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Exactly. You can't predict it, and you may solve problems. The problems that we do know to exist should take priority over the ones that might. Taking risks with huge amounts of resources is a dumbass move in any branch, why should it be different in science?

Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge that space exploration has been useful though, and I'd never shut it down altogether. The ISS has been a rather fruitful project, satellites are indeed important in our daily lives, and research concerning helium-3 extraction from the moon definitely has my approval. In fact I was only referring to your list of inventions which, though useful, really didn't require space travel to come up with.

That being said, I suspect that some of the more prestigious projects such as the Curiosity mission have had little to do with practicality. It wouldn't have hurt to have stuffed those in the fridge in favor of more urgent matters.

That's exactly what I mean by knowing your priorities. Terraforming is all well and good but you probably won't know it's even a viable option until you've already begun the procedure. Earth has well-outlined problems now, problems you'll just drag along to your terraformed planet anyway if you don't straighten them out sooner than that. It's not a matter of choosing one or the other, that would be stupid. But if I'd have to redistribute scientific budgets, I wouldn't give the lion's share to Mars missions to put it kindly. Thing is, those happen to be among the most expensive scientific projects...

Isn't it? Good luck getting your paper published if you can't at least imply its practical uses. There are theoretical fields and their respective journals of course, but the bulk of scientific literature in functional morphology, ecology, chemistry, medicine or even your field (physics as I recall?) all but demands a tangible use for your work in order to publish it.

To tell you the truth, I don't blame them. Pragmatism has been playing second fiddle in scientific research for too long. It's about time that curiosity became the byproduct, and not the main goal. I'm not even going to be hypocritical on this one. My own field is that of evolutionary and behavioral biology, a subclass of biology that doesn't exactly come to mind when we're talking pragmatic uses. I'd be perfectly fine with having our budgets cut for other, more useful research to prosper.

Which is exactly why the majority of our research should stay down-to-earth. Solar panels are said to have a life span of 40 years, but they usually don't last quite as long and even so, may start performing subpar sooner than that. All of this has made people reluctant to buy them. If you could make them more cost-efficient, then fossil fuels would not be cheaper anymore.

Plus, there's the entirely non-scientific aspect to consider, which is business. Hate to piss in your orange juice, but it's not enough to simply re-invent the wheel and hope your revolutionary research finds its way to a broad audience. The oil industry for example is well-established and powerful indeed, and innovative solutions such as electric cars have trouble competing. An inquiry in my country has shown that the two major reasons that people don't buy an electric car are its price tag and its lack of recharging points, both of which can be resolved with the right investments. Not in research, but in the application thereof (such as these charging points).

REVERSAL TIME!!! DING DING DING
We could spend billions that will benefit us in our lifetime and the generations to come, because there's no such thing as true short term research. Everything we invent now can be used or improved later (making the term "short term" kind of moot). Or we could take a shot in the dark and hope we hit something. Setting scientific arguments aside for now, I think I could predict what every economist in the world would choose. What say you?

I'm perfectly okay with solutions taking up a large amount of time, as long as they get there in the end. I can feel blissful staring through the window on the back of the bus, only to be mighty pissed upon finding out I took the wrong one.
Scientists shouldn't be forced into doing what's practical, nor should they get heaps of cash in order to sate a limited audience's curiosity.

OK, let's talk about processes that take time. How long do you think that finding a miracle element, bringing it back to Earth, figuring out a lab environment that won't break down your rare and precious element, conducting experiments on it, putting it to practical use and then mass-producing that practical use is going to take? My guess is: pretty fucking long. And that's assuming that you haven't screwed up in Phase 2.
Your argument is basically one huge double standard, treating two long shots completely differently when they shouldn't be. Invoking an environmental epiphany en masse and getting into action to stop the planet's deterioration is a hugely unlikely event, but so is "finding that one element that will save mankind". The difference is that the former at least has a somewhat predictable outcome.

Nobody is contesting that. It's not the allocation of people that is questioned here; it's the budget.

