Reasoned Consideration

"Please don't kick me!" This article contemplates  Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots : "Even for fully informed adults, the difference between alive and lifelike may be muddled enough in our subconscious to warrant adopting the same attitudes toward robotic companions that we carry towards our pets. A study of Sony AIBO online message boards reveals that people were dismayed to witness the story of an AIBO being tossed into a garbage can. Not long after the Pleo robot dinosaur became commercially available in 2007, videos of Pleo “torture” began to circulate online. The comments left by viewers are strikingly polarized – while some derive amusement from the videos, others appear considerably upset, going so far as to verbally attack the originators and accuse them of horrible cruelty. The Kantian philosophical argument for animal rights is that our actions towards non-humans reflect our morality — if we treat animals in inhumane ways, we become inh...

An interesting article by Natalie Wolchover on the blue-skinned people of Kentucky, and recessive traits:  Will Humans Eventually All Look Like Brazilians? "Stearns says globalization, immigration, cultural diffus sion and the ease of modern travel will gradually homogenize the human population, averaging out more and more people's traits. Because recessive traits depend on two copies of the same gene pairing up in order to get expressed, these traits will express themselves more rarely, and dominant traits will become the norm. In short, blue skin is out. Brown skin is in. Already in the United States, another recessive trait, blue eyes, has grown far less common. A 2002 study by the epidemiologists Mark Grant and Diane Lauderdale found that only 1 in 6 non-Hispanic white Americans has blue eyes, down from more than half of the U.S. white population being blue-eyed just 100 years ago." I wonder, perhaps related mechanisms could explain why humans may be getting dum...

It's possible for something to be a fad and   also happen to be correct . People who pride themselves on not 'following fads' sometimes blindly follow the wrong path instead. Or to put it another way, sometimes the 'sheeple' are right. If your ego is tied up in your ability to 'not follow the crowd', you may fail to follow the crowd when they happen to be going in the right direction. Forget about whether something is a fad or not - the only thing that matters is whether something is  correct  or not. What you need is a set of 'mental tools' to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. This mentality seems to be a kind of 'inverse  argumentum ad populum ' - effectively believing something is false  because  it is popular. Sometimes the sheep are going in some particular direction simply because there's food, water or sanctuary from danger that way.

Briefly: I think GMO is just a technique/technology - it can be used for good or bad. Blanket bans on GMOs are akin to banning "phones" or "the Internet" - it is wrong and ultimately damaging. If someone is misusing a technology for evil, then the evil practice should be banned, not the technology. It's true that particular companies involved in the development of GMOs are doing bad things - but the positive potential for GMOs in the right hands is enormous - these are ultimately separate issues. This is by no means apologism for the aforementioned.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bidding-2022-olympics-disaster-because-192953806.html "The Bidding For The 2022 Olympics Is A Disaster Because Everyone Figured Out That Hosting Is A Total Waste" Token pic that's closely-enough related to the Olympics I don't know if this is true, but it seems like there may be a simple solution: Host it in a city that's already hosted it in recent history. Pick a few cities (e.g. one per continent) that have the infrastructure for it, and cycle through them. If the infrastructure has already been built in a city, then there would be only marginal additional investment costs required (as e.g. stadiums and airports would exist already), and it allows more meaningful amortization of prior investments (i.e. existing stadiums wouldn't be 'white elephants' if they were used regularly for subsequent games). Would make more sense than building new white elephants in some new city every four years (assuming these really...