Comment author: Romashka 15 September 2016 06:04:06PM 0 points [-]

Has anyone here had associations/subjective feelings about subjects of study? (Probably in high school, where the range of subjects is wide and students' attitudes depend on the teachers' images, to some degree.) I tended to like algebra, because solving equations and the like reminded me of gradual shifts of attention in yoga-style exercise - flowing, ordered and always seeking the point of balance. Geometry, I took for a much more "masculine" discipline, a form of exercise in endurance, and was not fond of it. Of course, calculus messed things up...:)

Comment author: ChristianKl 27 August 2016 08:58:24PM 0 points [-]

Why do you think that reading a history of how people who didn't know what DNA was thought about taxonomy will help dissolving the question?

Comment author: Romashka 28 August 2016 03:39:20PM 2 points [-]

Why DNA? For most of taxonomy's existence, DNA "didn't exist". Just because genotyping changed the game doesn't mean there was no game before.

Comment author: Romashka 24 August 2016 10:51:14AM 2 points [-]

It seems to me that the history of biological systematics/taxonomy is a great source of material for a study on dissolving the question (but I am neither a systematicist nor a historian). Are there any popular intros into the field that don't focus on individual botanists of the past? Serebryakov's "Morphology of plants", printed half a century ago, has a nice section on history, but it is limited in scope (and not quite "popular"). Other books often just list the people and what they did without interconnecting them, which is boring.

In response to Buying happiness
Comment author: Romashka 23 August 2016 05:35:21PM 0 points [-]

When my grandfather died, they would have sold his library, but Mother put her foot down and we had it sent to us instead. Simply mailing it cost (us) more than €1000 - a sum wonderfully outside my experience of directly spending - and on the border we had to unload the boxes and show the books to customs officers. Grampa'd really liked his swashbucklers, too, so the officers were probably impressed... Anyway, that day I learned to enjoy as much as possible out of buying experiences, helping others, and paying now - consuming later... It just helps, ok?:)

Comment author: milindsmart 21 August 2016 09:23:41AM -1 points [-]

Ah that particular idea of all human pleasures being harmful for the environment is pretty much religious. It's not at all what the impact is like.

Computing is basically blameless in the direct sense for global warming. We should probably enjoy it as much as possible. Electricity is good. Trains are good. Holidaying is good.

Airconditioning is bad. Air travel is bad. Short product lifetime is bad.

The situation is far more positive than some make it out to be. Even the direst climate change predictions necessitates drastic changes in some aspects of life.

AGW can't take away modern medicine or virtual reality from you.

Comment author: Romashka 21 August 2016 07:02:04PM *  0 points [-]

Why do you think "harmful for the environment" means "leading to global warming"? Lots of things are harmful for the environment. Drying swamps to make railroads harm it. Holidaying leads to decreased "old habitat" biodiversity. Building power plants on small mountain rivers leads to decreased biodiversity, too. Yes, these things are good for us. It just has no bearing on whether they are good for nature.

Comment author: milindsmart 21 August 2016 03:29:39PM -3 points [-]

*Longtime lurker, and I've managed to fight akrasia and geniune shortage of time to put my thoughts down into a post. I think it does deserve a post, but I don't have the karma or the confidence to create a top-level post.

Comments and feedback really welcome and desired : I've gotten tired of being intellectually essentially alone.*

There are many urgent problems in the world yet Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) should be considered the defining crisis to humanity. For example, increasing drug-resistance in pathogens , reducing populations of endangered species, an increase in fundamentalism, rapid increase in lifestyle diseases, increasing inequality, etc.

The key difference is that solutions to the other problems can be either technological or economic. Even solutions to fundamentalism usually involve development and infrastructure deployment, which is a difficult, but known, process. Reducing populations of endangered species looks more insoluble, but it’s rarely land itself that’s in shortage. Better monitoring and surveillance can greatly reduce poaching.

AGW however requires, in addition to technological and economic solutions, solutions at the social, psychological, and, fundamentally, human level. Now this sounds true only in a wishy-washy way, so I’m going to back them up one by one.

AGW of course requires technological solutions. The main emitters of GHGs are electricity generation, industry and transport sector. All of these are using fossil-fuel for the energy, so we need low-carbon sources of energy. We also waste a lot of energy in various ways, and it’s a lot cheaper to not consume that unit of energy than to generate a green unit of energy, so energy efficiency is needed.

Low-carbon energy sources are relatively mature with well-known costs. Aside from certain rare metal shortages, a worldwide rollout of low-carbon energy sources is eminently possible.

Energy efficient generation, transmission and consumption devices can allow us to reduce energy consumed by half, at max. There are hard limits to the effectiveness of energy efficiency, so new low-carbon energy deployment is quite necessary.

Basically, there are technological solutions, which require gigantic capital outlay, thus passing it on to the economic sector. AGW of course also requires economic solutions, primarily for the massive capital outlay. Since low-carbon energy is more expensive than fossil-fuel energy, end-consumers will have to pay the costs in some form or the other. This would have to be accounted for by economic growth.

