View 493 November 19 - 25, 2007 (original) (raw)
Friday, November 23, 2007
Humanity vs. the Universe
"Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/
earth/2007/11/21/scicosmos121.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox
-- Roland Dobbins
The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.
But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.
Now we've done it!.
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Coming to you from beautiful (actually it is) downtown Tehachapi. Richard and Herrin live up here and hosted the Hopper and Pournelle clans for Thanksgiving. We had three of the boys, Herrin's parents from Albuquerque (he's business manager of the Albuquerque Symphony). It's the first time we've been away from home for Thanksgiving since we were married. An odd experience, not having the kitchen to clean up and wreckage to strike away on Black Friday...
And off for home shortly. A pretty drive through the Mojave Desert.
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And an interesting scam story:
Subject: Hello.
Hi Jerry.
I have a juicey story for you to put on your site, obviously with holding my identity completely.
I have just received an email in my POP3 email account from my yahoo.com email account advertising VIAGRA! Somehow, someone got into my account and is using it to spam other people. Lucky I got my own email and found out about it before it got to too many people. I am in the process of contacting yahoo.com about this annoying error and security breech and I am going to deregister all my accounts with them. I had the accounts due to faulty POP3 email accounts and lousy email and Internet ISP's!
Juicy enough for you, or should I email what I got from my own email address just to make it all the better?
Thanks,
Cary.
from cary at @photoafrica.co.za with receipt requested. Guess what happens if I reply or allow the receipt?
In any event I don't intend to find out.
= = = = =
Does anyone know of a program I can run that will make VISTA believe that my DVD drives are also CD drives, and it should read CD's when they are put into those drives? There are two, and VISTA simply refuses to believe there is a disk in the drive if it's a CD. It has no problems with DVD drives. This is part of the VISTA Death Watch: I am going to have to uninstall that program since many programs I want to install come on CD, and Vista simply cannot see the program or any other CD disk in either of its drives.
Perhaps I can buy a CD ONLY drive and install it in place of one of the DVD drives?
Vista didn't always do this. At one time it saw both CD's and DVD's in those drives. Now it won't. Uninstalling the drives and letting Vista find them again does nothing whatsoever to change the situation.
It is EXTREMELY ANNOYING.
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Another inquiry and answer on learning to write... see mail.
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Eugenics
From another conference:
When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/21/eric-turkheimer/race-and-iq/
"How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups?... While we are at it we could open a whole scientific institute for the scientific study of racial stereotypes, and finally pull together the evidence on sneaky Japanese, drunken Irish, unintelligent Poles, overemotional women and lazy Italians."
I keep hearing this trite analogy, and I have no idea why people that use it find it so persuasive. It doesn't offend me in the least, and it doesn't map onto the B-W IQ gap for one very important reason: the IQ gap is tied into social goals that African Americans themselves feel are important and not being met.
A better analogy would be materialist Jews who despise their own inability to stop accumulating wealth, and blame the malevolent Amish for excluding them from the secrets of their simplicity.
Finding the source of this unwanted drive to succeed would be the first step in putting it into proper perspective and repairing it.
J
The campaign against truth continues, but I do note that William Saletan at Slate, having ritually denounced Watson, is having second and third thoughts, and often makes sense:
human nature
Created Equal
Race, genes, and intelligence.By William Saletan
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2007, at 8:03 AM ET
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights .
-Declaration of Independence
Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."
I wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.
If this suggestion makes you angry-if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable-you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating "supposedly superior intellects," "eliminating the weak," "paralyzing the hope of reform," jeopardizing "the doctrine of brotherhood," and undermining "the sympathetic activities of a civilized society."
The same values-equality, hope, and brotherhood-are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.
Another participant observed:
Our current available most powerful way to elevate the IQ of the general population is to bribe the dummies to not reproduce. Eventually we will also have genetic engineering as an alternative technique.
But bribing the dummies to not reproduce delivers an additional benefit: A reduction in total population. The world has too many people now. We can accomplish two goals at once if we offer money for sterilization.
R
The original "eugenics" program founded by Sir Francis Galton did not seek to discourage others from having children: he wanted to establish funds to encourage bright people to have more children. In particular, scholarship funds for bright couples who marry at age 20 or so. They were to be paid fairly good bounties for having and raising children while continuing their education. The idea was to let them have kids without having to drop out of school and make a living.
In the US the eugenics movement pressed for sterilization of "dummies" and mental deficients -- three generations of morons is enough -- and ended up ordering sterilization of people more downtrodden than dumb.
One of the early proponents of this kind of eugenics was Margaret Sanger, she of the Planned Parenthood and Birth Control persuasion. The early US eugenics movement was discredited and with it the entire notion of eugenics, although abortion rights did come out of it.
Isaac Asimov was a strong advocate of population control. Larry Niven once told him, "Isaac, you only persuade normal and bright normal people; you're contributing to the dumbing of the planet. Are you sure you want to keep that up?" Isaac, who had read "The Little Black Bag" and "The Marching Morons" was taken aback, but he recovered quickly and I never detected much change in his writing after that.
Couple denigration of positive eugenics with egalitarianism, and the rich and successful are easily persuaded not to have kids, since the only thing they can leave them is expensive private school education.
The result of all this is a realistic fear that the US will not be able to sustain a First World Civilization after another couple of generations. Perhaps that is false, and H Beam Piper's fears of decivilizing societies were unf0unded; but as I observe the Capital City of these United States, and the rapid changes all over Southern California, I wonder.
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Subject: Problems with CD/DVD drives
Jerry:
I have had similar problems with my cd/dvd drives under both Vista and XP pro. The solution I found is contained in the Microsft KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060
Although the article refers to XP using the Guided help on the page cleared up this problem with Vista Home Premium.
Hope this helps.
Martin Fine
I tried that; alas, the problem remains. Vista sees the drive. It simply refuses to believe there is a CD in the drive. It has no problems with DVD's. This is infuriating.
Does anyone know if they sell CDROM drives any longer? If I buy one and install it as a third drive (or even remove the DVDROM drive and replace it with a CDROM drive) will that work? Will Vista see a CDROM drive?
It has to, sometime: I have installed programs using this setup. But not recently. First Vista couldn't recognize a CD in the DVDROM drive, but it saw it in the Plextor DVD-RW drive; now it will not see a CD in either drive.
I hate this. A lot.
