Thoughts from space anthropologist David Valentine on a couple contrasting photoessays.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Brain
Is it computable?
Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells, Nicolelis says.
“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”
I’m personally an agnostic on the issue.
Facebook And Conservatives
Some interesting (and surprising) observations from Glenn Beck:
It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges.
I sat there, looking around the room at ‘our side’ wondering, ‘Who are we?’ Who am I? I want to be very clear — I am not referring to every person in the room. There were probably 25–30 people and a number of them, I believe, felt like I did. But the overall tenor, to me, felt like the Salem Witch Trial: ‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it proves you are screwing us.’
What happened to us? When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?
Good questions. I agree that Facebook should do whatever it wants to do, but that it should be transparent.
[Update a while later]
House Cats
A review, from Elizabeth Lopatto.
The #JourneyToMars
Why many are skeptical about it.
Someone made a good point the other day. It’s nonsensical to call Mars a “horizon goal” as the NRC did, because a horizon is something you never reach.
The Shirtstorm Social Experiment
Thoughts on how disconnected gender feminists and SJWs are from normal people.
Buzz And SLS
It doesn’t hurt that he is attacking it, but it probably doesn’t help that much, either. Sadly, the congress/space-industrial complex doesn’t pay much attention to him.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the story from Eric Berger.
A Heart-Attack Gene?
This looks like interesting research, but I’ll bet that sensible nutrition advice would be even more effective.
We stayed in a Residence Inn in Florida, and they have free breakfast. Cream cheese for the bagels was available in two varieties: 1/3 reduced fat, and no fat. The real thing wasn’t available.
Bill Nye
…the climate huckster guy:
Admittedly, climate science is complex. There might be perfectly reasonable scientific justifications for what’s happening on the tornado front. Although, surely, there are just as likely interesting scientific arguments that challenge The Science Guy’s chilling and reckless assertions meant only to scare you into adopting leftist economic policy, not to teach you anything. Nye’s “science” is, at the very least, arguable.
But that’s not the reason Nye is dishonest. Or, at least, not the only reason. His biggest lie—and he makes these sorts of claims all the time—is that people are increasingly suffering because of global warming, and thus by extension they are suffering because of the use of fossil fuels.
This is simply untrue. Life, by nearly any quantifiable measurement, is better today for more people than it has ever been. One of the externalities in the spike of comfort and health is that more people are emitting carbon into the air. Fewer people are suffering. On top of the huge, if inadvertent, moral benefits of oil, gas, and coal, we should add that far fewer people are dying from drastic weather events—or any weather, actually.
These charlatans shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take them seriously.
Hillary’s Emails
Is the scandal finally about to explode?
If so, it’s way overdue. Everyone who’s ever handled classified material knows that they’d be sporting orange after all this, if they had some last name other than “Clinton.”