It's almost certain you can't separate chimps from humans this way. Chimps not only use tools, they *learn* to use certain things as tools and the knowledge spreads between chimpanzee groups through individuals -- in other words they have a rudimentary technological culture.

Chimpanzee groups engage in warfare to annex territory, and it's not just a case of encountering other groups and spontaneous fights breaking out. They *invade* the territory of other groups. Surely that shows rudimentary planning. Within a group there is politics. The dominant male is not necessarily the strongest; a clever male can defeat a strong one by forming alliances.

Psychological experiments support the notion that chimps have a consciousness of self. Chimps have been taught American Sign Language, and appear to use all the cognitive features of language. Objections have been raised that this is just operant conditioning, but the same objections would apply to human use of language.

A hundred years ago, the idea that chimps might be persons from the point of view of ethics would be ridiculous. They were just animals in the forest. But a century of research has seriously undermined nearly every substantive distinction between humans and chimps. At this point the verifiable differences between chimps and humans aren't ones of *kind*, but of *degree*. Chimps use tools, but simpler ones than humans do. Chimps can use human language, even learn it spontaneously, but their vocabulary is in the hundreds of words, not thousands for a fluent human speaker.

If there is a defensible *ethical* distinction between the status of chimps and the status of humans, that distinction ought to arise out of clear-cut differences between humans and apes. At present there are only two clear-cut distinctions between humans and chimps. The first is genetics; chimps are close, but past attempts to create human/chimp hybrid have failed. Second, humans *rely* upon our advanced behavioral capabilities to survive. Tools are useful to chimps, but *essential* for us. Yet it is hard for me to see how we get from "chimps can get along without tools" to "it is immoral to experiment on chimps." One doesn't follow from the other.

If the answer is "well, they just aren't *human*," that has implications which are nearly as counter-intuitive as the notion that chimps have some of the same rights as humans. Most people would assume that if we ever met an alien, non-human civilization made up of self-conscious individuals, that hunting those individuals for pleasure would be morally wrong, and perhaps legally impermissible because while not human, they are "natural persons" with at least some of the basic rights of humans. Furthermore, if genetic tribalism is the ethical basis of law, why not favor Europeans over Africans, or vice versa?

This is a meaningless assertion. What units would you use to describe the "rate" or "time" flow? Images like "moving through time" or "time flowing" implicitly assume an independent time-like dimension.

In reality what all these analogies characterize is not time, but things we might use as a clock. The passage of a water molecule down a clear, straight section of stream can be used to mark out a certain length of time from any starting point in time. It's not in any way *like* time, any more than a pendulum is like time. It's just a way of measuring a certain length of time against a fixed extent of space (in this case the arc of the pendulum rather than a length of stream).

It's always comical when bigots and oppressors try to whine that they are the victims, try to pull the "show tolerance of intolerance" crap.

If someone wants to deny people equal rights, deny people the right to get married, based on the color of their skin or their religion or gender, then I will defend their rights such as free speech. However I will not invite them to my dinner table. I will not welcome them in my home. I will not welcome them in my social circle. I will earnestly endeavor not to put on damn dollar in their pocket. And I will damn well use MY right to free speech to call them a vile bigoted scum.

Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance-of-intolerance is self contradictory. Tolerance does not mean I need to be polite or accommodating to a Ku Klux Klan group who are directly harming innocent people, or who inflict or advocate indirect harm of innocent people via laws or other force of government to deny them equal rights.

Whether it's interracial marriage or gay marriage, I do not need to be "tolerant" of the HARM inflicted or advocated in denying people equal rights.

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Most polls use the sample size to obtain a 3% or 4% error margin. The percentages I posted was the midpoint of 6 polls taken this year, and they were all within +/- 3% of what I posted. Very consistent. The vast number of polls over the last few decades show a strikingly clear and steady shift.

The political and other major events on the subject don't seem to be really pushing the numbers around. It seems that this is something that's just plain percolating through society, and the political fireworks and the court battles and the news items are more like an effect of this process rather than a driver of it.

I suspect almost the opposite. I think positions are changing faster than feelings. I think a lot of the shift is people who are still "uncomfortable" with the idea of gay marriage, but who are actively overcoming that discomfort to try to "do the right thing". I suspect a lot of the ideas and attitudes and understanding developed during the interracial marriage shift are directly responsible for the speed of the gay marriage shift. I think a lot of people are recognizing that "doing the right thing" here means supporting other people's equal rights, even when it means taking an uncomfortable position.

All of the complex factors behind it is why I find it particularly striking to compare it to the equivalent polls on interracial marriage. The shift on gay marriage is almost exactly twice as fast. Whatever the forces and processes are, they are twice as fast this time. That's huge.

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Polling on interracial marriage showed it increased in acceptance at a fairly steady rate of 1% per year.
Polls show acceptance of gay marriage rising 2% per year. It's currently about 55% support vs 39% against.

Approval of gay marriage is overwhelming among the younger generation, who largely view it as a civil rights issue. The strongest opposition among senior citizens, who are literally dropping dead day by day. There is nothing that can stand against the force of a generational shift.

You lost this fight. You lost this fight several years ago. YOU are the gadfly that has been swatted. Get used to the word "bigot", because you're going to be hearing increasingly often.

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When I was a teenager back in the 70s I knew a kid who put a solenoid controlled bleach dispenser over his rear tires to achieve that truly obnoxious white smoke burnout.

Why, do you ask? What possible purpose could that serve? Well, when his girlfriend dumped him, he backed up into her parent's driveway and blanketed their house in smoke for ten minutes.

This pretty much shows the level of mentality involved.

Well, start with the conservation status of the birds. Both species are rated as "Least Concern" -- which means no identifiable conservation issues.

