually hit the building. "Aydan Kizildrgli, an English language student who is a native of Turkey, saw the jetliner bank slightly then strike a western wall of the huge five-sided building that is the headquarters of the nation's military. 'There was a big boom,' he said. 'Everybody was in shock. I turned around to the car behind me and yelled "Did you see that?" Nobody could believe it.'" - "Bush Vows Retaliation for 'Evil Acts'." USA Today, 11 Sep 2001 "Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program, left his office trailer near the Pentagon's south parking lot at 9:36 a.m. Sept. 11. Walking north beside Route 27, he suddenly saw a commercial airliner crest the hilltop Navy Annex. American Airlines Flight 77 reached him so fast and flew so low that Probst dropped to the ground, fearing he'd lose his head to its right engine." - "A Defiant Recovery." The Retired Officer Magazine, January 2002 "Omar Campo, a Salvadorean, was cutting the grass on the other side of the road when the plane flew over his head. 'It was a passenger plane. I think an American Airways plane,' Mr Campo said. 'I was cutting the grass and it came in screaming over my head. I felt the impact. The whole ground shook and the whole area was full of fire. I could never imagine I would see anything like that here.'" - "Pentagon Eyewitness Accounts." The Guardian, 12 Sep 2001 "Afework Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but stuck in a traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew over. 'There was a huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over. Everybody was running away in different directions. It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance. It hit some lampposts on the way in.'" - "Pentagon Eyewitness Accounts." The Guardian, 12 Sep 2001 "Henry Ticknor, intern minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, Virginia, was driving to church that Tuesday morning when American Airlines Flight 77 came in fast and low over his car and struck the Pentagon. 'There was a puff of white smoke and then a huge billowing black cloud,' he said." - "Hell on Earth." UU World, Jan/Feb 20 "We were the only people, we think, who saw it live," Dan Creed said. He and two colleagues from Oracle software were stopped in a car near the Naval Annex, next to the Pentagon, when they saw the plane dive down and level off. "It was no more than 30 feet off the ground, and it was screaming. It was just screaming. It was nothing more than a guided missile at that point," Creed said. "I can still see the plane. I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels up," - Ahwatukee Foothill News Gary Bauer former Presidential candidate, "I looked at the woman sitting in the car next to me. She had this startled look on her face. We were all thinking the same thing. We looked out the front of our windows to try to see the plane, and it wasn't until a few seconds later that we realized the jet was coming up behind us on that major highway. And it veered to the right into the Pentagon. The blast literally rocked all of our cars. It was an incredible moment." Massachusetts News Sean Boger, Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief - "I just looked up and I saw the big nose and the wings of the aircraft coming right at us and I just watched it hit the building," Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief Sean Boger said. "It exploded. I fell to the ground and covered my head. I could actually hear the metal going through the building." dcmilitary.com November 16, 2001 "The only way you could tell that an aircraft was inside was that we saw pieces of the nose gear. The devastation was horrific. It was obvious that some of the victims we found had no time to react. The distance the firefighters had to travel down corridors to reach the fires was a problem. With only a good 25 minutes of air in their SCBA bottles, to save air they left off their face pieces as they walked and took in a lot of smoke," Captain Defina said. Captain Defina was the shift commander [of an aircraft rescue firefighters crew.] NFPA Journal November 1, 2001 Here is the hole in the building - it's been reported by at least a dozen different sources (including conspiracy theory sites) to be a 16 to 20 foot hole. That is really interesting when you take into account the fact that the 757 body is 12 ft 4in wide and 13 ft 6in high. (Here is where I was mistaken in the past, like so very many others I was led astray by the HEIGHT of the aircraft, which is actually the measurement from the wheels-down to the tip of the tail. That measurement is for aircraft hangar clearance, not the SIZE of the aircraft.) The 757 is basically a cylinder that is 13 feet across. It then should not be surprising that it would create something around a thirteen foot hole in the side of the building. Look at the nose-on view of a 757 - you can see the body is slightly less than 1/3 the size of the height of the aircraft. The tail certainly isn't going to punch a hole through a reinforced concrete wall; that is why there is no 40 foot hole in the front of the Pentagon in any photos. A 40 foot object didn't hit it, a 13 foot object did. The Gate Camera Some people don't seem to see perspective correctly. I've zoomed in, and compared the two frames over and over - here is what I see as the airplane. I will repeat, however, that this is terrible evidence due to the horrible quality of the original images. I do believe, however, that the white smoke in the images is caused by one or more damaged engine from the impact with the multiple light poles on the way in (as seen in the above image). I stuck in a 757 that was at relatively the same angle - except it's banking slightly to starboard instead of to port - hence the ONE wing is out of place. If it was banking slightly to port it would fit perfectly... However, once again - this is entirely subjective and the image quality from the released surveillance camera is not good enough to form a factual opinion. Yes, and people reported hearing four shots at the Kennedy assassination. What does the majority say? Oh jesus mother****ing christ, will you just read the link? The wheel: The bulkhead: Below: More parts from inside the 757 - note the Boeing green primer on 3 parts in this photo - two circled. Parts from the turbine: Parts with original markings: I don't offhand, because I don't have to. "How do you explain" [...] "you can't, therefore it was this!" is an ARGUMENT FROM INCREDULITY Please, stop spreading bullshit based on logical fallacies.

