Posts by Kracklite
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Can I just say that I’m impressed that a discussion that could have gone throughly off the rails has not done so?
I’d like to second that. I find this thread fascinating even though I don’t have the time to engage. I’d like to congratulate everyone for arguing in (no pun intended) good faith.
I identify myself as an agnostic, but I’ve recently begun a relationship with a very devout Christian and it’s been very enlightening to me that that we can find much common ground for discussion on issues of faith, as distinct from dogma (hello Richard Dawkins, can you hear me…? Ah, that’s a no, I take it).
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
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Well "(c)" sounds good - best wishes!
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
for moving from here
That's rather sad. Leaving an old home is a death in a way too.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lilith __,
I’m staunchly Green, but such stupidity makes me writhe with embarrassment.
Likewise. Just when they’d got rid of Sue Kedgely… It’s the sort of simple-minded sanctimony that’s the norm for Grauniad columnists and I despise sanctimony because it’s simply making a show of hand-wringing as a substitute for real thought.
The thing that irritates me most about this blather:
Metiria Turei – expressed discomfort with the cost of the LHC project, and felt that the money would have been better spent alleviating poverty than seeking intangible knowledge.
… is that under existing real-world conditions, if the money were actually taken off science, the people who would do so would most definitely not give it to the starving... more likely, it would - as it is in fact - go to bailing out banks.
Carl Sagan wrote a rather clever article – I think it was in The Cosmic Connection – pointing out that NASA’s budget for planetary exploration could easily be paid for and indeed increased with the money given to cost overruns on just a few specific programmes by the US Department of Defense that he named.
I feel like locking up Turei in a cell and demanding that she answer this multiple-choice question:
The difference between a million and a billion (and then a trillion) is:
(A) Two times
(B) A thousand times
(C) What?
(D) A speech impediment
My vote in 2014 is going to involve not hand-wringing, but teeth-grinding.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lilith __,
While JET/ITER have some promise – though Tokamaks could fall short of other potentially cheaper and ultimately easier means than Polywell or Z-pinch – who knows – alas, the opposition the fundamentalist green opposition to anything with the letters “f” or “n” reaches the level of the absurd. I can’t find the actual source, but I remember a German Green politician saying or admitting in a radio interview that her party’s opposition to fusion was essentially because it was “nuclear”. Turei’s idiotic tweet seems on a par. People like that would ban stars if they knew how they shone. It’s a pity, but sometimes I’m reminded all too well by a quote from Larry Niven that there is no cause so noble (and I do believe that overall the green movement is a noble cause) that you won’t find damned fools following it.
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Well, this conversation is taking an weird and thoroughly delightful turn.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
If snails suddenly started cementing sand - iron!- granules togther & making high-arched bridges over hot-water streams...I'd call that an equivalent, and make an application to be one of the ambassadors to the Molluscan Republic.
Islander, I have to ask, have you seen The Future is Wild? Molluscs, it seems, could well be our successors. It's all very much in the tradition of H. G. Wells, and all the better for it.
I thoroughly appreciate leaps into absurdity -within reason!
Ahem, one does not make leaps into the absurd within reason, one makes leaps into the absurd using reason taken to its extreme.
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to JLM,
“Only a little nuclear bomb” which referred to the fact that they wanted to use such a device instead of standard explosives in their mining operations.
Shades of Operation Plowshare if true. That at least was seriously proposed and plans were quite advanced.
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Hard News: Women and their representations, in reply to Lilith __,
OK I fed some of these into the travesty generator and the output was about as intelligible as the input
William Burroughs would love that on so many levels.
Depending on the level of garbling you dial in, you can get a pretty good Lovecraft pastiche out of it too.