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Post by zilch on Jan 5, 2012 11:29:41 GMT -4
Yep. Not much critical thinking going on in the denier mind. Maybe part of the problem is something Richard Dawkins pointed out in, I think, The Blind Watchmaker- that our inborn sense of probability, like our other senses, is tailored to our historical medium sized and fast world, and is likely to go haywire in our modern barrage of information, and disinformation, from all sides, unless it's bolstered by a good dose of science. Thus, for instance, moon landing or holocaust deniers, or 9/11 troothers, can point to dozens of "anomalies", which is of course what you would statistically expect with thousands or millions of data points. It might well be that simple intuition is easily seduced here, especially when the result is politically, or emotionally, desirable.
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Post by ka9q on Jan 5, 2012 11:34:00 GMT -4
the idea of being without a TV--and, come to that, a computer--is all but incomprehensible to me. There are all kinds of things I'd do without first. Back in the late 1980s, people thought I was weird when I said I'd rather give up my phone than my Internet connection. One day at lunch, one of my colleagues said that only I and a few of my geek friends would ever use the Internet. (The guy I'm pretty sure said it now denies it.) This was at Bellcore. And not just anywhere in Bellcore, but in an applied research group. At the time, this was supposed to be a bleeding-edge R&D organization right on the frontiers of modern communications. It just goes to show you that even the people whose job it's supposed to be to anticipate the future don't always do a good job of it.
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Post by gillianren on Jan 5, 2012 15:37:18 GMT -4
I am allowed to include a phone on my list of expenses, but not my internet connection, which I consider more important.
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Post by nomuse on Jan 5, 2012 15:48:52 GMT -4
I used to say our instincts are great -- for what life is like in a warm pressurized gas at the bottom of a gravity well. Now I say more that our instincts are best at anything that's large enough to see and small enough to pick up; anything that's within a magnitude of our own mass and length, that moves within a magnitude of a walk, etc.
Most of us just don't have an instinctive feel for the height of a skyscraper or the weight of a locomotive, any more than we have an instinctive feel for what life is like at the scale of an ant.
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Post by nomuse on Jan 6, 2012 0:27:25 GMT -4
Just bumped into this account from Fred Ordway, quite by accident. Underlines the massive effort necessary to create 2001 -- and how implausible tackling the much bigger problem of faking the Apollo Program would have been. www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0075.htmlAnd there was also this page a link or two away: www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/2001a/page2.htmlTalks a bit about lighting issues and the use of front projection in 2001. And, not coincidentally, shows that Dave McGowan is an idiot. The "seams" he talks about were solved by Kubrick's people before the first scene was even shot. That is...within the development of the technology itself. And, also, underlines just how non-trivial setting up for front projection is.
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Post by ka9q on Jan 8, 2012 1:32:04 GMT -4
Just bumped into this account from Fred Ordway, quite by accident. Underlines the massive effort necessary to create 2001 -- and how implausible tackling the much bigger problem of faking the Apollo Program would have been. Unfortunately, most hoaxers seem almost totally innumerate. They just don't understand quantitative arguments; everything is either black or white.
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