The fear is that when people are starving and competing for scarce resources, there isn't usually much question of remaining "civilized". The fight for survival could become all, and it could be brutal.

Well, at least I'm not dreaming. Others can see it too.

There's a lot of confusion about this right now it seems. He may have been fired, or be about to be fired.

This page currently says he's expecting to be fired today, and that Mueller's Russia investigation could be at risk.

Edit: Obligatory Mueller firing rapid response link.

Watch out for his coal lobbyist successor, Andrew Wheeler.

Nathan Robinson's response pretty much hits the mark:

Pretty loud for being so silenced.

I get the same feeling off these people as off the white nationalists who complain that white men are more oppressed than anyone else. They're either very deluded or speaking in bad faith.

Yep. They actually do some good journalism these days, often enough that it has ceased to surprise me when I see an article like this from Buzzfeed. But I did just take a glance at their homepage and it's the same nonsense as ever. Can a website suffer from multiple personality disorder?

There's a few of us around.

The quickest prevention method we could think of was a klaxon attached to a leaf switch set to go off anytime the pump is opened. Provide all pump repair folks with ear protection and the problem of skimmers is solved.

Unless those are the people installing them.

The greater concern, I think, is the impact on other species of a change in the nutrient content of their food. Ecosystems can be quite fragile and such a shift could have ramifications we can't foresee. Food chains may break down. And all this takes place in ecosystems that are already stressed due to temperature change, atmospheric change, the effects of agriculture, ocean acidification, ocean deoxygenization, etc. We're applying so much stress across the whole planet that it's unpredictable where breakages are going to take place. The nutrient issue is one more source of stress, and one more reminder that these systems are so complex that our actions have unpredictable effects.

Sure, it's a problem, but his diagnosis seems off the mark:

Part of the blame must reside with the toxic, feminist, politically-driven whispering campaign that “all men are potential rapists”. Modern masculinity has been put in the dock, and there it appears to remain.

I'd suggest the problem in the UK has more to do with (1) tabloids stoking paedophile paranoia for decades (blowing up each case into a fear that paedophiles lurked in every neighbourhood just waiting to prey on your kids), and (2) the discovery of a systematic cover-up of paedophiles in prominent positions in UK society (Jimmy Savile, other entertainers, several politicians from the 1960s to the 1980s at least, the Rotherham scandal, etc.). And we don't seem to be done with number 2 yet.

So let's not blame feminism for this. The slogan about potential rapists is one I haven't heard for about 30 years so I doubt it's highly influential today. And a rapist is not a paedophile so the connection doesn't really make sense anyway. The paranoia about paedophiles comes from other sources.

If this prompts enough warranty claims maybe the manufacturers will gain an incentive to improve security on their devices?

how do you change someone's mind?

Probably a good start is not to go into the interaction with the goal, "I'm going to get them to believe what I believe." It sets up a barrier and puts both parties' beliefs under lockdown. No matter how attached you are to what you believe, for a fruitful exchange to take place it's best to enter it with an open mind, and that means recognizing that your beliefs are subject to doubt just like theirs. Growth can take place when you form a true empathetic connection and meet as equals, and that can only happen if you're sincerely open, listening to and feeling the person you're talking to, and you maintain that even if they are defensive or even offensive towards you. A good start is to feel where it is that you can warm to them. If they're racist, is that because they're afraid of something, and can you feel and relate to their fear? I know this is vague, but the agenda can't start with specific actions on specific beliefs.

And how do we add beliefs? We're born with certain tendencies, during our upbringing we imitate and are trained, learn what rewards and what brings pain, and form social bonds. Our likes and dislikes take shape and we start to be driven by these, and we form habits. Social bonds and habits soon turn into our assumed identities, and this whole submerged iceberg of arational formation lurks beneath the visible tip of our rational thinking. Mostly we form beliefs to suit what's already there and avoid discomfort, though we may think we're being awfully rational and objective. Being aware of this can help when you encounter someone whose iceberg happened to grow into a different shape from your own.

The behaviour is egregious, but writing an email containing the phrase "touch base with you so as to close the loop on" is a crime against humanity.

they need developers from the open source world to not see them as malicious

They almost convinced some of the development community that there was a new spirit at Microsoft, but then they released Windows 10 all loaded up with spyware you can't turn off. Developers tend to be sensitive about such things, especially developers of open source software. With that one move they undid a lot of the progress they had been making in improving Microsoft's reputation among developers.

What would constitute an objective standard here? By what standard does the researcher judge which automatically generated statements are meaningless? If the algorithm slings words together into something that one person finds meaningful but another doesn't, who's to say that the more skeptical judge is simply correct? One person might find a poem profound that another finds meaningless, and in that context we don't say one is wrong and the other right, because we understand that reading poetry is an active interplay between the reader and the poem. Why then declare that there is an objective standard of meaningfulness in computer-generated new agey statements?

