No more disruptions. I’m going to go sit in solitary and finish this article I’m supposed to write (hey, Simon, it’ll be done by this afternoon!) and then I have to get the answer keys for all the homework I assigned in genetics done and posted.
So go away, internet, and stop bothering me.
Bill Nye apparently thinks that philosophy is that meandering babble you do when you’re stoned out of your mind. It’s rather impressive, actually, that he can sit there giving advice about philosophy to a philosophy student and get everything about philosophy completely wrong.
Transcript – Mike: Hey Bill. Mike here. I’m a philosophy major in college right now and I’m looking for your opinion on a subject. Some of the scientists like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson have brushed it off as a meaningless topic. I’m just wondering about your thoughts on the subject.
Bill Nye: Mike, Mike. This is a great question. I’m not sure that Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, two guys I’m very well acquainted with have declared philosophy as irrelevant and blowing it off in you term. I think that they’re just concerned that it doesn’t always give an answer that’s surprising. It doesn’t always lead you someplace that is inconsistent with common sense. And it gets back – it often, often gets back to this question. What is the nature of consciousness? Can we know that we know? Are we aware that we are aware? Are we not aware that we are aware? Is reality real or is reality not real and we are all living on a ping pong ball as part of a giant interplanetary ping pong game and we cannot sense it. These are interesting questions. But the idea that reality is not real or what you sense and feel is not authentic is something I’m very skeptical of. I mean I think that your senses, the reality that you interact with with light, heat, sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing, absolutely hearing. These are real things.
And to make a philosophical argument that they may not be real because you can’t prove – like for example you can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow. Not really, right. You can’t prove it until it happens. But I’m pretty confident it will happen. That’s part of my reality. The sun will come up tomorrow. And so philosophy is important for a while but it’s also I get were Neil and Richard might be coming from but where you start arguing in a circle where I think therefore I am. What if you don’t think about it? Do you not exist anymore? You probably still exist even if you’re not thinking about existence. And so, you know, this gets into the old thing if you drop a hammer on your foot is it real or is it just your imagination? You can run that test, you know, a couple of times and I hope you come to agree that it’s probably real. It’s a cool question. It’s important I think for a lot of people to be aware of philosophy but just keep in mind if you’re spending all this money on college this also may be where Neil and Richard are coming from. A philosophy degree may not lead you to on a career path. It might but it may not. And keep in mind humans made up philosophy too. Humans discovered or invented the process of science. Humans invented language. Humans invented philosophy. So keep that in mind that when you go to seek an absolute truth you’re a human seeking the truth. So there’s going to be limits. But there’s also going to be things beyond which it doesn’t matter. Drop a hammer on your foot and see if you don’t notice it.
Some advice to engineers: when you’re asked about something totally outside your field, in a discipline you’ve never studied and have only misconceptions about, the correct answer is to say “I don’t know.”
Actually, that’s pretty good advice for all of us.
I knew it wouldn’t take long. A philosopher responds.
It’s perfect for me: got a little downtime, sure, I’ll go dig a tunnel for 20 minutes, or build a fort, or whatever, and playing on a public server is even better, because if I don’t have the time or skill to assault an end fortress, someone else does and I can trade for the useful loot. Fun and casual and creative are exactly what I want in a game.
I am mentioning this because Mojang is releasing their special, long-in-the-coming 1.9 update on Monday, and the server I play on, Sitosis, is going to spawn a brand new, empty, untouched world shortly thereafter, and they’re asking all their former users to check back in (new users are also welcome). There’ll be a rush to stake out new territories in exotic biomes next week!
One hint: you probably don’t want to settle anywhere near me. Apparently, I have a reputation for defending my territory by breeding so many cows and chickens and pigs — for my genetics experiments, don’t you know — that only the best computers can cope with their owners approaching the milling mobs in my base. I also tend to be a bit lax about lighting things up to thwart evil spawn, so my place might be crawling with undead and creepers and giant spiders. The way I like it.
