Lobby

Hey IG this sounds very familiar - taken from The Tao of Boo

I'll agree with that part - that we should try to be square with the world and G-d and the people we love. It's a good way to live even if death isn't coming anytime soon.

The guy who writes thesimpledollar wrote a post about being ready for the apocolypse. He wrote that you should have money, food, and water stored so that if something major happens, you can manage for a while. I thought it was a good post about something somewhat ridiculous.

I don't think 'threatening' the end of the world really helps people to reform.  I mean, it might in the short term, but as a general strategy, I think it's broken.

I do think that good behavior pays off big dividends later, not only after death, but during life.  But it isn't easy to see how, so I think many people ignorantly (not stupidly) continue to maintain some bad behavior with the misguided belief that 'it works', because of the short-term gains such behavior gives them.

Also, I suspect some people are just wired funny.

I don't support doomsdayers, short of noting that when masses of people behave poorly, I do suspect it can generate massive problems for those people (something along the lines of natural disasters, economical and ecological problems, etc).  When people correct that behavior on a massive scale, it can help clear up the other problems after a while.

Somewhat along these lines, obliquely, have you ever wondered how science has managed to advance so much in the past 100 years, when mankind has been around much longer than that?  I really wish I fully understood why mankind hasn't seemed to embrace much of the technologies we take for granted today centuries ago.  What has changed?  Our ancestors were at least as smart as we were, and had access to the same physics we have.  There's something peculiar about it... it makes me wonder if they knew something we forgot.

I'm not sure I buy the logarithmic thing.

I mean, knowlege builds upon itself, and it does have an impact on how quickly we build knew technologies, but the rate of change in the past 100-200 years doesn't quite match up for the kinds of information available to people in earlier times.  In fact, I'd say the technologies in the east far superceded the technologies of the west during the west's medieval period, yet for some reason they didn't come up with some of the downright amazing stuff we have today, despite efforts towards those ends (e.g. flight).

Something feels weird about it all.

Heh, I kinda liked 'recaculating'.  Or, with just another tweak of misspelling, 'reejaculating'...

Well, again, I dunno about that.

We have a lot of history behind us.  I think the oldest written work that has survived today is Gilgamesh, which describes a king from 2500 BC (which seems not as long as I was thinking).  That is only about 4500 years ago, but plenty of time for other works to have been written, and other bodies of knowlege to grow.

I recall that there was a very large library somewhere in the Middle East that held a great many bits of useful knowlege, but warfare destroyed much of the knowlege therein.  I'm surprised nobody tried to replace all that information at the time, or that they only had the one library.  Still, there was information in a fairly useful format that people could have built upon.  Why didn't we?  Or did we, but in some completely different direction that we haven't appreciated.

I point that last bit out because, supposedly, in this area of the world, the native Americans had advanced textiles and agriculture to an incredible degree, the likes of which we can't duplicate very well today... at least they had before they were nearly wiped out by disease when the europeans came with their unique bugs and spread them amongst the people (by accident or purpose, I'll leave to your judgement).  About the only amazing thing from that time that survives today is corn, so I understand.

Maybe that's part of the problem... people advance in different areas, and as we focus on those areas, we fail to perhaps consider advancements we could make in other areas.  We're currently advancing in the area of information and its transmission, which might facilitate other kinds of advancements that weren't as easy to accomplish before.  But, again, I dunno... transmitting knowlege always seemed kind of important to human history.

The ability of innovators from around the world to communicate instantly has to be a huge force in speeding up innovation. I think the invention of the telegram/telephone probably indirectly brought about a lot of the innovations we've seen since then. It gives a good reasoning as to why technology has speeded up development radically in the past 100 years or so.

AFter days of being in heaven i have to say its no paradise up here. Same as earth. Only difference is that everybody is happy and  no one is sad

Alexandria?

Maybe.  I recall it was in the Middle East somewhere, but my recollection is poor.  It could have been a Greek library, but for some reason I thought it was an Arab library.