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Robert Smart
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Robert's posts
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Cheap energy might solve global warming, but it will also provide the capability for even greater destructive actions. The whole solar system and galaxy beyond will become available for human creative destruction. But on Earth we need conservation and some skillful restoration.
http://www.sciencealert.com/german-has-just-successfully-fired-up-a-revolutionary-nuclear-fusion-machine
http://www.sciencealert.com/german-has-just-successfully-fired-up-a-revolutionary-nuclear-fusion-machine
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Declaring oneself a fan of Barbara Thiering immediately labels you as a nutter. Yet she has the only explanation of the New Testament I've seen that makes sense to me. Summary: Hellenized Jewish intellectuals hatch a plan to conquer the Roman world and beyond. Their plan succeeds, though not in their lifetime. Whether she really discovered it, or totally invented it, it is a magnificent self-consistent intellectual tour de force. And if it is correct then it is one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th Century, ranking with those in Science and Mathematics. I wonder if we could do a kickstarter for an evaluation by experts with no axe to grind (i.e. non religious experts on the languages of the time).
Her writings after the 3 books are at http://www.peshertechnique.infinitesoulutions.com/.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obituaries/academic-and-iconoclast-barbara-thiering-exemplified-tumultuous-1960s-ethos-20151203-glf9mk.html
Her writings after the 3 books are at http://www.peshertechnique.infinitesoulutions.com/.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obituaries/academic-and-iconoclast-barbara-thiering-exemplified-tumultuous-1960s-ethos-20151203-glf9mk.html
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When doctors say "I wouldn't recommend that people do X", it is almost the opposite of saying "I would recommend that people not do X".
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34857022
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34857022
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Starting an attempt to put things on a firmer footing after the previous muddled post. This includes a challenge for the category theorists.
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When I first went gluten-free there was a big advantage that it stopped you eating junk food. Now there is gluten-free junk food everywhere. Eating natural low GI food is the general answer.
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A cat is a toxaplasma's idea for making more toxaplasma. Which is to say that cat's without toxaplasma would be much less successful, and hence less prevalent. Since feral cats endanger many native species in Australia it seems like a good idea to cure them, or the rats/mice, of toxoplasma. But then you wonder if more rats and mice might not be a worse problem.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-10/toxoplasma-parasite-hijacks-human-cells-could-alter-behaviour/7014258?site=science/news
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-10/toxoplasma-parasite-hijacks-human-cells-could-alter-behaviour/7014258?site=science/news
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In the unusual circumstance that one pole is on a large island, and the other in a (nearly) land-locked sea, we find that the world has no stable climate, but oscillates between ice ages and interglacials. The article below adds a little piece to the puzzle. We know that dust from desserts is another part of it that we could influence. To me it is obvious that we have to plan to manage the climate. If we talked in those terms we would get a lot of people on board who currently aren't. Indeed just the fact that the Greens would be really annoyed would get a lot of people on board. Also it would get the Greens to make explicit their desire for a return to the Status Quo Ante, which should effectively sideline them, and that seems like an absolutely necessary step given their opposition to nuclear power as part of the solution.
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"There are no lone geniuses; science is a collective, collaborative enterprise."
While this (the blog post, not the book) is a very nice exposition of the folk who worked out the story of elliptic orbits, it is perhaps worth saying this: to find the right path you have to follow a lot of wrong paths, and all the forgotten scientists working on other paths also contributed.
While this (the blog post, not the book) is a very nice exposition of the folk who worked out the story of elliptic orbits, it is perhaps worth saying this: to find the right path you have to follow a lot of wrong paths, and all the forgotten scientists working on other paths also contributed.
The TPP has to be rejected for this alone, which says (as far as I can understand it) that the IoT (Internet of Things) will consist of stuff whose behaviour is only known to people in another country and we're not allowed to know.
Article 14.17 of TPP, published at last after years of secret negotiations, says: “No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.”
What we need is the reverse: If products contain software then the source (and reproducible build chain) need to be freely available.
Article 14.17 of TPP, published at last after years of secret negotiations, says: “No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.”
What we need is the reverse: If products contain software then the source (and reproducible build chain) need to be freely available.
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For Australian republicans: This is why you don't want a president elected by the voters, because then they think they can be a player as well as an umpire.
Portugal has fallen into a constitutional crisis, something that puts it on the edge of falling back in to the sequence of unstable dictatorships of its pre-1974 era.
Like many countries, Portugal has both a ceremonial head of state (a President) and a head of government (the Prime Minister). As in other parliamentary systems, the public elects members of parliament, and whichever party has the majority gets to assemble a government, including a PM. And as in many such systems (such as England's), there's a ceremonial step at the beginning of that, where the head of state (in England, the Queen) invites the ruling party to form the government.
