ribuck

Moriartis is God!

I would name the film "Uncomfortable!", for two reasons: (1) to attract attention with a quirky name, and (2) to prepare viewers to receive ideas that some of them will find uncomfortable.

The original claim (that cyclists emit more CO2 than cars) came from this 2010 article in PJ Media's Daily Digest. The article includes the numbers, and the mathematics is correct. But it misses the point. The car is producing carbon dioxide from carbon that was sequestered underground. The cyclist does emit CO2 - but matches it by the CO2 absorbed by the plants that the cyclist eats (and the plants eaten by the animals that the cyclist eats). So the cyclist is, overall, carbon neutral. The car is, overall, carbon-emitting unless you consider timescales of millions of years. This reminds me of one of the more interesting questions that was asked at Google's old Google Answers service: How many tyrannosaurs in a gallon of gasoline? It turns out the answer is 460 gallons per tyrannosaur (assuming 100% conversion of the tyrannousaur's carbon content).

Provided she's being peaceful, I don't care whether she has a job or not.

I felt no anger, either while watching the video or posting comments. I thought we were discussing her personality. I tend to avoid spending time with very self-centered people, because I find it unsatisfying being with them, but that's nothing to do with anger.

In the case of the poor family, apparently their daughter had received great value from her. So in that case, I agree. But in other cases it's not at all obvious. For example, the guy who gave Amanda Palmer the crate when she tweeted for it seemed to want to be photographed next to a famous person. I would agree with that, except that I think most people would "hope for help" rather than "expect help". And most people who ask for help do so reluctantly, even though they may need help quite strongly. When Amanda Palmer asks for help, it's human nature to assume that she really needs the help, and I think that's part of why people respond so readily, whereas sometimes it seems she's just being lazy and would rather someone else did things for her. Yes that seems the most likely explanation. And it's not really a video I want to watch a second time.

Sorry, I can't help you with the podcast, but I guess the film was .

To me, the "talking" is the main text. The "subtext" is her choice of what to talk about, the body language she used when talking about it, and the way she ends each anecdote at the point where she got a good outcome for herself from whatever she did. I also think it's self-aggrandising when she implies that she is so important and wonderful that she only needs to tweet about something and she gets it. She talked about the very poor family that gave her food and accommodation even though they really couldn't afford to. A less self-centered person would then have said something like "and in return I gave them a share of my earnings from that night's performance". Instead, she tells us how the next morning the poor family offered her even more things!

Agreed! The subtext of every part of her talk is: "I'm so enlightened. I'm so wonderful. People worship me like a goddess. I'm so inspiring! I'm so brave! I'm so cool! ..." But her message is a good one: that creative people don't need the machinery of corporations and copyright and contracts and lawyers to succeed. If you give your fans what they want, and let them choose how to respond, the free market will let them reward you.

Oh man! When I lost mine (at age 24) I thought "Wow! Wow! That was way better than I imagined it could possibly be! That was way better than I imagined anything could be! Wow!"

The drug called music can also work pretty well (if you get the right kind, and learn to totally immerse yourself in it). It doesn't work as well as love, but it's also legal and is much easier to find.

A while back, I went into a music store to buy a guitar bag for my daughter. The owner showed me a black guitar bag with a huge white logo on it. I asked if he had one without advertising, which took him by surprise because he assumed that the brand was a premium one that anyone would be proud to display. He then fetched a plain black guitar bag from the back room, which was half the price. Also, whenever I buy clothing, I try hard to find a garment without a visible brand on it.

How could you tell? I might be conscious. Or, I might be an organism with complex responses that are triggered by various stimuli, but has no awareness of anything. Externally, the difference is undetectable. Conventionally each of us reasons that we are conscious ourselves, therefore other humans are probably like ourselves. But that's no more than an assumption. Let me turn it around. How do you know that your spinal column (which is structurally quite similar to your brain) does not have a separate consciousness of its own? Your brain's consciousness wouldn't be able to tell. Even your stomach has as many neurones controlling it as there are neurones in a cat's brain. How do you know your stomach doesn't have a consciousness of its own? Consciousness is probably the least-understood aspect of life. Therefore, using consciousness to define life seems fraught with problems.

What I mean is, even if you meet me face-to-face you can't know whether I'm conscious or not. So how can consciousness be a useful test for life?

Hmm. How do you know that I am conscious?

I also asked this question of a molecular biologist over at the Bitcointalk forum. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=147283.msg1565119#msg1565119

Ummm.... how can I put this? He's dead. Oh. In that case the interview might not be so interesting.

William Ress-Mogg would be interesting. He co-wrote (together with James Dale Davidson) the book The Sovereign Individual, which is a high-octane freedom-based treatise on "how to survive and prosper in the coming economic revolution". On the other hand, he's a member of the House of Lords (the UK's unelected senate)!

Jake from The Voluntary Life.

There are no "loose concepts" in Science. Equivocations and ambiguities are for religion. Of course. Instead, scientists use rigorous specialised definitions that are not universal but suit the purpose at hand. I already said this. You can do rigorous science without needing to have a universal definition of "life". The scientist rigorously defines whatever it is that he/she is studying. Do you really think so? Let's consider furniture. It's a concept that covers chairs, tables, sofas, beds, etc, just as life covers mammals, bacteria, etc. And furniture as a concept is as fuzzy as life, with lots of gray areas. For example, is an old wooden box a piece of furniture? What about the bed from a dolls house? "Furniture" is most certainly not an object as you suggested. You don't go to the store to buy a furniture. The definition of "life" is a philosophical or linguistic exercise, not a scientific one. It's the same with furniture.

As an informal definition, "Life is that which evolves" works very well. It includes viruses (which certainly evolve) but not lower-level things like prions (which can sort-of move themselves ("fold") and reproduce ("replicate") but don't evolve). However, it's hard to formalise that simple definition in a way that works for everyone. Because an individual instance of a species doesn't itself evolve, it becomes necessary to require replication. But then a castrated man is not alive because he can't reproduce! You could talk about life comprising instances of species that evolve, but then you end up having to define "species" which is hard to do without introducing a circularity. Although it's interesting to ponder the definition of "life", there's no scientific need to rigorously define such a loose concept, just as we don't have a rigorous definition of "sand" or "food" or "furniture". Instead, scientists use rigorous specialised definitions that are not universal but suit the purpose at hand.

I have heard Jeffrey Tucker talk about how he values the community of his church, and about how much he enjoys singing in its choir, but I've never heard him claim that there is a sky-being behind all of this, or that the pope is some kind of agent of this sky-being.

The paper proposes that things are alive if they move by themselves against gravity. Are you actually serious about this, or is it some kind of joke? What about a cell in orbit around the earth? How does it move by itself against gravity? What about flames? Are they not moving by themselves against gravity just as much as I am when I jump?

Knight, I'm sorry you've found yourself in this predicament. I see that the Reddit thread contains a lot of potentially-useful advice.

Ripple isn't a competing cryptocurrency. It's a payment/exchange system that can be used with any fiat currency or with Bitcoin. Its most important use may end up being to provide an easy way to exchange between fiat and Bitcoin. Ripple has an internal cryptocurrency called XRP which is used to pay the fees for payment processing. Because the designers of Ripple reserved the initial stock of XRP credits for themselves, it has no chance of being taken seriously as a competing currency to Bitcoin. Which is fine! I think Bitcoin is a great cryptocurrency, and I think Ripple has the potential to be a great payment/exchange system. Of interest might be the following page on Ripple's site: Introduction to Ripple for Bitcoiners