I've continued posting my new series of intellectually stimulating 10 minute monologues on YouTube:
Grand-scale reasons to explore space.
Space Exploration:Planning our next steps in beyond Earth
Space Exploration: - Mining the sky: Are there economic incentives?
Space Exploration: The Big Picture, excitement? warp drive?
Space Exploration:Ambitious tech- tethers, solar sails, space elevators.
The Transparent Society: Part 1:
The Transparent Society: Part 2:
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I’m offline for a little while, so here’s just a dump of some cool/interesting items I’ve collected...
Anybody on Google Buzz? I am now!
The online comic Schlock Mercenary had this bit about Uplift... funny! (Thanks Robert.)
See a couple of eye-opening brief articles from the Globalist:
Ending Gridlock in the U.S. Senate and
Shanghai's Coming Out Party
See a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. interact + connect with the space community. Great signs of an age of amateurs! But it isn’t as recent as some think. I was an active amateur variable star observer as a teenager, way back in the 1960s! See:
See what a boy did with a GPS tracking device, a weather balloon, and some duct tape.
MIT neuroscientists demonstrated that they can influence people's moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). This sheds light on how the brain constructs morality.They found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired when this region was subjected to an electrical burst.
Wiki Leaks is now under attack by the same people who campaigned against ACORN. At least ACORN had some sins to atone for, but burying WikiLeaks is all about destroying hopeful trends in general transparency. Visit their site. Make a donation!
“Dark Flow” of galactic clusters indicates a “direction” in our universe and possibly lots of matter “beyond” it.
Fascinating article about the quirks and “buts” in evolution theory. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong
The the blogger at “Asymptosis” seems an especially bright fellow. Worth a look For example in this posting, he comments on research by Jonathan Haidt (that I’ve talked about many times) to the effect that:
Republicans (on an oversimplifying average) care equally about five spheres of morality: avoiding harm, fairness, group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity.
Democrats mostly care about only two: avoiding harm and fairness.
The blogger adds that, according to Stephen Pinker: Libertarians look much more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures, EXCEPT those that have anything to do with compassion, on which libertarians are lower than liberals AND conservatives.... But here’s where it gets even more interesting (for me at least). A commenter suggests that “libertarianism essentially amounts to is the political expression of autism.”
Yipe! Of course, this could help explain why a movement whose basic premise is so attractive to American psyches does so badly in elections. Or the fact that libertarians who extol cut-throat competition tend to have done very badly at it, in real life. Or their historical amnesia, ignoring who - across 4,000 years - were the real oppressors. I do quibble with Haidt’s simplistic “2 vs 5” morality check, though. In fact, many liberals are VERY attentive to “group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity.” Their loyalty is often to more abstract versions of group, authority and purity... and it is that level of abstraction that I believe constitutes the real difference between them and conservatives.
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Finally, do not let your tea-drinking brother in law avoid acknowledging two facts:
1) that the "socialist" Obamacare bill was first written at the Heritage Foundation as the GOP alternative to Hillarycare, in 1993, therefore the neocon screeching hate-fest is entirely fact-free.
2) that a certain foreign, hostile (but brilliant) royal family owns up to 20% of Fox. Now how would they be using that influence?
Enough. I am off line for a while. Keep up the fight. NOT for "the left" or even liberalism. I care little about narrowing my range of choices, which is why I most despise those who have made the Right an impossible shopping ground for modern solutions. No. Fight for the general Western Enlightenment, for the American Experiment, and a return to sanity among many of our brothers and sisters who've mixed Koolaid with their tea.