I clicked the bullshit generator a few times. Most of these statements strike me as pseudo-profound junk, but occasionally one pops up that gives me pause. For example, "Turbulence is born in the gap where awareness has been excluded." I read that and thought, yes, it's easy to slip into a frantic spin when you're not paying attention to your life. This randomly generated statement suggests something to me that it might not to someone else. Who's right? There's no right, of course. How you read it depends what you bring to it. So I'm a little suspicious of an experiment that starts out from the premise, "These statements are meaningless."

Which isn't to say the experiment is worthless. It shows that people handle these statements differently, and one group might see the other as credulous while the other may see the first as lacking imagination. But if you then ask, "who's right?" you should watch what standards you smuggle in to that question.

Until recently a mildly embarrassing trace of a dumb site I made in 1994 was still kicking around in internet search results. It seems to have gone now, but there is still a trace of it on this site which archives Lycos search results for the words "rock sand stone aggregate" from 1995. Someone must have thought that was useful at the time for an engineering website. Actually it's quite interesting to look around that site, which seems to have lain untouched since 1995. For example, Jay's Hot Web Sites is a list of links that brings back memories. Anyone else remember Stroud's Consummate Winsock Apps and the CIA World Fact Book 1994? Or am I the oldest geek on Hubski? Anyway, it's kind of fascinating how this stuff has rattled around for more than 20 years while much else has been lost.

Edit: Their homepage says it was edited in 1998, and it boasts of being online since 1994.

A humanity that destroys earth and is forced to move into space will be more successful overall, potentially, than one that does nothing on earth because we might harm the environment.

It depends what you count as success. Destroying your home planet and wiping out those who live with us here on Earth could be seen as less than successful. A neighbour who creates huge problems for everyone else on the street yet takes pride in their wealth and problem-solving abilities might come over as a little blind to their own problem-creating abilities. And that blindness might too be seen as less than optimal. It's not unreasonable to see "living harmoniously with others" as part of a good life.

This discussion turns us towards fundamental assumptions: is there such a thing as a successful life, and what is it? Does it belong to someone, or must it be shared? I hope we can be optimistic about these things, but we shouldn't underplay the suffering that capitalism, industry and technological progress have brought and their power to alienate us from our world, even as we celebrate their successes.

And, as thx1138 pointed out, the alternative isn't "doing nothing" but being considerate.

So please, respond sarcastically again dismissing my entire argument, as it's fairly obvious you already have an agenda that this video somehow illustrates.

Fuck you.

Guys, can we please not turn Hubski into reddit? Thanks.

But I think what this video shows is that, despite some initial exasperation with the interviewer's muddled question, Feynman comes through as a superb communicator with an acute appreciation of what it is to explain something to someone. He may not be able to explain how magnets work in everyday terms, but he gives an excellent explanation of why there's no such explanation to be had.

At least this can probably be safely ignored, and doesn't affect the rest of the world, unlike the UK Government's other technologically and socially clueless goal of banning all (non-backdoored) encryption.

That characterization of "a man who knows himself" rings false to my ears. It describes someone with unexamined self-confidence, not someone who truly has self-knowledge. The deeper you go into trying to know yourself, the more you realize that it's hard to pin down the object of that knowledge, and hard to distinguish the self you're supposed to know from the world, or life. You'll start to become more aware of your inseparability from the others on whom you depend, and of just how fluid your own nature can be and how it slips free from your grasp each time you convince yourself you've got it. For a while at least, uncertainty increases with self-knowledge. Thus true self knowledge is more an ongoing practice than a project that gets completed, and a project that encourages humility and empathy more than the kind of clueless arrogance described here.

Related: http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/usb-killer

See also Extracting the SuperFish certificate. A quick text search of the binary enabled this guy to extract the certificate's encrypted private key and the password needed to decrypt it. The password turned out to be "komodia", the name of the company that makes the man-in-the-middle attack software.

Obviously so the aliens will feel comfortable with it, since it'll be just like the music they have back home.

Maybe The Atlantic realized the ambiguity and changed it. Their current headline for it is "This Is How a Prisoner of War Feels About Torture".

AdNauseam. You can correct titles on Hubski. Won't somebody please think of the pedants?

Also, they should try for a less shitty-looking website.

In 2014 an improved version of the image was released, including additional wavelengths:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/27/image/a/

In 2006 a study predicted all ocean fish will be extinct by 2048.

In 2010 the UN predicted that all ocean fish could be extinct by 2050.

In 2011 the International Panel on the State of The Ocean (PDF) concluded:

As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the ocean the implications became far worse than we had individually realized. This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond.

I am not aware of anything being done. People still buy fish at the supermarket. The oceans may well lose their fish within our lifetimes or our children's. After that how does the Earth continue? Are we really going to pretend that such a huge mass extinction will not change or destroy the lives of creatures we feel closer to, including people?

I post articles about these kinds of things to reddit from time to time. They get maybe 5 to 10 upvotes. Meanwhile people are very concerned about whether their new cellphone has more pixels on the screen than the previous one, or a slight increase in processor speed. Our consumer culture has infantilized us to the point where we can no longer take care of ourselves like adults.