Crystal Clear

The human mind is a funny thing. Events and situations that are of grave importance may not faze us at all. Minor annoyances may upset us for days.

Daniel Gilbert writes about this in an op-ed for the LA Times:

“NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

His third reason especially resounds with me: that humans have a hard time planning for the long term, because we’re so caught up with what is happening today. With the exception of course, of planning for our retirement.

In a non-religious society, there is little reason why this shouldn’t be. If we are only products of natural selection, then we have little extra insight into the long term. Animals live and die in the day to day, with only a few ’storing up’ for hard times.

But my Christian religious background says that humans are the crown of all things living, and have a special responsibility to care for the earth. Christians must look ahead to the future and make choices now. Perhaps we can be on the forefront calling for change!

If gay sex caused global warming, we have no shortage of volunteers to help eradicate it…

Comments(1)

A (hopefully) exhaustive reference on stupid things people have done to or done around computers. A great laugh!

Comments(0)

People I talk to who don’t believe in global warming often ask me to prove it to them. I cite studies and scientists, and statistics, but I can’t really prove it. And so then they take that as negative proof, that global warming isn’t happening.

I then get frustrated and am unsure of what to say next. Then I read the following post and to me, and I’ll try this tactic from now on. (Which I have already had the opportunity over email with a person.)

Stop getting carried away with something that has not been proven scientifically... See, the thing is that science never proves anything. That’s not a flaw in science, it’s methodology. Scientists have long discarded modus ponens as the logical basis for the scientific method, in favour of modus tollens. What that means is that we don’t try to prove things, because we recognise that we may not yet have all the facts. Instead we propose a explanation that seem to fit the facts and we try and disprove it.

The thing to note here is that if we wait for science to prove that global [warming] is happening, we’ll still be waiting in billions of years time. Even if the Sun the should expand to swallow the earth and engulf us solar plasma, we’ll still be waiting, because that’s not what scientists do!

If you want to be scientific about this, you need a counter theory, and it has to be falsifiable. There has to be a test we can conduct that to prove it wrong. Preferably one that doesn’t involve waiting a thousand years to see if the climate flips state back to the Cambrian Era. (Read full comment in context)

This isn’t going to convince someone that global warming is happening, but I hope it will make them think harder about why they believe it isn’t happening.

Comments(2)

I’ve had the opportunity lately to try to find online computer help for some software issues on computers that I use. I noticed a striking difference depending on the operating system for which I needed help.

Just about every forums for help on a Microsoft Windows platform had the same answer for just about every problem: Is your anti-virus up to date? Have you checked for spyware? Did you try rebooting? Did you reinstall the program? If you still have a problem, reinstall operating system. At some point, you may fix the problem you are having, but unless it is a virus or spyware issue, the actual cause of your problem usually remains a mystery.

However, on forums for help with Linux operating systems, you may actually find someone else who had the same problem you had and the steps to fix it. If not, you may be asked to post debugging info, which means you’ll usually receive a response from a developer. You might end up at a bug report which means you’ll have to wait for the fix. You might have to reinstall the program (or install the latest version where the problem is fixed), but you’ll never have to re-install the OS for a program problem.

I know that I like to know why things stopped working even if I can get it to work again. A black box solution, where I have no idea, always leaves me wondering if it will happen again, without warning.

Comments(1)

I was glad to read recently that Greenpeace, an environmental organization that has done a lot of good advocacy (and some not so good), has also released an open source tool.

They hope the tools will encourage developers to create tools to assist in global warming campaigns. More about Project Melt

Comments(0)