Posts by Peter Ashby
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Not without some decent evidence in their favour, no. I have looked at and assessed a number of schemes that come under the heading 'quantum consciousness' for eg and they all fail on various points. Perhaps the heaviest hitter, Penrose fails in that his attempt to demonstrate using Gödel's theorem that the brain needs something more than boring old Neurophysiology by assuming that the brain is a computer. Computer is a nice analogy, which falls down quite quickly when you try and use it more than superficially. As I keep explaining to the youngest spawn who is doing bioinformatics.
Penrose also blots his copybook with his hookup with Hammeroff going in search of 'things that might be able to go into superposition in the cell' and latching on microtubules because it is the only thing they can get that might fit the bill (but not at 37C in an electrically active salt solution with transport proteins hauling vesicles and stuff all over them). The problem with microtubules is that every cell has them, which would make Charles Atlas or Arnie geniuses.
Johnjoe McFadden's form of QC falls down quite spectacularly the way he ties himself in knots trying to avoid even mentioning anything about the speed of his electronic spread, or its attenuation in space. IOW he dilligently ignores the Time Constant. Since he displays quite some knowledge of neurphysiology this absence is more than a little curious which means he has calculated it and his entire schema is simply too slow. It is a tragedy that anyone takes him seriously.
Dennett in Freedom Evolves, even in you don't like his schema does a good job showing how you don't get any useful control out of randomness. So beyond an undemonstrable ghost in the machine which is just endless recursion (what is watching the ghost's mind?) there is firstly no good reason why the wetware is not sufficient and secondly no plausible let alone functional demonstration of anything beyond it.
Thus dualism is just a god of the gaps formulation.
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@Richard
Although at least one charmer has told me to my face that I am simply wasting my time, because it is clearly much too hard. So far as I can tell these individuals are not motivated by religion, so much as a paucity of imagination.
After much time wasted arguing with both religious types and recalcitrant dualists (not of the sword variety) I have come to the conclusion that it is not a lack of imagination but rather too much of one. They object to hard materialist science because they imagine that they know they are too special to be like that or to inhabit such a (to them) boring universe with no 'mystery' to it.
It is partly the Unweaving the Rainbow syndrome Dawkins spent a book trying to deal with, and partly that desire to be special and for there to be large unplumbed mysteries that can still be hoped to contain something miraculous. It is why Loch Ness Monster believers are both fully behind deep sonar sweeps of the loch but also not because when nothing is found they are left trying to catch smoke in a net.
I enjoy good,* well written scifi/fantasy like lots of people, I just remember to pick my disbelief off the suspense tree when I put the book down. Some people not so much, which is just sad.
*If you open the book telling me it is set 50million years in the future and humans are just the same I will throw the book down in disgust. True story. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away is much better ;-)
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Regardless, Australian proposals to 'filter' the big bad foreign interweb have the air of Don Quioxte about them; quaint and entirely unworkable to my supremely un-techie like mind. What on earth is the point then?
My understanding is it is a 'won't someone think of the children?' moral panic that various groups and the media won't let anyone challenge by the old saw of accusing them of being paediatricians. By which means nobody has, quite, had the balls to put a stop to it yet. Everyone without a hair trigger moral panic button knows it is a complete nonsense, but that is no help it seems.
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8km? that's a bit tame. I was ranging further than that in Dunedin in the mid '70s, both on my feet and on my bike. I would disappear all day to go fishing down the docks for eg. Where there were always other kids, of all ages, doing it too.
That is what has changed. A child out in the world alone sticks out like a sore thumb now and they are more at risk because there is not that army of other kids and their eyes and ears also around. oh and we always had three 2c pieces for the phone box. Or you rounded up a few returnable bottles for it.
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I also think that the world societies we have created are in part to blame. In a globalised world where competition at all stages is urged and nothing certain, where hard work can avail you of nothing as your job gets outsourced to China or Vietnam or whichever low wage slave economy is de jour or simply casualised to such an extent that there is no incentive to work hard.
We have atomised society, pushed rights without responsibility and disempowered adults to tell off kids not their own. What has resulted are cohorts of teenagers who look at their likely futures and want none of it, who are under nobody's supervision and who have never had any boundaries drawn for them, let alone enforced.
Add in societies obsessed with the cult of celebrity where making it big regardless of ability is an obviously realisable aim. Where exactly is the incentive to knuckle down and work hard? When bad behaviour gets you noticed and made much of.
Seeking a chemical anaesthesia, like they see their elders do, thus becomes a rational response to a world that offers them few palatable choices. Sure they can go to university, load themselves up with huge debts then either be unemployed or in sink casualised jobs that pay barely above the minimum wage. You can tell that university is no longer a guarantee of a good income by govts in many places seeking to lower the income level at which student loans become repayable.
Those of us who had some certainties, who were rewarded for hard work but encouraged to co-operate and compete in a friendly manner and who were funded at university had it good. Is it any wonder we didn't behave like so many of our kids? Mind you I remember a younger kid at school who went into the boy's toilets one break time and skulled a whole bottle of vodka he had pinched from home. This was back in '82.
