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Aaron Kinney (M, 34) Los Angeles, US Immortal since Jun 18, 2007 Uplinks: 0, Generation 1  Kill The Afterlife
The Radical Libertarian
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Juche!
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SpaceCollective
Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction. Introduction
Featuring Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, based on an idea by Kees Boeke.
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I found this marvelous clip of Carl Sagan explaining science, set to music. Enjoy!
I was quite surprised to see this debate on PBS of all places. Not only is it impressive for being aired on PBS, but the content of the show is overall rather good. Moral principles against government are explained, and the word anarchy is used in a non-derogatory manner.
If the future is to be post-political, then it makes sense to work to reduce the size and scope of politics and government in society.
We now have a little bit of help on the way. 200 economists have signed up to oppose the instantiation of the Keynesian broken windows fallacy, also known as Obama's bailout package:
Included in the list of 200 economists is Nobel Prize Laureate James Buchanan (the economist, not the president). Mr. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986 for his work on public choice theory, which basically exposed how political leaders' self-interest gets the better of them and negatively affects their policy decisions, to the detriment of us all. Oh, how fitting.
I doubt Obama will ever see or hear of this advertisement. He is probably too busy to be reading the ads in The New York Times. But the mere fact that these dissenters are pushing their message (and pushing it quite well) is a very good sign. This is but a small symbol of the slowly building rise toward post-politics in society. Progress-minded people like us should recognize events like these and embrace them wholeheartedly.
We now have a little bit of help on the way. 200 economists have signed up to oppose the instantiation of the Keynesian broken windows fallacy, also known as Obama's bailout package:
Included in the list of 200 economists is Nobel Prize Laureate James Buchanan (the economist, not the president). Mr. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986 for his work on public choice theory, which basically exposed how political leaders' self-interest gets the better of them and negatively affects their policy decisions, to the detriment of us all. Oh, how fitting.
I doubt Obama will ever see or hear of this advertisement. He is probably too busy to be reading the ads in The New York Times. But the mere fact that these dissenters are pushing their message (and pushing it quite well) is a very good sign. This is but a small symbol of the slowly building rise toward post-politics in society. Progress-minded people like us should recognize events like these and embrace them wholeheartedly.
From Telegraph.co.uk:
I absolutely love it! The private sector is doing what the government can't do: build affordable, reliable space transportation vehicles for the everyman. When government sends something into space, it costs us a billion dollars. When the private sector does it, we make a billion dollars.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I hope that Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan make NASA obsolete, and soon. Space is a trasure trove, not a money pit. Let's utilize it properly.
Sir Richard Branson unveiled the final design of the spaceship he hopes will take fare-paying passengers into space.
Sir Richard, whose Virgin Galactic is one of several commercial enterprises competing in the nascent space tourism market, said SpaceShipTwo will start test flights later this year.
Speaking at a launch at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, he said: "Two thousand eight is going to be the year of the spaceship. We're excited about this, and everything it will do."
He described the designs of both the mothership and the new spaceship as "absolutely beautiful" and beyond anything he had expected for commercial space flight when his company registered the Virgin Galactic name in 1999.
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He added: "I think it's very important that we make a genuine commercial success of this project. If we do, I believe we'll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology."
I absolutely love it! The private sector is doing what the government can't do: build affordable, reliable space transportation vehicles for the everyman. When government sends something into space, it costs us a billion dollars. When the private sector does it, we make a billion dollars.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I hope that Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan make NASA obsolete, and soon. Space is a trasure trove, not a money pit. Let's utilize it properly.
Sam Harris, Neuroscience researcher and author of "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation," recently co-authored a study entitled "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty." And Time.com has an interesting article about it:
Harris tested how the brain responded to assertions in seven categories: mathematical, geographic, semantic, factual, autobiographical, ethical and religious. All seven provided some useful data, but only the ones relating to math and ethics produced results clear enough to give a vivid picture of the way the simple and the complex, the subjective and the objective intertwine. Regardless of their content, statements that the subjects believed lit up the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a location in the brain best known for processing reward, emotion and taste. Equally "primitive" areas associated with taste, pain perception and disgust determined disbelief. "False propositions may actually disgust us," Harris writes.
Is there a practical application here? He speculates that if belief brain scanning were sufficiently refined it could act as an accurate lie detector and help control for the placebo effect in drug design.
Harris says there is no critique of faith hidden somewhere in his brief paper. But his next neurological enterprise may be another matter. He is planning an fMRI run that will concentrate specifically on religious faith, which Harris thinks he now knows how to plumb more deeply. He also plans to set up two different subject groups — the faithful and non-believers. "That way," among other things, he says, "you can ask, 'Do believers believe that Jesus was born of a virgin the same way that nonbelievers believe that Chevrolet makes cars and trucks?'" It may turn out that the brain treats religious faith as its own special category of belief unlike ethics and math.
But that is not what Harris expects to find. He suspects the machines will show that "belief is belief is belief." And that conclusion, he admits, may put him at loggerheads with familiar foes. No one, he says, could accuse him or anyone else of trying to disprove God's existence on the basis of an fMRI. But faith is more vulnerable. "People who feel that religious faith is a singular operation of the brain — if they admit that it's an operation of the brain at all — would object to what I'm doing, since it may show that faith is essentially the same as other kinds of knowing or thinking. The whole thing will seem fishy to anyone who thinks we have immaterial souls running around in our bodies."
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