On being unreasonable

I asked a question today on a science site...  the background is regarding SETI and people were insulting politicians who felt spending money on SETI was wrong and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

Whether you agree with that idea or not, calling people idiots simply because they disagree with you is ridiculous.  Out of the 5 or six men mentioned as idiots, the 2 I researched in light of those posts would be what most people would consider to be exceptionally gifted.  One began college at age 16, earned a degree with high honors and went on to get a doctorate.  Yes... must have been a total moron, that one.  The other had a similar history... bright, very hard working.

So, I mentioned that much (that the these men appear to be quite bright, actually) and also mentioned what benefits I KNOW SETI contributes (such as general mapping for places that might be interesting to focus on with better tools, and for the international effort), and then posed the simple question:  how has SETI pushed the boundaries of science and what has it contributed back to society?  These are the 3 major points I got back as an answer:

No. You just have a short attention span.
I strongly suspect you think the same thing about fusion research too.
You appear to be one of them.

"Them" is a person who demands immediate results.  The person also provided this nugget:

Given now that habitable planets in our galaxy appear to be as common as beach sand, I would think advanced governments would be willing to refund the effort with renewed vigor.

So I responded (in two posts) that first, please stop trying to fit me into your mold and second please go ahead and name all these wonderful places!  (In a much less snarky tone, honest).  The answer was:

 You know damn well I was talking from a statistical standpoint!

So I asked my original questions again, granting that he believes, statistically, there are a ton of human-habitable worlds out there (apparently... as I did make the caveat in one of my posts that I consider habitable planets ones that are capable of supporting human life).

He still has not answered the question I posed.  He has added thoughts, and drummed up other questions for me, but has not answered my direct question, which I have now asked 3 times.  I can tell you what the next response will be... he will call me a name and tell me that I am stupid.

The world and the people in it are wearing me out.

Science vs. Science Fiction

I think that few people realize that much of the "science" they are exposed to is in reality "science fiction".

It is fine fantasy to imagine paleontology finds, for example, living lives similar to our own, or animals alive today.  For example, watching a National Geographic special on dinosaurs the finds were romanticized, portraying moving stories of the animals such as them struggling to reach the surface as they were buried alive, or two finds, close together, holding hands.

This is what people WANT to hear.  They WANT to imagine a scene of intimacy, of complex behavior that is obviously unknowable.  And science narrators are more than happy to oblige, to delve into this story telling that would support their ideas and perhaps bring more money into their profession.

Science is the process of trying to figure out how the world/universe works.  In regards to history, especially ancient history, it becomes quite difficult to know everything we WANT to know.  How do we fill the gaps? With fiction.  Stories.  Romanticized ideas.

There is nothing WRONG with this, per se, but when people don't understand the difference between science and science fiction misunderstandings occur.

What I find interesting is when we have good historicity, ancient documentation supporting something current, that is well supported by critical analysis but it borders on the "supernatural" it is immediately discarded.  Yet something that is literally IMPOSSIBLE to know that happened perhaps 80 million years ago and little or no supporting evidence, even circumstantial evidence exists, it is easier for people to believe the "stories" crafted to support theoretical ideas that are not provable.

Ah well.

Continuing thoughts on my AMD build...

The tests are slightly unfair as my disk optimizations (I previously used RAID 0 - but when installing everything I messed up, forgot to set my RAID in the BIOS beforehand and Windows doesn't really like you changing from AHCI to RAID after it has been installed/configured).  So I forwent RAIDing my drives and keep a USER drive and a WORK drive.  My point is that read and write times will be slower.  That being said, some things to note:

Large system compilation went from an average of 58 seconds on the Intel build to 72 seconds on the AMD build.  No surprise as single thread execution is known to be slower in some cases.

The flip side is WinZip decompresses the WAR files MUCH more quickly in the AMD build.  It is so fast I don't have time to do my usual little things (closing my selection windows for the war, emptying the trash, stuff like that).  I click "Expand to" and *BOOM*... done.  The AMD CPU is practically made for this sort of work tho'...

Starting JBOSS (after a FRESH deploy) the first time on my AMD build took 13 seconds.  That's not bad...  I've only done it once so far... taking into account slightly slower disk read times that's not too different from the 9 to 10 seconds it took on the Intel build.  Again, all of this doesn't surprise me either, since Java doesn't seem to be overly multi-thread friendly (the Java app itself, not its capabilities).


More soon!