In the 1950s there were only 412 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the US, due to hunting and DDT. By 1995 they were taken off the endangered lists, and five years ago they were taken off the "threatened" list. By now there are nearly ten thousand breeding pairs in the lower 48. Half of US states have at least 100 breeding pairs.

From an environmental viewpoint it's quite reasonable to stop treating an occasional accidental bald eagle death as some kind of serious event. For healthy population, an individual removed is room for another individual, just as with reasonable levels of deer hunting. Emitting more carbon in order to stop a handful of eagle accidents makes no sense at all.

Models work from assumptions. The assumptions you put into them don't have to be plausible; a model simply spits out the consequences of the initial conditions you choose. Thus you could start a simulation of the Earth which started with the tropical seas being frozen and the polar seas being at 38 C. Those initial conditions are impossible, but the computer program will faithfully spit out *some* kind of result.

Well, how about this for a system: instead of counting how many papers a researcher publishes, count the number of times a paper he has written has been cited by somebody else.

This is truer measure in any case. I recently had occasion to review the information science research literature on ontologies, and discovered that about 5% of the literature was absolutely vital to read, and were cited by a substantial fraction of papers in the field -- hundreds of times in my own literature search, and likely thousands of times in total in peer reviewed literature.

About 20% dealt with abstruse and narrow technical topics which were nonetheless useful to people working in the field; or were case studies. Such papers make up the bulk of citations in the research literature, although any single such paper probably gets only a few dozen citations. Still that's useful work.

The remaining 3/4 of papers are trivial, a complete waste of anyone's time to read. They may score a handful of citations, but from authors scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're so trivial, obvious, and unoriginal.

Odd side note: the less an author has to say, the more elaborately he says it. The really important papers tend to be written in straightforward, easily understandable prose. The trivial papers read like parodies of academ-ese.

Well, C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on this. He obviously believed in miracles, but he thought of them as becoming "naturalized", in the way a foreigner becomes a naturalized citizen in his adoptive land, and is subsequently bound by the laws of that land. So when the *supernatural* occurs (e.g. drowning the northwest corner of the continent at the end of the First Age), the consequences should follow *naturally*.

I bring this point up with my fantasy writing friends. Just because your world *has* miraculous things in it doesn't mean *everything* should be a miracle. People should have common-sense responses to miraculous things. If wizards throw lightning bolts in battle, then the cavalry shouldn't charge in a tightly packed formation until they're right at the line of battle.

George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire conspicuously soft-pedals magic, but ironically a lot of the world of those stories fails the naturalization test. For example kind of society depicted is dependent upon consistently generating a massive agricultural surplus, something that's not compatible in my opinion with decade-long winters. But I gave up after only a million words into the stories, so maybe that's explained elsewhere.

... as were nearly all examples of tengwar and dwarf-runes we have from Tolkien's own hand.

They're going to die a horrific, slow, and painful death. While I agree they brought it upon themselves, the picture of what they're likely to go through brings me no pleasure or satisfaction.

Neither of these analogies seem quite right to me.

If there are any morally legitimate uses for military weapons, you cannot say the working on weapons per se is automatically immoral. On the other hand, that doesn't make working on any weapon development program for any client morally neutral.

When Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, the Soviets were busy trying to repel German invaders -- surely that was a legitimate goal. They needed a cheap, rugged, lethal weapon that could be easily manufactured in large numbers. These same properties that have caused to to proliferate into unstable regions of the world. In some countries it is cheaper to buy an AK-47 than a live chicken. Some have called it a "slow motion weapon of mass destruction."

If somebody had asked Kalashnikov "Design me the ideal weapon to arm a conscripted child-soldier," he'd have told them to get lost. He designed the weapon to liberate his homeland; and he always regretted seeing his inventions in the hands of terrorists. He remarked on one occasion that he'd rather have invented an improved lawn mower.

Clearly, the ethics of weapons engineering is complex. But complex is not the same as "morally neutral". Heisenberg made errors in his atom bomb calculations, leading him to believe that a bomb was not feasible in time to affect the course of the war one way or the other. If his calculations had shown the way to an easier, practical bomb much earlier, then he'd have faced the ethical problem that arming a regime such as the Nazis with such a weapon would be a bad thing.

Today people working on aerial drone warfare are faced with serious ethical questions. Yes, you can construct scenarios in which the drone does the work of a human piloted vehicle without exposing the operator to risk -- clearly that's a good thing if you believe the operator is fighting in a just war. But one of the tenets of just war theory is that killing people pointlessly is never moral. Suppose you believed (as many do) that the Obama administration's use of drones was self-defeating, that we'd never be able to kill more legitimate enemies than are recruited to to the cause by civilian "collateral damage". Working to supply *this* regime with *that* weapon would present a moral dilemma.

Here's a simple analogy that I think works. Selling someone a gun is morally neutral, if you know nothing about what they intend to do with a gun. But if you know for a fact someone is going to use that gun to committ robberies, then selling the gun becomes wrong. The point is that you can't make generalized decisions about weapons development in a vacuum. Circumstances matter. For example it is possible to believe that under the circumstances the Manhattan Project was justified, but believe that North Korean or Pakistani nuclear program is not, without necessarily stipulating that the United States has more rights to nuclear weapons than any other country. You just have to show the circumstances are different.

Being a criminal is not remotely justification for a Darwin Award.
Being a criminal with really bad luck is not justification for a Darwin Award.

I haven't seen the truck or the Cobalt container, but the only way these guys might warrant a Darwin Award is if they ignored flagrant radioactive warning labels.

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Yes, dagnebbit. If only them long-haired hippies with their free love, LDS and bell-bottom trousers would go away, TEPCO would have this licked.