Joklem wrote:
Please don't kill kittens. It's a paradox he made as a demonstration against a misinterpretation of quantum mechanics.
Your OP was a paradox, whether you realize it or not. Many paradoxes are humorous. I'm poking fun at how you retell a joke you apparently don't get.
Joklem wrote:
Quote:
Idealism and metaphysics are the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objective reality or having it tested against reality. Materialism and dialectics, on the other hand, need effort. They must be based on and tested by objective reality. Unless one makes the effort one is liable to slip into idealism and metaphysics.
That expired around 100 BC or so.
You mean...in the waning years of the Roman Republic? O_o
You could have really made an effort to be clever and said "around 400 BC" when Socrates committed suicide. But yeah, citing random years in an effort to sound like you're erudite just makes you sound all the more idiotic when talking to someone who actually has a decent idea what they're talking about.
Joklem wrote:
When the quantum computing technology is more advanced, it's going to change the face of everything from computing itself to medicine.
Science is as important as engineering. They're connected. If you don't like it, you can fuck off.
Fifty years ago, people who liked cool stuff drew aesthetic fantasies of space colonies and how living on the moon would change everything. That was the science, you know.
Then the people who actually play the game of life didn't see any money in it, and the real scientists who do more than gawk at JPGs realized advancing past hurling payloads into orbit just wasn't that simple. And so those cute vignettes of cities on the Moon never advanced beyond the status of wallpaper. Instead, other technologies such as organic chemistry and computing quietly developed over many decades and came to define our world.
A few years back I watched a "documentary" about cybernetics. It ended with this guy in a red bowtie saying "we've got amazing technology, if we threw everything we've got at it, we could do it," make a cyborg. Whatever that means. I guess if you want to make Lawnmower Man you can just replace some guy's arm with a lawnmower and say you've got a cyborg. Of course, this person isn't a real scientist, he'd never done any hands-on work in either computing or prosthetics; he's just someone who marvels at what he does not understand and likes to act elite by worshipping technology.
I went through that phase as a teenager, then I grew up, at least a little bit.
Popular Science is your kind of magazine. Every issue is about some cool new development that's going to change everything. And it's a whole hobby onto itself to dredge up articles from 50 years ago and see how invariably, nothing they ever talk about whether it's home robots or flying cars ever comes to pass on a practical level. People who aren't kooks outgrow their subscription by the end of adolescence.
When progress does come, it's driven by people who do more than try to make themselves look smart by association with cool JPGs and officious-sounding numbers, dates, and factoids. I've had the liberty of meeting some of those people. Amazingly, conversation with them doesn't invariably come back to pie-in-the-sky dreaminess. They don't need to appear intelligent, they just are.