More insidious, however, is the requirement for continuous expansion of economy for it to remain stable. Also, economic growth and energy consumption growth are tightly linked – more energy made available creates economic value, and more affluent consumers demand more energy-intensive goods and services.

So then, we would need a way to have economic growth, without carbon-intensive energy growth – a process called decoupling. One fundamental problem with a substitution of fossil-fuel by low-carbon energy sources is the sheer scale of the operation. Indeed, “even if solar panels are as cheap as dinner plates and 100% efficient, it would still take a few decades to replace current energy sources with solar”[citation needed]. So clearly, we need to reduce energy consumption in the meantime.

Relative decoupling means the emissions intensity of the economy decreases – higher economic value generated per joule of energy consumed. This kind of decoupling means nothing for AGW if economic growth continues. Absolute decoupling means decreasing absolute energy consumed and increasing economic value. So far, this stage is proving elusive.

Unfortunately, economic growth is the only reason countries around the world can have stable societies. The moment economic growth stops, basically chaos breaks out.

This is essentially an allocation problem. We have all the technology and resources to ensure basic necessities to everyone, but 1. We have already allocated resources in a highly imbalanced manner 2. We don’t know how to deliver resources to only the resource-poor

Compound this with the fact when more resources enter the economy, those already with resources tend to accumulate more of it. Notice, however, that I made no moral position on inequality, except that today we do not want poor people to die out of lack of resources, and the cost of basic resources keeps rising (again due to economic growth).

The problem should be clear by now: we require an increasing amount of resources to simply keep the economy running.

Rectifying this requires us to get mentally used to the fact that things don't just keep getting better every year. And that's neither a technological problem, nor an economic one. It's psychological.

Comment author: Romashka 21 August 2016 06:29:59PM *  -3 points [-]

Edit: sorry, I assumed you're new here. Apologies.

To start with, I don't agree that land shortage is not one of the worst threats to endangered species. Your reasoning is mostly suited to megafauna, but won't exactly fit colonial birds, rainforest dwellers, lots of plants, etc. (Your argument doesn't actually rely on AGW being the worst problem, so you can jettisone the beginning.)

Am I right that you consider the first obstacle to solving AGW to be the lack of coordination between nations? In this case, what direction should the solvers choose?

Comment author: MrMind 19 August 2016 08:13:50AM 0 points [-]

That doesn't seem very healthy, unless it's said in humour. What's the point of drilling on impossible circumstances?

Comment author: Romashka 19 August 2016 09:04:31AM 0 points [-]

I don't know, but my relatives and their guests do it all the time.

Comment author: MrMind 19 August 2016 08:16:46AM 0 points [-]

No I don't think, but still Dunbar number are not an exact quantity, first, and second: if you only need to relate to a handful of comrade in your platoon and one higher ranking official, then you can effectively restrict the number of people with whom you have to interact.

Comment author: Romashka 19 August 2016 08:30:28AM *  0 points [-]

I am asking mostly because I have trouble imagining strict segregation in, say, Mongolian hordes; and intuitively, advance (where you have an army of able-bodied men) should be different from retreat (where you have also women, children and infirm men).

Comment author: Romashka 18 August 2016 08:17:36PM *  1 point [-]

Just a note, posting here because some people might have participated in something similar (if so, what were your impressions?):

...Unfortunately, at the all-Soviet [mathematics] Olympiads they failed to implement another idea, which A. N. Kolmogorov put forward more than once: to begin one of the days of the contest with a lecture on a previously unfamiliar, to the participants, topic and then offer several problems which would build on the ones considered during the lecture. (Such an experiment was successfully carried out only once […] in 1985 […] the lecture was on geometric probabilities.)

N.Vasilyev, A.A.Yegorov. Problems of All-Soviet mathematical olympiads. - Moscow, 1988. - p. 14 of 286.

Comment author: MrMind 18 August 2016 02:32:25PM 0 points [-]

Well, I guess it depends very much on the situation you are asked for.
Generally speaking, I think those are idle questions: unless you're prepared like a Special Force operator, you usually in a crisis situation will behave instinctively. And if the situation is so bad, then you'll die, yes, like anyone else in that situation.
But why they ask the question? Is this something that you are particularly probable to face? Like a job-related risk or a well known danger in the place you live? Because in that case, then I would put much more effort in thinking and training on how to cope.
If, on the other hand, those are idle questions, then I think they deserve an idle answer: "I don't know exactly, but I'm a grown woman, somehow I'll manage it."

Comment author: Romashka 18 August 2016 03:22:52PM 0 points [-]

As far as I can tell, it's just healthy sportsmanlike interest. Like, "I went to the shop and a drunkard threw his bottle at me, so I waited for a bus on my way back." - "AHA! And what would you have done if there were THREE of them, and they had KNIVES?!" - "..."

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