About 7,500 feet over California there's a small autonomous flying wing trying to prove that it can land, all by its lonesome, on the deck of an aircraft carrier. More »
Honors the beauty and variety of the four seasons and the beauty all around us and within us.
A helpful resource for parents who want to expose their children to some of the many images of God in the Bible.
What could be more fun than a Kinect-powered eyeball that blinks to life when you enter the room and then follows you around until you leave? A lot of things, actually, because this is terrifying. More »
Speaker Straus to bring it to a floor vote
From Eric Dondero:
Staunch conservatives have been rather suspicious of San Antonio-based Rep. and two-term House speaker Joe Straus. They launched an effort to oust him earlier in the session. Now Straus is moving a bill along that's been a cause celebre for hardline conservatives and right-libertarians.
The Voter I.D. Act would require state identification for voting purposes in all Texas elections.
According to TexasInsider.org, a Straus colleague and friend, Republican Rep. Jose Aliseda (Dist. 35) was one of the first to endorse the Bill.
“You need an I.D. for everything you do in today’s society … why not to vote? We have counties in this state that have more registered voters than persons eligible to vote.
“As a former prosecutor who has actually prosecuted cases of voter fraud, I believe our citizens need measures like this to inspire confidence in the election system. The opportunity for vote fraud is here. This measure (SB 14, the Voter ID Bill,) will do much to close the door on that.”
Governor Perry has prioritized the Voter I.D. issue and has put it on the "fast track" for signing as soon as it passes through the legislature.
Stephen Budiansky has penned a snide review of Dale Peterson's new book, The Moral Lives of Animals in which he claims that animal rights advocates have gone too far in ascribing altruism and other forms of compassionate behavior onto non-human animals. Budiansky, like many other skeptics, is arguing from the perspective of human exceptionalism—the notion that there is something intrinsically valuable or special in the way our species operates, and that it is this specialness that irrevocably separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The primary fear expressed by the human exceptionalists is that through our increased understanding of non-human animal cognition and behavior that we will better come to understand our own, and that by consequence we will conclude that we're all relatively similar in certain key aspects. They see this as an overt effort to prove that humans are nothing more than another "animal in the forest," a claim that somehow demeans or lessens the value of the human being.
Budiansky writes:
Mr. Peterson....makes clear at the outset that he very much shares the fundamental ambition of the animal-rights movement to puncture the claim of human exceptionalism—the "error," he states, of believing that humans have a unique status in nature or "are disconnected from the limits, systems, structures, and truths of the rest of the natural world." Recognizing the difficulty of boosting animals, his approach is instead to deflate humans: in particular, to suggest that there is much less to even so vaunted a human trait as morality than we like to believe. Rather than a sophisticated system of language-based laws, philosophical arguments and abstract values that sets mankind apart, morality is, in his view, a set of largely primitive psycho logical instincts. This is a definition undemanding and broad enough to encompass much of the animal world, which is precisely his point.
A sense of fairness and reciprocity, for example, does not depend on formal rules or any "complicated intellectual" processes, he writes, just a gut check: Our sense of justice is really nothing but a "quick emotional" assessment. Empathy does not require a mind capable of imagining the feelings and thoughts of another mind, but arises from "mirror neurons" that are automatically triggered when an animal witnesses the actions of others, generating the same sensations experienced when it performs those same actions itself. In Mr. Peterson's view, human philosophizing about morality is little more than a smokescreen that obscures an instinctual and primitive essence. While language "allows us to discuss morality and to debate, endlessly, this or that obscure issue about it," in fact all this rhetorical hot air merely expresses "unspoken and unwritten universes of urge and inclination and inhibition," shared by a large number of animals, that surely evolved "long before the separate evolution of our own species."
Despite having begged the question of human exceptionalism at the start—by dismissing the sense that we are different as mere "Darwinian narcissism"—Mr. Peterson does develop a provocative case for the existence of a broadly shared evolutionary imperative that under pins human moral instincts. Among his better-chosen anecdotes are vivid illustrations of the social mechanisms by which primates and other group-dwellers mediate access to mates, food and other resources. Vampire bats, strikingly, remember which members of the group have shared a regurgitated blood meal in the past and know who to return the favor to. It is hard to argue with his propo sition that the powerful emotional saliency moral issues have for us, and their connection to serious matters of social organization and conflict—sex, territory, possessions, reciprocity, kinship—point to a hard-wired evolutionary adaptation of group-dwelling animals.
As that last paragraph suggests, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the science. Yes, much of human culture contributes to the ways in which we can and choose to act as moral agents, but utlimately it's our hard-wiring that makes any of this possible in the first place. Whether the human exceptionalists like it or not, this comes down to an issue of latent capacities.
Yes, we are just "another animal in the forest." Those who are offended by this notion sound suspiciously like those in the 19th Century who were aghast at Darwin's suggestion that humanity is descended from apes.
None of this really bothers me. What matters is that we understand how our minds work and how our moral faculties develop in concert with our culture, institutions and the ways in which we are socialized. If anything, culture is a way for us to go against our programming; we are animals through-and-through. We have some nasty traits as a species, but we also have some very powerful empathetic and cooperative skills that we're learned to accentuate and emphasize through our culture.
Many of the animals studied in Peterson's book have similar moral capacities to our own. The problem is that they don't have the sophistication and robustness of human culture to extend it further.
