yes. . sign of the times. -- j
.

Short of committing murder on TV at 9:00 PM I doubt if he'd ever get convicted. And, now that I think about it, probably not for murder either.

when he goes to prison for violating the constitution,
we should consider piping Fox News and Rush and Levin
and Chris Plante into his suite. . he might learn somethng. -- j
.

Interesting - as I'm an engineer and a pilot. I should read those papers. I will. But, at first glance here I am reminded of Pol Pot's practice of killing engineers, educated, people who wore glasses...

There are some Mesopotamian finds of instances when the whole area between the Tigris and the Euprhatese Rivers was under water. "Noah" has its origins in Mesopotamian myth (Utnapishtem)- some of this biblical text is very close to the original in the Gilgamesh epic.

If you are interested, I can try to find out more precise details (had to look up Utnapishtem already!).

Jan

Interesting. I used to fly aerobatics. It was extremely exciting and the perfect of example of fully immersing myself in the physics I had studied in school. "Yep...a stall with rapid application of yaw DOES result in a snap roll! Yipee!"

I am a few different things. One of them is a PE - professional engineer, graduated from the finest engineering school (arguably) in the nation. This twisted story reminds me of an event in my life. Several years ago I was invited to speak to a local junior high engineering/tech class about engineering. I thought beforehand, "How could I define engineering in a simple way?" I came up with the following definition..."Apply math and science in a way that makes the world a better place for humans." In my mind, that got the job done. I've used it ever since. People who shoot up recruiting stations or open fire in a crowded room don't fit that description. You could train a monkey to pull a trigger.

Jolene, I am not clear on which "thinking nation" the United States attacked. Did you mean Iran? Iran seems formidable, but suffers from all the weaknesses of a controlled society, from intellectual drought to economic instability.

I can accept that they have a good educational system and serious motivation for science and engineering studies. However, a society that hangs homosexuals is going to find itself lacking creative people. Even in America, you do not announce your atheism to your co-workers, but at least here, it is not a capital offense. And what if you do not want to pray six times a day? Here, we do not care if you go to church or not. Over there, the choices are not so broad. The bottom line is that a controlled society cannot stand up to an freer opponent.

Appeals to God are fairly common. Both Germany and Netherlands had "God with Us" on their coins, just as we have IGWT. The coins of Austria declared their last emperor, Franz Josef II, to be an "apostolic monarch." The faith of Muslims is no less assertive or surprising. Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus all find encouragement from celestial beings. I do not mean just the people who happen to believe, but the leaders of those nations. The Dalai Lama is pretty sure that the Great Wheel of Life will restore Lhasa as it carries China downward. Most of the people whom I know who also admire the works of Ayn Rand would ask a more basic question at that point.

Hi, John:
Rand & Astrology? Starting my day off with a laugh.
Obama being a big fan of Rush & FOX.

I'm an engineer and find this correlation curious. . the art of design
requires that an engineer assume the cloak of a mini-creator,
but that is also true for any kind of producer. . the study of
science to improve the lot of humanity is also common to
many pursuits. . could it be the acceptance of dull mathematical
constraints which frustrates the architect inside an engineer's
"heart" which requires some sort of release? . I have known
a bunch of engineers who love excitement, like roller coasters
and motorcycles, Jeeps and mountain climbing. . maybe this
correlation somehow connects with excitement. . and within
Islam, there seems to be plenty of room for that. -- j
.

Jan, I watched the movie Noah during this past week on vacation.
have you heard of any evidence of large groups of drowned humans
back in the past? -- j
.

I carry a penlight-size laser when traveling, K, which can
readily blind an assailant. . cheap from Tmart. . approx.
3 mile range, if the air is clear. -- j

http://www.tmart.com/301-5mW-532nm-Pr...
.

Sharpton paying his taxes?
Algore visiting East Anglia?
Maher going to church?
Whoopi hugging O'Reilly?
Rand embracing astrology?
-- j
.

M a y b e , or maybe not. I think...maybe not. Will read papers.

Mike, I completely agree... there are many cultural underpinnings that could be blamed for those reactions, and 'education' alone probably isn't the panacea.
For every one that says 'we need to address the culture,' I'll bet there are several others who'll defend 'the culture's right to stay the same.'
Impasse.

