George sent me this link as a response to a previous post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&list=PL6A1FD147A45EF50D&feature=plpp_play_all
This is a fascinating, brilliant video. It vividly demonstrates the utter cluelessness of large parts the economic and business world to the implications of basic mathematics as they apply to non-renewable resources.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
When you pray to God, what are you praying to?
Science is now in the position to tell us what praying to "God the Creator" means. It means praying to evolution!
The scientific evidence is overwhelming that evolution, and nothing else, created all living things. For a refutation of creationist claims, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html Or read, Why Evolution is True
Praying to evolution is hopeless. Evolution is a blind, uncaring process, not a being. Evolution is not the kind of thing that could "hear" our prayers, or care about our prayers, or do anything about our prayers.
Otoh, mindfulness meditation, something that could be called a form of prayer (but not a prayer to anything or for anything) is, in my experience, quite valuable. The reason is straightforward: mindfulness meditation requires no intellectual baggage.
Equating evolution with God immediately clears away massive amounts of confusion:
1. All theological debates become moot. For example, the question of why "evil" exists is transformed. As theology, the question disappears. As a topic for inquiry in the biological sciences it has great interest. It leads to the notion of Evolutionary Stable Strategy which is well worth a separate blog post.
2. All concerns about "what God wants us to do" disappear. All morality, or lack thereof, comes from us (by way of our evolutionary makeup)!
3. The belief that "everything has a purpose" or "everything is for the best" is seen as the risible nonsense that it is. Evolution has no purpose!
Before any of you despairs, I would like to point out one not-so-obvious consequence of evolution as designer: namely that our understanding of evolution does not directly affect the world as it is in any way! That is, the world we inhabit, in which love, morality, purpose, truth, beauty exist, is not affected by the theory of evolution. They still exist, just as they have always existed. The only difference is that we are seen as the authors of love, morality, purpose, truth and beauty, not some non-existent God!
When we rid ourselves of childish, pre-scientific notions of God, we free ourselves to ask much more interesting questions, such as, "what evolutionary forces act on us and societies so as to affect our choices?"
The scientific evidence is overwhelming that evolution, and nothing else, created all living things. For a refutation of creationist claims, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html Or read, Why Evolution is True
Praying to evolution is hopeless. Evolution is a blind, uncaring process, not a being. Evolution is not the kind of thing that could "hear" our prayers, or care about our prayers, or do anything about our prayers.
Otoh, mindfulness meditation, something that could be called a form of prayer (but not a prayer to anything or for anything) is, in my experience, quite valuable. The reason is straightforward: mindfulness meditation requires no intellectual baggage.
Equating evolution with God immediately clears away massive amounts of confusion:
1. All theological debates become moot. For example, the question of why "evil" exists is transformed. As theology, the question disappears. As a topic for inquiry in the biological sciences it has great interest. It leads to the notion of Evolutionary Stable Strategy which is well worth a separate blog post.
2. All concerns about "what God wants us to do" disappear. All morality, or lack thereof, comes from us (by way of our evolutionary makeup)!
3. The belief that "everything has a purpose" or "everything is for the best" is seen as the risible nonsense that it is. Evolution has no purpose!
Before any of you despairs, I would like to point out one not-so-obvious consequence of evolution as designer: namely that our understanding of evolution does not directly affect the world as it is in any way! That is, the world we inhabit, in which love, morality, purpose, truth, beauty exist, is not affected by the theory of evolution. They still exist, just as they have always existed. The only difference is that we are seen as the authors of love, morality, purpose, truth and beauty, not some non-existent God!
When we rid ourselves of childish, pre-scientific notions of God, we free ourselves to ask much more interesting questions, such as, "what evolutionary forces act on us and societies so as to affect our choices?"
Why I am finding it difficult to concentrate on computer programming
The evidence is overwhelming: on humanity's present course of inaction,
world civilization has just *decades* left before it starts to unravel
into famine and war caused by global climate change. Civilization might
hold on for another 5 or 6 decades; it might collapse in as little as
15 or 20 years.
For those of you who still don't get it, here is a comprehensive rebuttal of climate-denial cliches:
99 One-Liners Rebutting Denier Talking Points — With Links To The Full Climate Science
http://thinkprogress.org/
The catastrophic effects of climate change are not news, but the quickness of the impeding collapse was news to me just a few weeks ago. Here are some sources:
An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces
http://thinkprogress.org/
Climate wars, by Gwynne Dyer
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-
The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?
http://www.amazon.com/The-
TED Talk: Climate Change is Simple
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
http://www.rollingstone.com/
It seems too late to hope for real governmental action to reduce CO2 emissions directly, though some government ministers are beginning to wake up. Here's something encouraging from today's news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
The last, faint, hope is to discover ways of removing *billions* of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans. This isn't completely impossible, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: P. furiosus turns CO2 directly into industrial chemical
http://edreamleo.blogspot.com/
You can also google "CO2 to fuel" to see other approaches.
