Yes you have, but worth another giggle. I wonder if the bloke phoning in is Beddytare's Scottish cousin?
No you're not reading too much into it. Has been known to wear a Saints shirt while performing on stage. He grew up watching SFC.
IT'S SO HOT. But great. Where do you live? Why is it so hot here? How do you get a country that is such a weird shape?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...martphone-makes-less-intelligent-study-finds/ Smartphones make you less smart. According to a study you perform better in tests if your phone is in another room compared with it being on your desk (even if turned off and face down). It seems that trying not to think about your phone when it is in sight uses up your brain capacity. Anyone who has tried to engage youngsters in conversation whilst they constantly fiddle with their phones will know this....I have had to remove a phone from someone's hand to make sure they have grasped an extremely salient fact. Wonderful tools but they should be treated as such...not a substitute for life.
I have to say that I was always in the group blaming the accident on fan behaviour...not the behaviour of the dead of course who were always victims. Have to eat my words. Things happen, mistakes are made (and hopefully learned from)....all these things are human, but a massive cover up causing so much pain is shameful. And we want the truth to come out and the right people punished....not the little guy at the bottom told by a superior to change his statement or forget details.
I think gadgets make people less smart in life's fundamentals. Sure they make life a lot easier but already it is being said, and arguably correctly so, that mankind is at the peak of its evolution overall, certainly in the physical sense, with a general slide towards a reliance on machinery, robotics, gadgets and such, to do the real work, while people either do other things, or, and this is more worrying, sit in an armchair and vegetate with a remote control. Of course, that's a first world westerner's view. In the 2nd world this is far less so, and in the 3rd world they often still don't have the electricity supply to wire a plug to, that most westerners have long since forgotten how to do. Aside from that, tests are an outmoded form of evaluation that we don't seem to have superseded yet. Some very stupid people can regurgitate facts and concepts at the sound of the phrase you may turn over your papers and begin. And some very smart people simply can't. Perhaps they have so much more important things going on in their heads. On the subject of smartphones themselves and grabbing them out of people's hands to get them to focus on you, there are two points that spring to mind. 1] Yep, I agree, I've done it myself and the owner was shocked until I explained that they needed to grasp the concept, but 2] just how boring was I being that the owner would rather focus on their phone.? Gadgets like smartphones give us the ability to know things very quickly without having to store the knowledge in our heads. Once upon a time it was paper, and the book, which took away our memories, because we could always look things up in them. Now it is the internet and web. It's a giant leap forward from the printing press. And once again it helps to make us even more intelligent, but less smart.
Evolution is slow in animals with long life spans and low reproductive rates (compared with bacteria and fruit flies for example)*, so I suppose the evolution of technology is a way for us to speed it up. *Always makes me laugh when people predict what we will look like in the future....apart from colour, height and weight, we will look exactly the same in several thousand years (if we are even here).
I was always hesitant to judge until the facts were in. I know it's easy to blame some so-'n-so and then just leave it. The general opinion of people in crowds and groups is that they are often up to no good. People are people on both sides of the argument. The like to have a bit of fun often without responsibility. They like to have a bit of power, often without the requisite responsibility. They don't want to admit to being wrong because the consequences of being so are often quite awful, from losing face to being in jail. And the innocent are sometimes not so innocent either, but more often than not actually are. The dead pay for all of this with their lives. And, up until the point where they don't survive, they, the dead, may conceivably be amongst those who are being judged. It's an awful thing, and it wouldn't be quite so bad if people pitched up and said, it was down to me and I'm really sorry, a damn sight sooner than they end up doing. But we make that a very, very hard thing for people to do.
Did you know that already, in the space of 60 years, children are less fit, less healthy, and less smart than they were in the 1950's.? Those bloody tests [again] have proved [suggested the case] it. And they are generally more rotund and overweight compared to what we might call 'normal'.
As I said, these parameters change, but people predict changes that will just not happen...extra limbs for example. We are what we are....every vertebrate animal on the land is based on a 4 limbed creature that crawled out from the water and mud in prehistory....some may have lost limbs or reduced them (like snakes) or converted them (like birds and bats), but that's the full extent of it. And took a very very long time. Changes have to result in reproductive success...some might say that being a geek has the opposite effect to that.
Oh crikey no, I don't think I have suggested that, and I had no knowledge that anyone was stupid enough to predict that. Perhaps in millions of years we may all be brains in jars, telepathically communicating, but we'll possibly have to get off this planet to do so, because at the present rate, we've got a couple, maybe a few, of hundred years before it becomes too unbearable to exist on Earth. Thing is, we can't naturally adapt quickly enough. Technology may well have to save us. Full circle.
Stromboli is having a little puff and pant today. Throwing rocks out of its crater: https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam/italia/sicilia/messina/stromboli.html This is a new camera position. I think they're expecting some proper action soon. New white sulphur deposits on the leeward rim.
I watched a programme where it was suggested that intelligent life (humans in our case) have a very small window for survival after industrialisation. The point being that the reason we have seen no sign of alien life is down to distance and to the brief time that contact could be made (compared with the age of the universe). We have only been transmitting into space since the 20th century....and only to any great extent in the past 50-60 years. Industrialised life forms have to be in a condition to receive our inadvertent transmissions to even be aware of us. Huge coincidences are required. So our messages will probably be received millions of years after we are gone or we will detect them millions of years after they have gone. And we may in fact be the most advanced life form at this particular moment. May sound depressing. but on the other hand there is all that real estate out there that we can claim.