Good points, Mike, and makes me wonder, too, what be the influencing factors!! I could guess a few things that might do it, but none of them sound right to me.
Need more research; that's for sure!
And hell, yes, my examples were anecdotal. Too many "proofs" are!

You should read the actual papers.
http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambet...
and
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/09...

The studies began with investigations of engineers in Arab/Islamic lands, but also included statistics about engineers in the USA and Canada.

Also, your experience with engineers, valid though it may be, can also be a "confirmation bias" in that you limit your validations to what you have experienced without accepting the broader findings of statistical surveys.

Ha! Right.

I'm not a poet, but sometimes a rhymer.
I don't see a conflict either. But I rather suspect that there are more scientists who can do poetry, than poets who can do science.

I admit that my discussion of the archeological record mentally ended with, "Oh darn!" because it would be a lot of fun to discover that there had been a prior high tech civilization on Earth.

My personal version of what you said is that I am a scientist...and a poet. My scientific side sees chloroplast based life forms responding to high and low pressure areas; my poetic side sees dryads dancing the trees.

I actually do not find a conflict in this.

Jan

Thank you for the lesson, Jan.
BUT who is talking about plausibility?
One of the things that steered me to objectivism was the attempt to find sanity in an insane world (universe?). To the extent that objectivism has allowed me to function and understand to a limited extent what is going on around me, I do pretty well. But I still have that small unresolved space reserved for the implausible. When I took up the attempt to understand quantum physics in order to buttress my dealing with reality, I found it to be not only implausible, but improbable. But there it is. I can't make it go away. So I hold that area open like a guest that rarely shows up, and now and then indulge in the "what-if" that is reserved for sci-fi. One of the things I find fascinating is the responses I get in the Gulch which are scientific, analytical, and surprisingly fanciful. (You are included in there somewhere).

This is a good point. I have known a few engineers with a healthy creative side (my daughter is one, but the creative part didn't come from me ;-) ), but most seem to be the problem solver type (more like me). Linear thinkers ... If A, then B, then C. Unfortunately this does not lend itself to "thinking outside the box".

If you can assemble the right team of creative types and engineers, you can create some amazing things (phones that are basically small computers, cars that drive themselves, etc).

A creative engineer MAY be the best of both worlds, but may also come with other quirks (OCD, fear-of-failure are just a couple I have seen). I don't have a big enough sample to say whether this is a side effect of balancing the creative with the more logic-oriented, or is unique to the few I have been around.

We have archeological traces from that far back. We have evidence of early tool use (stone tools used to cut meat from bones) as far back as 3.4 million years, and bone cuts plus stone tools at 2.5 million years.

Modern Homo sapiens didn't evolve until about 200K years ago (we can trace this through the genetic clock); close predecessors (H. erectus) had stone tools and was similar to us at around 500K years ago - their average brain size was slightly smaller, but overlapped the lower range of modern humans. The first plausible evidence of human habitation dates from 2M years ago; the first wood and stone shelter with an internal hearth is from about 500K years ago. The first manufacturing site found is a ocher processing plant with several cement hearths in Sibudu, Africa, from about 60K ago.

So, there are remains of fragile archeological evidence (bits of bone, wood, and hide) from several hundred thousand years ago. If you wan to postulate a high tech civilization, you have to have a path of remains that go from stone to metal to technical. We have such a path, and it leads to the history we know. It is not plausible to assume that there was a prior high tech civilization when there would be massive traces of the evolution of that civilization - complex civilizations do not just spring out of a hole in the ground - plus a huge amount of evidence of the civilization itself. If we can find fragments of hide shelters from the last ice age, we would be unable to miss a starship building depot.

Jan

That paragraph was terrifying to me, the speech he delivered. So sad and so true, the US should not have attacked a thinking nation, because let's face it, ours by majority is not. And our leaders are the least thinking, they don't get there by thinking its by popularity. Also he makes the statement that God will back the righteous. We a Christian nation who have thrown out all the basic concepts of Christianity in hopes of forgiveness, should realistically shiver at that thought.

I doubt if any trace of any civilization that would be attributed to a civilization would be left after, say, 500K years, or 350K years. If we are talking about Mars before it lost its atmosphere, millions of years.