Behaving honourably is being right. I tell my kids, "Make sure you marry someone you think you could live through a divorce with." I married a good and decent woman, and it didn't work out (these things happen) and we've been happily divorced now for almost as long as we were married. Our kids have had two loving and happy homes instead of one unhappy one.

Even if you never want to see your ex again, remember it was your mistake in marrying them in the first place, and accept the consequences of that. It can take more love to get through a divorce unscathed (or at least less scathed) than through a marriage.

So yeah, focus on "winning" and "being right": behaving with honour, generosity and what love you can muster up. My lawyer hated me for being so non-combative, but that gave my ex nothing to fight over even if she had been so inclined.

Yeah, I got no disagreement on how dirty the Mediterranean is or on the human impact on littoral ecosystems.

My point is that there's a huge amount of FUD around AGW/ACC that's really irrelevant to the questions a) Is dumping megatonnes of toxic shit into the air and water a good idea? and b) Is being dependent on fuels with an open carbon cycle a good idea?

It seems to me the answer to both those questions is transparently: NO, but both sides of the purely political debate around AGW seem to buy into the premise that if AGW isn't happening then it's somehow OK to keep on poisoning our world in other ways and to keep on subsidizing a family of fuels that are going to get very expensive in the present century (the hockey-stick I worry about is the price curve of fossil fuels, which is being held low by various policies that will eventually run out of steam and result in a step-function price change.)

Absolutely.

You aren't actually making any argument, which is a little weird, so I'm going to have to guess what your premises would be if you were making an argument.

My first guess is that you believe it's only OK to kill a human if you feel good about it. By "feel good about it" I mean whatever it is when people say that someone "deserves" to die. As near as I can tell the entire meaning of "deserves to die" is "I would feel morally satisfied if this person died". Since moral satisfaction is a good feeling, this amounts to believing it is OK to kill a person if and only if you feel good about it.

I make this guess because you seem to think that "fault" is somehow the sole arbiter of moral killing, and I've noticed that people with primitive, punishment-based social responses tend to regulate their behaviour according to the "fault" they perceive in others, so they feel good about hurting or killing someone who is "at fault" and badly about killing or hurting someone who is not "at fault".

This emotional, unreasoning, non-rational, hormone-driven moral calculus is responsible for a vast amount of evil in the world, from war to hitting your kids, and I am imputing it to you, so please feel free to clarify if I am incorrect in this regard.

Since I reject that emotional, unreasoning, non-rational, hormone-driven moral calculus, I am open to reasons for killing people (or not) that have nothing to do with "fault", and am free to adopt a position that is simply orthogonal to your emotional, hormone-driven categorizations regarding whose death would make you feel good (who "deserves" to die.)

All human societies have some means of killing unwanted children, and I am in favour of giving pregnant women the choice of avoiding bringing unwanted children into the world only to be destroyed in other ways, either through lack of love (they are, after all, unwanted) or more mundane material wants. You are apparently in favour of such unwanted children being born, which seems to me a hideous, anti-human belief, a desire to maximize human misery and pain. Giving mothers the choice to kill their children in the early stages of pregnancy minimizes the human cost of our poor choices, and that's what any humane, rational moralist should be seeking with regard to this question, I think.

Since the child's mother has both the most information about the child's life and prospects and the greatest interest in the child's well-being she should make the decision in this matter, and I think anyone who believes they know more about the reality of the mother and child's situation or claims they are more interested in the child's welfare than its mother is a dangerous moral degenerate.

Since you appear to be not very intelligent I'll mention some obvious consequences of these beliefs: since giving mothers the choice to kill their children late in pregnancy or after they are born would not minimize the human cost of our poor choices there is no slippery slope here. Nor is the precise moment of minimization particularly at issue: any time before 12 weeks is certainly OK, and arguably up to 24 weeks. There is simply no interesting "where do you draw the line" question.

With regard to killing people who have been convicted of some crimes, this is known to increase human misery relative to lifetime incarceration, so I am against it. The wrong people get killed, and all possibility of redemption and rehabilitation is lost even in the cases when the person killed actually committed the act they were accused of.

Likewise, mass organized killing ("war", which I assume you oppose absolutely since most of the people killed are not at fault in any way) is something I oppose because it is the least efficient, least effective means of solving any human problem. It creates vast misery for less than zero gain in the general case. There are always more efficient, more effective, more humane alternatives, so I favour them and oppose war.

And I'm going to argue for an even longer one: "Life is self-reproduction with imperfectly inheritable variations."