My children are increasing likely to die from the direct and indirect effects of mass starvation, wars, civil unrest and the general breakdown of society that ensures. The odds that my own generation of 60-somethings die from those effects are also increasing at an alarming rate. (Those who don't understand how such probabilistic statements could make sense might want to study Bayesian statistics. A good introduction from a recent pycon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
In short, business-as-usual and life-as-usual seem pretty much irrelevant.
One part of the practice of mindfulness meditation is the development of the awareness of the "impermanence of all things". One exercise asks us to imagine everything (and everyone) around us disappearing or dying. Imo, this is an excellent spiritual practice. Alas, we can now see *how* everything will *actually* disappear. Way before we are ready ;-) It's a truly terrifying prospect. It is as if we were living in 1935, facing world war two without any hope of winning.
The only positive responses I can see to this situation are
A) telling as many people as possible about the impeding catastrophe in the hope that something might (finally!) be done and
B) attempting to maintain as much personal equilibrium as I can.
In fact, the famous zen story has always applied to everyone and everything:
For those of you who still don't get it, here is a comprehensive rebuttal of climate-denial cliches:
99 One-Liners Rebutting Denier Talking Points — With Links To The Full Climate Science
http://thinkprogress.org/
The catastrophic effects of climate change are not news, but the quickness of the impeding collapse was news to me just a few weeks ago. Here are some sources:
An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces
http://thinkprogress.org/
Climate wars, by Gwynne Dyer
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-
The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?
http://www.amazon.com/The-
TED Talk: Climate Change is Simple
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
http://www.rollingstone.com/
It seems too late to hope for real governmental action to reduce CO2 emissions directly, though some government ministers are beginning to wake up. Here's something encouraging from today's news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
The last, faint, hope is to discover ways of removing *billions* of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans. This isn't completely impossible, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: P. furiosus turns CO2 directly into industrial chemical
http://edreamleo.blogspot.com/
You can also google "CO2 to fuel" to see other approaches.
My children are increasing likely to die from the direct and indirect effects of mass starvation, wars, civil unrest and the general breakdown of society that ensures. The odds that my own generation of 60-somethings die from those effects are also increasing at an alarming rate. (Those who don't understand how such probabilistic statements could make sense might want to study Bayesian statistics. A good introduction from a recent pycon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
In short, business-as-usual and life-as-usual seem pretty much irrelevant.
One part of the practice of mindfulness meditation is the development of the awareness of the "impermanence of all things". One exercise asks us to imagine everything (and everyone) around us disappearing or dying. Imo, this is an excellent spiritual practice. Alas, we can now see *how* everything will *actually* disappear. Way before we are ready ;-) It's a truly terrifying prospect. It is as if we were living in 1935, facing world war two without any hope of winning.
The only positive responses I can see to this situation are
A) telling as many people as possible about the impeding catastrophe in the hope that something might (finally!) be done and
B) attempting to maintain as much personal equilibrium as I can.
In fact, the famous zen story has always applied to everyone and everything:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger.
He fled, the tiger after him.
Coming to a precipice,
he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge.
The tiger sniffed at him from above.
Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him.
Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine.
The man saw a luscious strawberry near him.
Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.
How sweet it tasted!
Friday, May 31, 2013
From Darwin's Dangerous Idea: why we can believe scientific theories
The following quotation is from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel C Dennett. This quote applies to all strongly-confirmed scientific theories, including global warming.
"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus." [Emphasis in the original]."
Denialist "arguments" are rubbish because they don't unravel any strands, let alone enough to let Gulliver get up.
"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus." [Emphasis in the original]."
Denialist "arguments" are rubbish because they don't unravel any strands, let alone enough to let Gulliver get up.
Everything you need to know to refute climate denial trolls
ClimateProgress contains a superb reference for rebutting 99 climate-denial trolls.
Each troll (skeptic argument) is followed by a one-line rebuttal, a paragraph rebuttal, and links to multi-page references containing nothing established science.
Read this page, keep calm, and you *will* win any argument with the trolls.
Each troll (skeptic argument) is followed by a one-line rebuttal, a paragraph rebuttal, and links to multi-page references containing nothing established science.
Read this page, keep calm, and you *will* win any argument with the trolls.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: P. furiosus turns CO2 directly into industrial chemical
UGA discovery may allow scientists to make fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere: http://news.uga.edu/releases/
Here is the abstract of the referenced article PNAS. I don't have a
subscription:
Exploiting microbial hyperthermophilicity to produce an industrial chemical, using hydrogen and carbon dioxide: http://www.pnas.org/content/
Exploiting microbial hyperthermophilicity to produce an industrial chemical, using hydrogen and carbon dioxide: http://www.pnas.org/content/
Here is an earlier article from PNAS, in full:
Mechanism of oxygen detoxification by the surprisingly oxygen-tolerant hyperthermophilic archaeon, Pyrococcus furiosus: http://www.pnas.org/content/
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Global warming will destroy our world sooner, rather than later
Burning proven reserves of oil and gas will destroy the world:
Full details here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-
One-liner rebuttals of denier bullshit, with links to the science:http://www.amazon.com/The-
http://thinkprogress.org/
http://thinkprogress.org/
It's time, way past time, for action.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