So alcohol and sexual behaviour are symptoms of a wider malaise and we will not be able to counter them in isolation.
One question: why aren't those teenagers motivated to do something more constructive?
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@Giovanni
Good points. The age you can buy booze hasn't changed here in the UK either, yet the same things are happening. Here in Scotland the latest thing against the ubiquitous Buckfast is banning alcohol and high caffeine drinks (Buckie has astonishingly high caffeine levels).@Islander
Teenage sexual experimentation was not a problem in indigenous or early settler societies for the simple reasons that firstly nutritional levels meant the first onset of puberty was later than it is now and their fertility was much lower for the same reason so the risks of early experimentation were much less. Secondly STDs were not a problem due to isolation and small peer groups anyway. We simply live in a very different world where teenage pregnancy is not a good idea and is a common result of early sexual exploration.
@Dyan Campbell
Oral STDs are indeed a problem, but nowhere near as much as teenage pregnancy, especially with genital STDs. So in terms of harm reduction it is a lesser of two evils. The kids are trying to be careful after all. So getting all down on oral sex is likely to backfire in bad ways.
As for the age reduction. When I was a first year uni student back in '84, being 18 didn't stop us going to the pub. It made buying booze to take to the beach much harder.
Here in the UK there is a cutoff for teenage problem drinking. It essentially ends as soon as they are old enough to get into a pub environment. Recent efforts to clamp down on underage drinking in pubs is making underage drinking worse, not better.
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@Dyan Campbell
I agree completely and have seen the same change in the style of alcohol advertising here in the UK as well.
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Russ when I go from completely unfit to exercise my waking pulse undergoes a step change. It usually takes 3 bouts of running, separated by a couple of days and my pulse will drop from the mid to high 50's to around 48. I have done this experiment numerous times and the result is consistent. It's like a switch has been flipped in my physiology and I am now in 'exercise mode'.
I have also found that it takes roughly 2 weeks for any given workout, such as a hard hill session, speed work or a long distance run to come through in terms of felt benefit to fitness. So your 2 weeks works for me too.
I do know that when you exercise your body changes the isoform of a number of enzymes in for eg the muscles. This involves replacing all the old forms and happens in a combination of as part of repair when you stress the system and due to normal turnover of proteins. You would feel the benefits of that when the new isoform is in some form of majority.
The process of losing fitness when sick, injured or discouraged is the reverse of that and again I find 2 weeks is the maximum I can rest for without losing fitness.
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@Islander
Sorry for being dilatory in replying. Certainly you can say hi to me and mine. My email address is my initials (my middle name is Richard) ashby at blueyonder dot co dot uk. if you want to get in touch.
I'm keeping the option of buckwheat flour in reserve because the stuff I have is wholemeal though the GF flour mix I use has it in anyway iirc. I will try gram flour since the commercial packet pastry mixes have it in and being proteinaceous it provides some flexibility. I made some tortillas yesterday with it and GP GF flour that are actually flexible and work really well. I think they will be really good with extra wholegrain buckwheat, I make sensational pancakes with it after all. I had my 6 bean chilli in wraps for tea last night, literally finger licking good.
Having failed to find a recipe for GF water pastry online I am motivated to put my final recipe up somewhere. I expect I will only use it intermittently as there are only so many pork pies you can eat before they become ordinary. I am using the cheapest, plain pack pork I can find for economy sake since it's the pastry that is the important thing. Once I get the pastry right I will make a number of small pies with good ingredients and freeze them.
Gilberts is simply being slow in one step of the breakdown of haemaglobin, at bilirubin which is yellow and causes jaundice in excess. My bruises get caught in the yellow phase and go slowly from there and I constantly have more bilirubin in my blood. It's really just one extreme of a normal distribution. When I get overstressed or run down I get more yellow and have a sort of lassitude. It frustrates my wife that when I get sick I have learned to rest whereas she tries to barrel through. It is of course the sole reason I have not won the Olympic Marathon, yet.
As for running (or any exercise) the trick is to withstand the first two weeks from unfit when it all just seems like too much hard work. Then when you have some fitness you find it can be enjoyable and you go from there. Unless you are someone who doesn't get that improvement. Apparently there are some people who simply don't improve in response to exercise, or at least not to the same extent as people like I do. When you have my experience of getting fit and ultra fit and how that feels and knowing you can run for 3 hours and enjoy it then the whole thing takes on an entirely different tinge.
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Since when was Science well paid in NZ? (or anywhere for that matter?). I used to raise laughs when I told the story of how I got into science* for the money.
*Well the branch I ended up in. The money in question was a summer studentship (it was either that or the dole given the employment situation in Dunedin that summer), a piddling amount of money. Later on when I swapped a PhD stipend (with added monies for dependants) for the dole we were better off, even after they cut the dole by 7% two months later.
Science well paid? pull the other one, except its in hock to pay the mortgage.