hugh_

10 ms·

31.
by hugh_ 17y ago
How about the role played by sexual frustration? It seems to be relatively common among engineers, and is probably a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for becoming a suicide bomber.
32.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Why should a changed climate result in worse droughts in places that are susceptible to drought? Might it not lead to more rain in some drought-stricken places and less rain in some rainy places?
33.
by hugh_ 17y ago
A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies. The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its si
34.
by hugh_ 17y ago
I knew a girl who had seen it twenty-something times. She had issues. Personally, though, I still think it's quite a good film. Some aspects of the love story grate a little (in particular Leonardo DiCaprio's always-perfect character) as do
35.
by hugh_ 17y ago
So they use a non-risky script, with nothing objectionable in it. How did we get to the point where "Humans are evil, kill them all!" is a non-risky script with nothing objectionable in it?
36.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Indeed. Christianity, as a religion, is designed to appeal to folks at the low end of society, so it's not too surprising. Nietzsche goes on about this kind of thing a lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master-slave_morality
37.
by hugh_ 17y ago
The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are. Britain is already a welfare state. How much more welfare-y does he want it to be? Also, doesn't "caring for the truly
38.
by hugh_ 17y ago
I think just the fact that so many are now considering the position of the poor facing moral choices of theft or starvation makes this an excellent sermon. When was the last time anybody actually managed to starve to death in Great Britai
39.
by hugh_ 17y ago
But for the example of the recently released prisoner he cites, I'm not sure which obvious ones he's failing to consider. Begging and dying would seem to both be more morally acceptable than stealing.
40.
by hugh_ 17y ago
I haven't seen Avatar, but at the very least it seems to be a masterpiece of PR. I forget, now, how many articles I've seen describing every random aspect of the production. How do they manage to get these written and published?
41.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Did Tolkein ever write any stories about what happened after the Elves left Middle Earth? They didn't seem to be doing a helluva lot of good.
42.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Headline inaccurate. What Kaltenegger is actually saying is that of the planets we're likely to be able to detect in the near future , life is more likely on moons of gas giants than planets. This is because the detection technology is sti
43.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Headline-article disconnect. He actually says they should be "banished to the literary dustbin", not "banned".
44.
by hugh_ 17y ago
A former boss of mine once said that he wasn't buying us a coffee machine so that we'd have an excuse to get out of the building and go for a walk. So much good high-quality thinking is done when you're walking instead of sitting in front
45.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Another good example: academia. As of a few weeks ago, the janitor only comes once a month, and we have to take out our own trash.
46.
by hugh_ 17y ago
If it's any consolation, for anyone more than 4.5 billion light years out the rock and the star don't exist yet either.
47.
by hugh_ 17y ago
It's quite pretty, but to me still doesn't quite manage to convey the real scale of the universe. We zoom so rapidly from the solar system scale to the galaxy scale that we forget we've just gone up in scale by a factor of 10^9 or so. Then
48.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Level of acknowledgement of strangers is a function of population density. In a big city you can't possibly acknowledge everybody you pass, so you acknowledge nobody. There's one exception: people who go for walks early in the morning are o
49.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Are you sure? Go and stare for several minutes right into the eyes of the biggest, toughest-looking stranger you can find, and see what happens. Eye contact is always an effort to communicate something , and it can easily be interpreted as
50.
by hugh_ 17y ago
The important question is: how likely is this to change the results? In recent decades there's been a trend for the Best Picture Oscar to wind up going to films which may not be all that good but which are seen as "Oscar-worthy" due to weig
51.
by hugh_ 17y ago
What kind of voting system would result in correctly recognizing "the best" in your opinion? And how does "the best" film differ from the compromise candidate?
52.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Interesting visualizations, but do the problems mentioned have any relevance for real elections? What happens if you move from two dimensions down to one, or up to many dimensions? While some of the pictures look ugly, does any IRV scenario
53.
by hugh_ 17y ago
The sea, Antarctica, the Moon -- all these places can technologically be colonized, but it won't happen until there's some compelling economic reason for it -- either an industry which can make money there (see colonization of South Africa,
54.
by hugh_ 17y ago
There was a pretty good article I read a few years ago about the technical problems with Orion. It wasn't just politics which killed it: http://www.alternatehistory.com/gateway/essays/OrionProblems... The main problem is the fact that hyd
55.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Quite likely, yes.
56.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Is it just me, or does that page break everyone else's "back" button? Anyway, not much of interest here. Ad company exploits new-ish social phenomenon, gets free publicity from media outlets looking for something to write about new-ish soci
57.
by hugh_ 17y ago
I was thinking about this the other day: what _is_ the best scientific statement we can make, at present, about anthropogenic global warming? On one hand, we have theory. There's reasonably good theoretical reasons to expect that increasing
58.
by hugh_ 17y ago
I'm guessing that civilizations on some other planets probably have a much easier time of colonizing space than we do. We have the misfortune of finding ourselves in the only vaguely-habitable rock in our own solar system, but some other sy
59.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Perhaps. But I guess my point was that "be the change you want to see in the world" is easy, since all I want is for everybody to be like me!
60.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Good idea. I have a job and bathe regularly. Yet I walk through the ghetto every day, and find that folks there are still unemployed and smelly. They're just not following my example like they should!

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