“Myers” is an odd name; not only can nobody spell it, but its origin is a little murky. My own family is no help at all, because apparently my father’s side emigrated to the US sometime in the 17th century and then spent the next few hundred years wandering around and completely forgetting where they came from. I had a vague notion that they came out of the UK somewhere, with some Scots/Irish admixture, but the name itself…who knows?
So I plugged “Myers” into this database of name frequencies in the UK, and it spat back a map of where that name has an above-average likelihood of occurring.
Yorkshire and the Northwest? Really? I’m going to have to work on my accent.
Adam Baldwin, the conservative “actor” who was apparently just being himself in his role in Firefly, has announced yesterday that he is leaving Twitter in protest over their announcement of a Trust and Safety Council to reduce online harassment (I’ll believe they are going to do that, when they actually do that). Unfortunately, after deleting all of his past tweets — but leaving his account open and enabled — he then proceeded to tell us in 17 tweets on Twitter (so far) that he’s going to stop making tweets on the Twitter.
Tell me, O Veterans of the Internet, how often have you seen that happen? It’s classic troll behavior. “Your board/forum/blog sucks! I’m leaving!” Then they keep coming back, sometimes under a new pseudonym, or 40 new pseudonyms (hi, Reap!). It’s so awful that they can’t bear to abandon it.
He’s not really leaving. If he were leaving he’d close his account and stop babbling. But then, hypocrisy never seems to bother right-wing jerks.
In this list of every state, ranked by how miserable its winters are, guess who the winner is!
Although I’m suspicious that we beat both Dakotas. I think I’d rather live in Minnesota than either of those places.
I came up with a balancing idea, though: if you suffer through winter in your state, you get to reward yourself by retiring to the complementary state on the list — just look at (51 – your state ranking). That’s the karmic redress you must someday pay. I’m looking forward to my twilight years in Hawaii; Hawaiians might not be as thrilled with the deal they’re getting.
Although I do think I achieve a Dickey state of mind on Monday mornings.
You know, I’m a professor at four-year liberal arts college, and I think Mike Rowe is on to something here. The kind of education we deliver is not for every one.
Now, eight years later, unemployment is down, interest rates are under control, and inflation is in check. But the overall labor participation rate is very low, and the skills gap is wider than ever. In fact, the latest numbers are out, and they are astonishing. According to the Department of Labor, America now has 5.6 million job openings.
Forget your politics for a moment, and consider the enormity of what’s happening here. Millions of people who have stopped looking for work, are ignoring 5.6 million genuine opportunities. That’s not a polemic, or a judgment, or an opinion. It’s a fact. And so is this: most of those 5.6 million opportunities don’t require a diploma – they require require a skill.
Unfortunately, the skilled trades are no longer aspirational in these United States. In a society that’s convinced a four-year degree is the best path for the most people, a whole category of good jobs have been relegated to some sort of “vocational consolation prize.” Is it any wonder we have 1.3 trillion dollars in outstanding student loans? Is it really a surprise that vocational education has pretty much evaporated from high schools? Obviously, the number of available jobs and the number of unemployed people are not nearly as correlated as most people assume.
I’m no economist, but the skills gap doesn’t seem all that mysterious – it seems like a reflection of what we value. Five and half million unfilled jobs is clearly a terrible drag on the economy and a sad commentary of what many people consider to be a “good job,” but it also represents a tremendous opportunity for anyone willing to learn a trade and apply themselves.
I was awakened this morning by the heavy patter of raindrops on my house. This cannot be. This is against the natural order. January and February are our coldest months, we simply do not get liquid water falling out of the sky in midwinter. I looked, and it’s +1°C out there! Unthinkable! Inconceivable!
Now I’m wondering, if we melt all the icecaps and glaciers, will we get enough sea water rise to refill the great inland sea of North America? If so, I could pretend I’ve moved back to Seattle.
He’s an editor for the Huffington Post, and was asked why the HuffPo doesn’t pay its writers.
I love this question, because I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.
See, you’re inauthentic if you get paid fairly for your work. You can trust someone if they did the work for free, which implies that you ought to be deeply suspicious of people who expect to get paid.
