But Dick posits that “the density of Jupiter is little more than that of water, and that of Saturn about the density of cork.” Jupiter, therefore, would have a gravity only twice as great as Earth’s—not so terrible in the grand scheme of things...
Well, that’s kind of close. The average density of Saturn is in fact less than that of water, and the gravity at its cloudtops is only very slightly higher than at Earth’s surface. Jupiter’s isn’t that bad, either, at ~2.5g.
Some deep hypothermia patients, however, have been successfully revived from a prolonged state of practically no brain activity whatsoever.
This is how Vetinari thinks, his soul exulted. Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.
—Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Although thought by a madman in the book, there seems to be truth in this quote. People often seem to think of the future as a coherent, specific story not unlike the one woven by the brain from the past events. Unpleasant surprises happen when the real events inevitably deviate from those imagined.
African praise songs were sung not only to kings, gods, and heroes, but to plants and animals, who obviously cannot grant anything to those who praise them.
I’m not denying the powerful psychological effect of praise in these cases, but the animistic religions of a large number of indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures do assert that plants and animals (or, more accurately, their respective spirits) have agency, and that good fortune on future h/g excursions may be ensured by respectful behaviour towards the spirits in question.
You make the “metabolism first” school of thought sound like a minority contrarian position to the mainstream “genes first” hypothesis. I was under the impression that they were simply competing hypotheses with the jury being still out on the big question. That’s how they presented the issue in my astrobiology class, anyway.
That was a fascinating article. Thank you.
Well, elves were intelligently designed to specifically be attractive to humans...
But because the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, the apparent receding velocity caused by the expansion is increasing, and, for any object distant enough, will at some point become greater than c, causing the object to disappear beyond the cosmological horizon.
This, obviously, assuming that the current theories are correct in this respect.
In the worst case scenario, with very pathological propositions.
Even though the various important satisfiability problems are known to be in NP, there are known algorithms for those problems that are polynomial-time for almost all “interesting” inputs.
AFAIK low body fat was not an attractive trait in the Western societies before the 20th century, either.
FWIW, one way to solve this problem would be to postulate mermaids to be marine mammals (they do have a placental umbilicus and mammaries after all in most depictions...), so their bottom part would be more akin to that of a dolphin, not a fish.
Drowning Does Not Look Like Drowning
Fascinating insight against generalizing from fictional evidence in a very real life-or-death situation.
A good question.
I ended up writing a longer post than I expected; originally I just thought I’d just utilize the TV Tropes summary/review by linking there.
Also, the Tropes page provides links to both of the parts, and to both the original threads (with discussion) and the cleaned-up versions (story only.) I’ll edit the post to include direct links.
I’m a bit surprised that nobody seems to have brought up The Salvation War yet. [ETA: direct links to first and second part]
It’s a Web Original documentary-style techno-thriller, based around the premise that humans find out that a Judeo-Christian Heaven and (Dantean) Hell (and their denizens) actually exist, but it turns out there’s nothing supernatural about them, just some previously-unknown/unapplied physics.
The work opens in medias res into a modern-day situation where Yahweh has finally gotten fed up with those hairless monkeys no longer being the blind obedient slaves of yore, making a Public Service Announcement that Heaven’s gates are closed and Satan owns everyone’s souls from now on.
When commanded to lie down and die, some actually do. The majority of humankind instead does the logical thing and unites to declare war on Heaven and Hell. Hilarity ensues.
The work is rather saturated with WarmFuzzies and AwesomeMoments appealing to the atheist/rationalist crowd, and features some very memorable characters. It’s a work in progress, with the second part of the trilogy now nearing its finale.
The Salvation War Web Original trilogy is based on this premise. And boy does it makes good use of it.
http://www.badscience.net/2010/07/yeah-well-you-can-prove-anything-with-science/
Priming people with scientific data that contradicts a particular established belief of theirs will actually make them question the utility of science in general. So in such a near-mode situation people actually seem to bite the bullet and avoid compartmentalization in their world-view.
From a rationality point of view, is it better to be inconsistent than consistently wrong?
There may be status effects in play, of course: reporting glaringly inconsistent views to those smarty-pants boffin types just may not seem a very good idea.
Could you elaborate? It seems to me that because there exists a much greater number of complex computations than there are simple computations, we should expect to find ourselves in a complex one. But this, obviously, does not seem to be the case.
If Oceanians consider Eur...Eastasians, their mortal enemies, unworthy of human dignity, and Eastasians regard Oceanians, their hated antagonists, as little more than maggots to be crushed, then that is not an example of psychological diversity; instead, it’s two different instances of underlying psychological unity—in this case, of the universal “Us vs. Them” heuristic.
It is interesting. IME in real life and in OkCupid, female self-identification as bisexual correlates quite strongly with the geek/liberal/poly/kinky meme complex (edit: mirroring your experiences, didn’t read carefully enough). Out of my top matches in OkCupid, over 80% of women interested in men seem to self-report as bisexual.
However, also IME, bisexual identification usually doesn’t imply being biromantic! Many of those women have had, or would like to have, sexual experiences with other women, but still may prefer men in romantic relationships almost exclusively.
FWIW, I support adding a question about romantic orientation in the next survey.