Thing is, you didn't have to actually go to space to invent any of those things. The materials and methods are as terrestrial as can be, and a vaguely related research question would have yielded the same results. Refining helmet visors has given you the technology to craft scratch-resistant lenses, but you could have just as easily invented those if you actually wanted to make scratch-resistant lenses.

You basically re-iterated that it's a terrible idea to stop space exploration in 53 different ways without giving actual valid reasons why it's such a terrible idea. I'm not saying space exploration is useless, far from it, but a slight priority shift wouldn't hurt. Is there really no better way to spend the cash burning a hole in your pocket than having a $2.5 billion dollar gizmo dig through Martian dirt?

I don't think space exploration should be stopped by the way

The Ones That Squirm

What lies on that yonder hill?
I've heard it's a land with statues of mud
Where they kneel for black clouds
And eat bread made of dust

Shadows of dirt and scarcity
Slide across poisonous snakes
Begging not to be bitten
But being bitten nonetheless

Once a haven of exhaustion
There is nothing left to overuse
A cure for a disease they didn't have
Turned into a disease that has no cure

And we sit upon our silver towers
Celebrate the messenger Guilt
For he tells us to turn our backs
And turning our backs we will

Comment: Old piece.

===

Killswitch

There are tales to tell
As implied by clenched teetch yellowed by silence and disbelief
Sightings of well-dressed men feeding cough drops down a shaft
To ascertain that the dust remains in place

A brave intruder wandered into this oblivion
Shedding their flashlight on prototypes of the apocalypse
And even though his rope home was hatcheted
Undead arms clawed their way to the surface…to live the hermit’s life
Curiosity had broken the cat

Therefore I say we detonate, become the dreaded emergency
The belly of the ghast monster that had swallowed the bomb
Will explode into a treasure trove of booming truth
Our feet and fingers held upon the tissue flakes to keep them from re-fusing
There are tales to tell, and we want to hear them

Comment: New piece. Do you see an evolution?

The more I read about PETA, the more I'm convinced that their members have either been replaced with trolls over the years, or have been trolls all along. That being said, most of their antics are pretty laughable (such as this thing and Mary-Beth Sweetland being a hypocritic cunt for using animal-tested insuling claiming that she "needs her life to fight for the animals") but others are somewhat unsettling. I mean, they're buying drones instead of investing in their animal care centers where they kill more animals than they save. Safe to say that anyone who supports the PETA is a retard who doesn't deserve the brain they were born with.

If it makes you feel better, Pokémon fans responded by PETA's claim that Pokémon trainers don't give a shit about their mons by posting a screenshot of Ash taking the brunt of a Spearow attack from the very first episode of the anime. That did seem to shut them up, although they still don't have the balls to admit that they were wrong on this.

Rather than being part of spectrum with a shitload of transitional forms, genres in music are rather grouped or hierarchically ranked. "Punk Rock" still clearly refers to its mother genres (though, granted, there are a lot of confusing genres and hybrids). I don't think the example is comparable to gender, but I guess you could call it unnecessary. If someone told me "I like rock bands like Bad Religion", I'm not going to step up and shout "They're a punk rock band you moron!" because a) they were not wrong and b) I wouldn't care enough about musical taxonomy to make myself sound like a dick.

Not gonna bother quoting everything. Shouldn't even be continuing this, but I wouldn't want to give you the false impression that moral superiority somehow silenced me.

If having a name tag slapped on your phenotype makes you "find comfort with your identity", then you are quite positively shallow. I have mentioned before that these finer distinctions should only matter on a professional level. You should get customized medical treatment if you'd benefit from it, and the law should probably mention that you can marry and fuck any of your own kind plus the traditional sexes. So yes, the distinction should be made on that level. What I don't see is why we, your friendly neighbourhood average people, should concern ourselves with learning the delicate nuances and transitional forms by heart in order to step on sensitive toes fewer times. Intersex individuals better put up with being handwaved into a sex, because those inquiries aren't gonna have more than two checkboxes anytime soon, nor should they.

And yes, this may lead to misunderstandings and inconveniences but damn, grow some balls (GET IT?). Yes, you are going to get slapped on the ass by pervs even though you're not technically a girl. No, there are no male / female / miscellaneous showers in the club room of the high school gym. We don't have Polish street signs either, even though we have as much as 1 Polish family in our town (THAT'S SIX INDIVIDUALS, PEOPLE! SIX!). Being a minority comes with feeling singled out, unless you expect the whole world and then some to revolve around you.