(Portugal differs slightly in that its head of state is elected as well; the current president, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, is in the midst of plummeting popularity)
What happened now is that, in the wake of one economic mess after another, Portugal's recent parliamentary election brought in a bunch of candidates who were sharply opposed to austerity measures, and to deals with the EU and IMF similar to the ones Greece has gotten mired in. This left-wing coalition of parties has a majority of the seats in parliament. But President Cavaco Silva has refused to allow them to form a government, and has said that it is far too dangerous for the country to allow any party opposed to EU membership to ever be allowed to take office, no matter what elections may say; instead, he has ordered the conservative parties to form a minority government.
Portugal has had conflicts between President and Prime Minister before, notably when President Jorge Sampaio called for new elections in 2004, as PM Santana Lopes' government was in obvious chaos. But there was no question of thwarting the popular will in that case: Lopes was not an elected MP at all, but had been appointed to be PM when his predecessor had gone off to become President of the European Commission, was widely regarded as illegitimate, and was promptly creamed in an election. Here, on the other hand, an election happened only a few weeks ago, and the President decided to deliberately thwart its results.
However, the history of Portugal's democracy is quite brief; up until 1974, it was ruled by a sequence of unstable governments and dictatorships. Given this context, Cavaco Silva's actions are all the more alarming: they aren't taking place in the context of a robust constitutional system, but rather in a fragile and fairly nascent one, one which routinely seems to be held together with duct tape and chicken wire.
Of course, the rise of a left-wing bloc is certain to trigger a crisis of another sort, as a second European government openly thumbs its nose at German demands for austerity and debt repayment above all. This could easily lead to a deeper crisis for the EU as a whole, making its internal split between rich and poor countries much more vivid.
That crisis, however, I think is inevitable; Europe has been trying to have fiscal unity without economic unity, something which never works, because the fiscal policy best for a poor country is basically the opposite of the fiscal policy needed for a rich one. Europe glossed over these matters for years, essentially artificially propping up countries like Greece and Portugal so that they could continue to buy French and German exports, until the complete unsustainability of the policy became all too evident.
Europe is going to have to give up on pretending to be a federation of completely different countries that just happen to share a currency and various regulatory schemes; either it really runs itself like a single entity, or it allows more of its constituent entities to decouple properly, and (for example) run their own fiscal policy.
Either way, this has the smell of a big mess, especially for the people of Portugal.
h/t +Peter da Silva.
Like many countries, Portugal has both a ceremonial head of state (a President) and a head of government (the Prime Minister). As in other parliamentary systems, the public elects members of parliament, and whichever party has the majority gets to assemble a government, including a PM. And as in many such systems (such as England's), there's a ceremonial step at the beginning of that, where the head of state (in England, the Queen) invites the ruling party to form the government.
(Portugal differs slightly in that its head of state is elected as well; the current president, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, is in the midst of plummeting popularity)
What happened now is that, in the wake of one economic mess after another, Portugal's recent parliamentary election brought in a bunch of candidates who were sharply opposed to austerity measures, and to deals with the EU and IMF similar to the ones Greece has gotten mired in. This left-wing coalition of parties has a majority of the seats in parliament. But President Cavaco Silva has refused to allow them to form a government, and has said that it is far too dangerous for the country to allow any party opposed to EU membership to ever be allowed to take office, no matter what elections may say; instead, he has ordered the conservative parties to form a minority government.
Portugal has had conflicts between President and Prime Minister before, notably when President Jorge Sampaio called for new elections in 2004, as PM Santana Lopes' government was in obvious chaos. But there was no question of thwarting the popular will in that case: Lopes was not an elected MP at all, but had been appointed to be PM when his predecessor had gone off to become President of the European Commission, was widely regarded as illegitimate, and was promptly creamed in an election. Here, on the other hand, an election happened only a few weeks ago, and the President decided to deliberately thwart its results.
However, the history of Portugal's democracy is quite brief; up until 1974, it was ruled by a sequence of unstable governments and dictatorships. Given this context, Cavaco Silva's actions are all the more alarming: they aren't taking place in the context of a robust constitutional system, but rather in a fragile and fairly nascent one, one which routinely seems to be held together with duct tape and chicken wire.
Of course, the rise of a left-wing bloc is certain to trigger a crisis of another sort, as a second European government openly thumbs its nose at German demands for austerity and debt repayment above all. This could easily lead to a deeper crisis for the EU as a whole, making its internal split between rich and poor countries much more vivid.
That crisis, however, I think is inevitable; Europe has been trying to have fiscal unity without economic unity, something which never works, because the fiscal policy best for a poor country is basically the opposite of the fiscal policy needed for a rich one. Europe glossed over these matters for years, essentially artificially propping up countries like Greece and Portugal so that they could continue to buy French and German exports, until the complete unsustainability of the policy became all too evident.
Europe is going to have to give up on pretending to be a federation of completely different countries that just happen to share a currency and various regulatory schemes; either it really runs itself like a single entity, or it allows more of its constituent entities to decouple properly, and (for example) run their own fiscal policy.
Either way, this has the smell of a big mess, especially for the people of Portugal.
h/t +Peter da Silva.
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