This is probably a better quote: Wouldn't this discovery seem akin to, say, physics unifying gravity will all the other forces? (ignoring our present inability to unify strong with electroweak for the time being) I mean, this seems to be the discovery which unifies Archaea, Prokaryotes, and Eukaryotes with Viruses. The other three were comparatively easy to unify and viruses have long been the odd-thing out (much like gravity). Now they are unified into a single, coherent, evidence-based picture.

So says the Discover March '06 cover story: http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/cover/

Oh really? Where do you see those corroborating the official story using the absence of evidence as evidence that a 757 the Pentagon? I'd really like to see that. The conspiracy theorist argument seems to be "There's no evidence of a plane (which is wrong to begin with) therefore it couldn't have been a plane, it had to have been a missile or some other projectile!" (when there's no evidence of that) My apologies for the strawman... but I hope you get the picture.

Perhaps it's all they have. "IIRC," a.k.a. hearsay, a.k.a. non-evidence. Can you find something more definitive on these alleged 3 tapes than your anecdotal account?

I prefer self-recognition of error to stubborn persistence in articulating the value of error (or rather, rearticulating the mistaken reasoning behind an error). Admitting your mistakes is the first step towards solving the problems they've caused. If you can't admit you made a mistake, the problems persist. Not that Cheney really had any other choice. If he got out there all "It's not my fault, that idiot walked into my line of fire!" the press would've crucified him.

aguy2, your complaints are all quite poignant. Indeed, if Lee Smolin's fecund universe theory is true, then our universe and by extension those which came before it are indeed ordered for a purpose, namely that of producing other universes, and therefore universes themselves would have extropic properties. And by "ordered for a purpose" I mean humans, in hindsight, can look at their operation and see underlying purpose, regardless of whether or not that purpose originates naturally (after all, those who believe in abiogenesis would still claim that the purpose of naturally arising replicators is to make copies of themselves) or if it was consciously directed.

They don't have a nervous system.

A little bit, but in this case, I certainly agree with what he has to say

Let me marinade my first post in a little more sarcasm... apparently it isn't dripping wet

He's selling a book? Briefly glancing through his site, I found this awesome run-on sentence with spelling errors: I can't imagine reading any sizable quantity of his writing.

READ: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html My argument is evidence based. Yours comes from an argument from incredulity, a logical fallacy.

Whenever I think of the archetype of patchouli wearing, pot smoking, Capitalism-hating, anarchosyndicalist liberal hippies, George Will is definitely the first person that comes to mind. Oh yeah: George Will in his anal retentive conservative douche disguise. Ingenious! It fooled me! So it was no surprise to see a column where he was ranting against the Bush Administration's attempt at a power grab and the marginization of checks and balances: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502003_pf.html

Well, my battery is still hosed. I got up this morning to a snow-blanketed car and it was about -13C out. That was more than enough to ensure that my car didn't start. So, now I have a brand new battery and things are much better again.

