> As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship
> If you can't keep it in your chapel then you're an evangelist and your morals are fundamentally no different than the colonizers of old.
disagree.
Colonization is done by force, evangelism is, in theory, consensual.
If I tell you "hey, have you tried the Emacs text editor? It's great, I love it, I recommend it to everyone looking for a great text editor, if you'd like I can show you how to set it up", that's not the same thing as saying "I claim your computer in the name of King Stallman, use Emacs or die".
I do science and mathematics, and I am 'religious' - I believe in God, which I define simply as the universal consciousness - in other words, I believe the universe has a soul.
Much as how Erdos talked about 'proofs from the book', I believe that mathematical and scientific truths exist 'in the mind of God', ie, the universal consciousness, which, by definition, is aware of everything, already knows the truth that we seek, and the process of mathematical and scientific discovery is therefore simply a process of learning more about God. The flow state that one enters into when working is, in my mind, a sort of communion with the divine, which leads to the creation of great work.
This is similar, in my mind, to Michelangelo's quote about "seeing David in the marble and setting him free" - the statue already existed in the universal consciousness, and this consciousness guided Michelangelo into bringing it into being.
The proof of $THEOREM exists, your job is to find it, and the universe will gently nudge you in the right direction.
But obviously, that's just my opinion/point of view.
You could just as easily believe that the universe is not conscious, and truth is discovered simply by a combination of luck and effort, and that would probably work just as well ^^
1) okay, I'm fascinated by the 'fighting in a foreign civil war' thing, can you expound on that?
2) this may sound weird, but I do think that if you want to be a good parent (and please note, I don't actually have kids yet, so ignore this advice if it doesn't ring true) is finding ways to get your 'alone' time despite family responsibilities. I'm also an introvert, but my 'recharge' time is stuff like meditation and solo-programming and math time, so that's pretty easy to do, just set aside a few hours a day to recharge my batteries so I can be fully present for my family the rest of the time, I can see that fighting in a foreign civil war isn't exactly the type of thing you can fit into an hour in the morning before the kids wake up, but if you have similar introverted activities that recharge you that can be more easily done alongside family life, I would argue that you'll be doing your family a disservice not to do them- they deserve you at your best, which means you should give yourself time do fully recharge yourself so you can be there for them the rest of the time.
If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?
Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.
It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.
I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).
But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.
to be fair, you can get "good" meat - factory farming is awful, but not all meat is factory farmed. You can eat happy animals, for example pigs that spent their lives outside being pigs, hanging out with their pig friends, and near the end of their pig lives had to go be eaten. If you believe plants are conscious too, that's probably more ethical than eating Nutella made with palm oil from forests that were completely massacred to harvest that oil (and even if you don't, the animals in those forests probably didn't enjoy their natural habitat being destroyed).
In fact, I've had the idea floating around my head for a while now for "fully ethical" meat, where you don't even kill the animal, just wait around for it to die of old age. Depending on your views on euthanasia, maybe if the animal gets like cancer or something and is evidently suffering, gently kill it to put it out of its misery because that might overall reduce suffering.
Also, pardon my asking a possibly stupid question out of ignorant curiosity, but if you're vegan for ethical reasons, why not eat eggs? My stepmom had some chickens a while ago, they lived lives that seemed pretty happy, they hung around the backyard eating stuff on the ground + the food we gave them, relatively free to move around (we did put up a small fence to keep them away from the dogs and cats, who did not exactly have a stellar track record of veganism, but they were free to roam inside that safe space) they laid eggs, because there was no rooster around to fertilize the eggs the eggs weren't going to go anywhere... did us eating those eggs hurt anyone?
Veganism is about being pragmatic. It's not a dogmatic mindset. The main goal is to not harm another sentient being. Both factory farmed or 'happy' farmed animals usually end up in the same slaughterhouse. Pigs are being gassed and have a terrible death. And in general, animals feel when they are about to die and then start to panic. In the words of Carl Sagan 'they are too much like us'.
Look up Mike Bisping, someone you would typically class as a tough man. Even he couldn't work in a slaughter house. So imagine what it does to your psyche day in and day out having to kill animals. Slaughterhouse workers suffer from PTSD. In one report one worker described how a pig came up to him and gently headbutted him (like a cat showing affection). He had to suppress his compassion to be able to kill it. How effed up is that?
We can vote with our wallet to reduce or stop all that.
In regards to eggs, I would say eating eggs from chickens you have in your garden is OK. There are folks who rescue chickens and let the roam in their garden and eat their eggs. There are certain vegans who complain about that. That is being dogmatic.
And what you suggested, eating meat from animals who died naturally and didn't have to be killed for you, I'd even class that as vegan, because no animal had to suffer. But it wouldn't be profitable as a business, so I don't see how it can work on a large scale or replace factory farming.
We need cultured meat or simply train ourselves to enjoy plant based foods. Dr Wareham said it will take a few weeks for your taste buds to 'like' other foods. And you get enough of nutrients and protein from those foods. Plenty of top athletes prove that point.
Or folks who eat road kill, I'd say that's also vegan. The animal died by accident. You didn't pay for it to be killed, i.e. you didn't contribute to the demand that keeps the meat & dairy industry running.
I think we have almost "fully ethical meat" now - engineered from tofu and other plant material.
ps. Im by no means a saint in this regard, but I have moved to soy milk and eat much less red meat generally, both out of self-interest for the health aspects, but also partially as I think its better for the environment generally. I suppose I should give up chicken, but its a habit hard to break in my social circle. My point is a gradual move by degrees is still improvement, when integrated over the whole population.
You don't need to give up anything just reduce. I don't drink alcohol at home but I'll have a few drinks socially. If having a burger socially is what you want to do then do it.
Palm oil comes from palm fruit, by the way, not from "massacaring" the trees. Fruits are, from an evolutionary perspective, meant to be eaten, it is their purpose. If plants are conscious of fruit being harvested at all it probably feels good.
> As we are apparently electing malicious narcissists with dementia to our highest office, a more precipitous decline seems reasonable
To be fair, the current political dysfunction can probably largely be reduced by switching the electoral system from 'first past the post' + electoral college to something like ranked choice or proportional representation.
> In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, as in, for example, the United States and United Kingdom, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.
> By contrast, in countries with proportional representation or two-round elections, such as France, Sweden, New Zealand or Spain, there is no two-party duopoly on power. There are usually more than two significant political parties.
and that way the presidential election does reflect "either the will of the Democratic Party elite or the will of the Republican Party elite" (ie, the extremes of the two main parties), but something closer to the will of the people.
For any given alphabet A, and for any positive integer n, the set of strings of length n over A is a finite set, with (number of characters in A)^n elements.
The set of all strings, of any length over A, is an infinite set, because it is the union of all sets of strings of length n for each positive integer n.
So if you don't know the length of the password, there are infinite possibilities. If you do know the length of the password, there are only finite possibilities.
Which would in turn imply that there is an infinite amount of information in knowing the length of a password - the complement of the set of n-length strings over A in the set of strings over A contains an infinite number of elements, which you can safely exclude now that you know the password is part of the finite set of n-length strings over A.
Only if the password is infinitely long. Which it isn't. The only way knowing the length shaves off a significant amount of time during bruteforcing is if the password is already so short that the time save isn't relevant in the first place.
Absolute nonsense. Apart from the fact that password length is necessarily finite due to memory and time constraints, passwords aren't stored as clear text. You will get hash collisions, because the number of unique hashes is very much finite.
Your argument therefore doesn't apply in this context.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
> As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship
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