I've been wondering recently if we can endow certain species with the culture required to suppress their own anti-social or destructive instincts. Could we ever teach males dolphin males, for example, that gang raping females is morally wrong? And I'm not just talking about a punishment/reward type lesson—I'm talking about actually convincing the dolphins that what they're doing is morally wrong. This would be a kind of cultural uplift and require some form of memetic engineering. To do so we'd have to radically expand not just our inter-species language and communication skills, but also find ways to plant complex and enlightened concepts in their minds according to their current cognitive architecture.
I'll have to expand on this idea later.
Back in the day, when NASA pilots posed with Corvettes and we were just getting to the Moon for the first time, our brightest minds thought space colonies might look at little something like this. More »
Media ignoring influx of Illegals from Islamic terrorist-linked states
Statement from United States Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, from TexasGOPVote.com, "Senator Cornyn Addresses the Annual Border Issues Conference" March 19:
As horrific as the [drug cartel] violence is, sometimes the media misses a few of the other major stories along our southwest border. One of those stories involves illegal immigrants from countries very far from Mexico. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 59,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended in the first 9 months of 2010 who were listed as “other than mexican.” Those include 663 individuals from “special interest countries”—such as Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, as well as the four nations currently on the list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” which are Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Sudan.
See related LR story, Jan. 27, "Gay-hating Muslim Cleric from Yemen busted on Border hiding in the trunk of a BMW"
Can anyone help me with connecting to a Slick 504 Plc with Link-sys?
I have the program and the software, and the cable from the PC to the PLC.
Just can not get the Rs500 to connect thru Link-sys.
The cable connects directly to the com port of the PC and plugs into the CPU.
Know it is the correc
From Eric Dondero:
Meet newly-elected Republican Rep. Glen Bradley of North Carolina. A few weeks in office, and already he's attracting national media. Bradley just introduced a bill that would allow North Carolina to "issue its own legal tender backed by silver and gold."
From the Raleigh News & Observer "Legislator says the state needs its own currency" March 19:
Bradley, a self-employed computer technician and former Marine, attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest until he could no longer afford tuition, he said. While he has not taken any in-depth classes in economics, Bradley described himself as a devotee of the Austrian School, a branch of economic thought that originated in Vienna and was influential before World War I.
Back then the value of most of the world's currencies were tied to the amount of the gold amassed in their national treasuries. The United States abandoned the gold standard in 1933, after it was blamed for worsening the Great Depression.
Though the ideas of the Austrian School have been rejected by mainstream economists for much of the last century, they are in vogue with Libertarians and some supporters of the tea party movement
Rep. Bradley is a staunch gun rights advocate. He was endorsed in his campaign by the Republican Liberty Caucus. He is also a friend of the Libertarian Party of North Carolina, and recently introduced legislation on their behalf to lower ballot access requirements for third parties in the State. (Source: FreetheVoteNC.com)
Here's one to ponder on.
A few years back we had a fault on a 33/11KV 20MVA transformer. Buchholz surge, it was due to low oil level. It was the middle of a freezing night so it was decided to leave it until daylight and just close the bus-section to get the plant up and running. Walking out of the
Democrat Bill Richardson's private airliner grounded, being sold by brokers
Republican Governor Susana Martinez quoted at Reuters "For Sale: New Mexico governor's executive jet":
"At a time when New Mexicans are struggling to make ends meet, their governor should not be leading a life of privilege," Martinez said in January. "We will get rid of that ultimate symbol of waste and excess; we will sell the state's luxury jet."
Former Governor Bill Richardson bought the Cessna Citation Bravo in 2005 for $5.5 million and [state General Services Secretary] Burckle said he is listing it at $3.3 million.
From columnist Thomas J. Cole, Albuquerque Journal "No More High-Flying Governor for New Mexico":
Martinez, who during the campaign pledged to sell the state jet and criticized aircraft use by the previous administration, hasn't set foot on a government plane since taking office Jan. 1.
She has been traveling around the state in a government-provided Ford Expedition with a desk in the back seat.
Photo h/t Jet Times
Home for next nine months...Inner Farne 
Loading at Seahouses
Nearly there - a full boat and Inner Farne
Everything must go - the long haul startsIt wasn’t long before we arrived on Inner Farne and we spent the day moving equipment and personal belongings up to the Pele Tower before settling back into island life. We couldn’t have asked for a better start, with glorious sunshine and very little wind resulting in a great way to spend the first day back on the islands. With more settled weather predicted, we could get very use to this.
On a bird front, there were plenty of Guillemots and Razorbills present with a handful of Puffins noted. Shags appear to be well ahead of the game, with some reasonably large nests already constructed (it’s going to be another early start to the season), whilst Kittiwakes are present in good numbers.
Away from the breeding birds, the islands have produced a few noticeable highlights including a lingering Red-necked Grebe, both Peregrine and Sparrowhawk have been seen hunting the area whist seven Whopper Swans moved north today (Saturday 19th March).
Some 24-inch and 27-inch Apple Cinema Displays owners are experiencing distracting flicker when connected to a MacBook Pro via the new Thunderbolt port. More »
At first glance this may sound like a dumb question. However I have not found an answer by searching CR4 archives.
The situation is this. Application is off grid with power provided in a battery power pac. The Power pac has a small inverter of 300 watts and a DC cigarrete socket. The question is wh
When you're done not finding any UFOs with your DIY UFO detector, you can also use its electronic magnetic field-detecting properties to not find ghosts, which also don't exist. [Strange Attractor via Boing Boing] More »
Can any one suggest best practice for vibration analysis for slow speed machines i.e. less than 50 RPM.
Also i would be thankful if i find some websites giving proper knowledge for vibration analysis for slow speed machines..