I had a lousy day today. I woke up and hopped in my car to drive to work, only to discover that my battery was dead. I popped the hood of my car to stare at the immense amount of order, design, and technical sophistication that the engine represented, and how useless it all was with a dead battery. So I hopped on my bike and rode to work. As I was nearing the end of my journey, my workplace in sight at the top of the hill before me, I swerved to avoid a car who clearly saw me as merely an obstacle. In the process, my jeans, my favorite pair of jeans, went over the top of the sprocket and were shreadded. I tried to continue riding, only to find my jeans caught in the sprocket again. Now my jeans had reached the point where they were in such a high state of entropy as to clash with the extropy of the bike, and the technological sophistication of the bike was, in turn, rendered useless. Not wanting to ride home having to deal with a pair of torn jeans, I called up a friend to pick me up and give me a ride home. He arrived, parked, and met me at the door. But as we were ready to leave, his engine would not turn over. Something was also wrong with his battery. Fortunately, we found someone to jump start his car. Later that night I sat and stared at the tear in my jeans the sprocket had made. All the order that my jeans had represented was reduced to near uselessness. As I stared at the rip, I began to ponder what it really meant in the grand scheme of the universe. This is what I came up with: We are producers and consumers of extropy. Extropy is, for all intents and purposes, something which is orderly for a purpose. We can combine raw materials and tools and produce things which are in a higher state of extropy than when they originally started. Of course, this process increases the overall entropy of the universe. Extropy must be bought for the cost of entropy. We are entropy-powered extropy assemblers. We exist in a large cascade of entropy-powered extropy assemblers who evolved in a progressive sequence which built better and better extropy assemblers. The reason why this was necessary was that extropy needs to be protected from entropy because unsheltered extropy is quickly dissolved by entropy. So along with better extropy-assemblers, better and better extropy sheltering systems were also devised. Extropy sheltering and extropy assembly have been progressively evolving via the rules of natural selection. The process has grown increasingly complicated, and the varieties of extropy that have been produced has exploded immensely. We’ve now built our own extropy assemblers which are external to the process of life, and we’re finding better and better ways of using these systems to increase the extropy of the world. This is all part of the external phenotype of mankind, and it is part of an overall pattern of extropy assemblage and sheltering which is inherent to the process of life itself. Life is the origin of all extropy, and the planet’s extropy has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of life. As time goes by the orderliness of our planet has continued to increase, and also found better and better ways of increasing. This notion must be coupled with the realization that unsheltered extropy is quickly destroyed by entropy. Thus the expansion of extropy on the planet is not smooth: mass extinction events, in which extropy is lost because it could not seek shelter from cataclysm, results in massive losses in extropy. But overall, higher and higher states of extropy are accumulated. There is most certainly not only an overall progressive trend towards the production of more extropy, but also a progressive trend towards better extropy production systems and diversification of types of extropy produced, all of which feed back on eath other in an incomprehensibly complex order assembling mechanism. Society continues to complexify through a multifaceted assemblage of incomprehensibly complex additive feedback loops. Their collective operation gives rise to Kurzweil’s Law. Shamelessly syndicated

Oh for the love of God... READ: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html

If you're looking for an XML format for ontologies, check out OWL

Oh god no. No please. Stop. Now. Conspiracy theories are pathological memes. Or, to put it another way: There was a 9/11 conspiracy. It was perpetrated by Al Qaeda under the direction of Osama bin Laden. As an independent organization unaffiliated with any country, they managed to strike a blow at the heart of one of the most powerful countries on earth. Here's a thought: have you tried looking for evidence against the conspiracy theory? There's ample evidence out there. For example: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm For the love of God be a skeptic. Think about practicality and parsimony when information is presented for you. Look for logical reasoning supported by evidence.

Uhh, you shouldn't be storing information in hierarchies. You want ontologies. The brain, much like Google, stores information in a highly distributed and redundant manner in order to improve access times.

Is anyone actually going to cite anything here? This is all just a bunch of hearsay...