The differences may be due to what we take as implied by the short definition. To my mind "autonomous" is redundant with "self-", whereas other people make take "imperfectly inheritable" as folded in with the meaning of "variations".

In physics we often define things in terms of the laws they are described by, so "anything described by this differential equation is an X" is the sort of thing you sometimes hear. Biologists, due to historical accident, do not typically talk in law-like terms, but if they did Darwin's Law (or Darwin's Theorem) would be at the core: "An entity that creates imperfect copies of itself will given sufficient time fill the configuration space made available by resource constraints and the laws of chemistry and physics."

Then: "Life is any entity described by Darwin's Theorem."

This approach has a number of interesting consequences. Since Darwin's Theorem really is a theorem (proof is left as an exercise for the interested student) then the whole non-Darwinian corpus is swept away. All arguments about evolution vs anything else come down to a simple combination of mathematics and the physical properties of DNA, which observably makes imperfect copies of itself. Once you grant that and the laws of probability you are committed to evolution happening, and any claim that divine intervention is also involved become extraneous, which doesn't prove them wrong but does make them look even sillier than they are today.

I've got mod points and am incredibly temped to mod this "Funny" because it is. But I'll make fun of you instead.

No logician anywhere has ever posited such a "first law" nor would they, simply because one can't know what one is talking about until one has talked about it. That is, your "first law of logic" entails a rejection of a discourse of imperfect meaning or knowledge, and since those are the only kinds of discourse we can have, you are engaging in discourse to denounce the possibility of discourse.

Like I said: funny.

Of course, no one talks about "logic" any more. We are all Bayesians now (at least anyone who cares about consistency is) and recognize that only Bayesian reasoning is worth considering.

Who cleverly used the well-known ruse of creating a story that relates a biological system to an engineering system, which for some reason despite being one of the most common patterns of engineering inspiration for centuries gets reported as if it was new and interesting every few months on /. and in the rest of the technology press.

It's like seeing stories that say, "The average spreadsheet user tabulates data, so Microsoft was inspired to come up with an improvement to Excel that made it easier to tabulate data by looking at what people who use their software actually do."

Who wouldn't expect software developers to get inspiration from user behaviours? Who wouldn't expect mechanical engineers to get inspiration from nature? I don't know what the answer to the former question is, but the answer to the latter is certainly "Only people who have being paying no attention whatsoever to what engineers have been doing for the last several hundred years." Why there are so many people like that reading technology news today is unclear.

As a matter of interest do you find what the Republicans say about the Democrats or vice versa interesting too? If so, why?

I don't get why a political organization like BAS that has no interest in anything except their own monotonic political agenda is interesting to anyone. They have no facts and no arguments, only conclusions that they they then try to justify by various manipulations. This is epistemically vacuous at best. It's like listening to Greenpeace on the environment or the Pope on the existence of god: nothing they say can possibly be interesting to anyone rational, because they make absolutely no attempt to ever do anything except promote particular conclusions (Greenpeace for example must be amazingly insightful because every bit of research they do just happens to support exactly the political policies they advocate for unrelated reasons.)

If you include the seriously wrong decision to over-load the cooling pools and spent fuel storage on site then I agree, but consider that to be a separate issue from decommissioning the plant, and it isn't a "questionable" decision, it is a flat-out incorrect one.

I can well imagine how such a decision could be made by increments: the storage facilities could be outside the containment because they couldn't ever go critical due to limits on what could be stored in them, then those limits were incrementally relaxed after the fact until there was a real risk of re-criticality.

But that doesn't mean it wasn't a bad decision.

So exactly the same as every other distinction, then?

All edges are imposed on the world by human attention, and nothing else. Consider the distinction between "land" and "water". In some contexts we simply treat the edge between them as ideal. In other contexts we introduce other concepts: beach, littoral, intertidal zone, and so on. But when you get close to it you notice that the edge is both constantly fluctuating and "soft": the "land" is always a bit wet. Where land ends and water begins is a made up human distinction. This is generally true, with the exception of quantum phenomena where there are genuinely forbidden "gaps" between states (which is one of the things that makes quantum phenomena weird: we are not free to make up distinctions in a way that is most useful to us in a given context.)

Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event

"In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland icepack warmed by around 8 C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[2] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 C change over 30-40 years is more common."

Please stop spreading nonsense. There are plenty of legitimate concerns regarding human impacts on the environment (and AGW is amongst them, although much over-rated in my view.) But false and hysterical claims do no one any favours. What humans are doing to the current environment doesn't have to be the Worst Thing Ever to be really quite bad enough to do something about it by changing your own lifestyle to be more sustainable.