hugh_

The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.

Personally, though, I still think it's quite a good film. Some aspects of the love story grate a little (in particular Leonardo DiCaprio's always-perfect character) as does the characterization of all first class passengers as snooty jerks and all third class passengers as idealized salt of the Earth (come to think of it, that's pretty much the same problem as Avatar) but as soon as the ship starts sinking it becomes a fairly gripping story. Hardly the greatest film in history, but perfectly watchable and rewatchable even if you're not a 17-year-old girl.

How did we get to the point where "Humans are evil, kill them all!" is a non-risky script with nothing objectionable in it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master-slave_morality

Britain is already a welfare state. How much more welfare-y does he want it to be?

Also, doesn't "caring for the truly needy" fall into the Church's mission statement? If a starving person comes to a priest, shouldn't the priest share his own food rather than telling him to go steal from someone else?

When was the last time anybody actually managed to starve to death in Great Britain? Great Britain is already a welfare state. It's easy to get paid for not working. If you fall through the cracks of that system there are dozens of charities devoted to helping those in genuine need. In addition, there's a beggar on every street corner. Oh, and there's always the Church, which really should be working on feeding the hungry itself (perhaps by reducing its own gold-plated candelabra budget) instead of sending 'em to knock over Tesco's.

Finally, if you somehow manage to be completely unable to find food anywhere, and you haven't eaten for days and you're actually in danger of dying of starvation, all you need to do is go to hospital, where they'll say "hey, this guy is dying of starvation" and give you free food and medical treatment.

In conclusion, dying for lack of food in modern Britain is very, very difficult.

Begging and dying would seem to both be more morally acceptable than stealing.

What Kaltenegger is actually saying is that of the planets we're likely to be able to detect in the near future, life is more likely on moons of gas giants than planets. This is because the detection technology is still at a stage where the only Earth-sized planets we're likely to see will probably all be so close-in as to be tidally locked to their stars, which is most probably going to be bad from life's point of view.

As for whether life is more common throughout the universe on moons than planets, we really have no idea at this stage.

I do like the way that every science story from Britain appears to include the word "boffin" at least twice.

(It helped that there were three truly excellent cafes and a bunch of so-so ones within walking distance; this wouldn't work in, say, Silicon Valley.)

Combine the "small town" thing with the "early morning" thing and you've got trouble, though. In a small town in Maine at six in the morning I encountered a guy who thought it was incredibly rude that I wouldn't stop and discuss (a) the weather and (b) where I was from as I walked past his house. Sorry dude, there's four million people in my home town, can't chat with all of 'em.

I wonder if preferential ranking will improve the quality of winners by better reflecting the true preferences of the voters rather than the preferences the voters seem to think they ought to have.

Approval voting seems like a worse idea in practice than in theory. I can easily imagine scenarios in which an unknown (and quite possibly incompetent or extremist) candidate with an attractive-sounding party name could garner enough votes to come out ahead (something like this recently happened with the Family First Party in several Australian elections).

Come to think of it, we already have colonies on the ocean floor, they're called oil rigs, and they're economically viable. I wouldn't want to live there, though.

http://www.alternatehistory.com/gateway/essays/OrionProblems...

The main problem is the fact that hydrogen bombs sans fission trigger turned out not to be possible [] which increases the amount of radiation released per launch from "modest" to "really quite excessive".

[] Or if they are possible then the folks who know how to build them certainly aren't interested in letting on. There'd be nothing worse for nonproliferation than hydrogen bombs without a U or Pu trigger.

Anyway, not much of interest here. Ad company exploits new-ish social phenomenon, gets free publicity from media outlets looking for something to write about new-ish social phenomenon, world shrugs and moves on to the next thing.

On one hand, we have theory. There's reasonably good theoretical reasons to expect that increasing carbon dioxide should increase global temperatures. However, every good scientist knows not to trust theory too much until it's been verified by experiment, especially when the system in question is so complex.

On the other hand, we have experiment. Unfortunately, we only have a sample size of one, and we don't have a control group. We tried increasing the CO2 emissions, and found that sure enough, the temperature did wind up increasing. But given there's only one planet in the sample and no planets in the control group, we certainly can't eliminate the possibility that there's no causal link. If we forget that we're looking at global temperature vs CO2 concentration and pretend we're looking at a high school kid's science project about whether playing music to plants makes them grow faster, we'd have to say that the experiment lends some support to the hypothesis but is hardly conclusive.

So what can we reasonably conclude? I think the fairest thing we can say is that it's more likely than not that increasing CO2 emissions causes an increase in global temperatures. Anyone who claims the science is "settled" though, the way it's settled for heliocentrism, evolution or relativity, is not much of a scientist.

(I am also, despite years of Year 9 science projects, still unsure whether playing music to plants makes them grow faster.)

Imagine if the moon had been several times bigger -- it would have an atmosphere, and thanks to panspermia might even have picked up enough life from Earth to give it a breathable atmosphere. The Apollo Project would have immediately been followed by a project to kill and eat the local wildlife to see what it tastes like. Or suppose we'd evolved on a moon of a Jupiter-like planet in the habitable zone -- there'd be a whole bunch of other equally habitable moons just a short flight away.

Instead we're stuck on a big rock, looking at a bunch of other rocks which are fairly useless to us. Sigh.

I have a job and bathe regularly. Yet I walk through the ghetto every day, and find that folks there are still unemployed and smelly. They're just not following my example like they should!