Note that I spoke of sexes and not of gender. I think the whole existence of gender identity is bullshit and abolishing it is probably the kindest thing we can do to anyone who has ever faced problems with it. Masculinity and femininity describe aspects of a person's personality, and they should be treated as such rather than being elevated into their own category and haphazardly linked to a biologically relevant duality. You are a dot on the male-female scale the same way you are a dot on the egocentrical-altruistic scale. I don't care if you don't feel 100% manly; pick a spot on the spectrum, call yourself part of the side you most relate to and stop yammering.

Spoiler

When debating with me, keep in mind that I'm often part of the "Shut up and suck it" school of thought, occasional hypocrisy notwithstanding. Arguments of the "But they feel sooooooooo misunderstood" nature hardly ever stick, and when they do, I'll still try to make you believe they don't. Anyway, I have to go get ready for a punk rock festival that lasts the weekend, so I'll check back on Tuesday if I haven't lost interest. Bye!

Just to clarify, I didn't mean to say that people should just conform to stereotypes or force stereotypes on other people. I'm not encouraging you to squeeze yourself into a definition ultil you fit. If you'd describe yourself as 70% male, 20% female and 10% amoeba, you shouldn't be expected to be the biggest tub of testosterone that has ever walked/creeped on the planet. You should, however, make peace with the likely event that people will refer to you as a male. It's not correct, but cut people some slack for convenience's sake.

I don't think this forces a question by any means, nor do I think that certain definitions should be expanded to cover more ground. One could make a case for professional jargon where the devil's in the details, but we don't need cookie-cutter descriptions for everything in casual conversation. People talk about love without having defined it, and still understand each other despite not being on the exact same wavelength. Male and female are equally well understood by all but the most context-blind. I for one am not keen on smearing their definitions into a blur for the sake of a few dumbasses that need to have everything spelled out to them.

This would take the discussion all the way to whether there really should be such a thing as a "gender" that stands apart from the biological sexes (which to my knowledge are finite and indeed quite limited in number). What significance does it have? Rather than giving more genders a name, would it really be such a loss if we abolished the concept altogether?

I don't acknowledge that there is a problem. I can express myself using only the outer ends of the spectrum the same way people know what I'm talking about when I say whether it's light or dark outside. Children need to have every loophole stuffed in order for them to be satisfied with an explanation. Adults interpret.

I'm well aware that putting the discussion away to rot is far more offensive so no, I'm not worrying about kicking someone in the identity. What I meant, pardon the lack of clarity, is that I shouldn't have to worry about it altogether. If everyone were to throw a hissy fit every time someone classified them as something they're not for the sake of convenience, the world wouldn't be the most pleasant place to live in.

And here I'm saying that turning a blind eye to those other colours isn't always a bad thing. It may very well be the only way to be in control, or even to feel any kind of certainity on any subject whatsoever. Few things are ever black and white, but I don't see why this has to be spelled out every other second. I can imagine that there are fields where certain dualities need to be debunked, but I don't see why average Joe should necessarily see life as the amalgam it really is. Discussing gender in any context other than professional medicine or biology? I'd be more useful counting blades of grass in my backyard.

TL;DR: Correctness for the sake of correctness is moot.

In all seriousness, and at the risk of sounding like a hick who shuns intelligent discussion, I think the whole philosophical "Are people 100% male or female?" debate is on the wrong side of the relevance line (same with gay/straight, note my absence in that thread). I could argue that there is indeed room for a large grey area, but I don't see a reason to try and untangle it. Is it truly necessary or important to toss all overly simplistic classifications overboard in favor of a more politically correct cesspool? I have my doubts.

I'm going to stick with male/female, yin/yang, life/death and other functional dualities that may not be entirely correct, but at least allow me to have a decent conversation without having to worry about offending a minority.

Polyamory is fine if you've got the mindset for it. I haven't had any experience with it myself, so I don't know if I'd be up for it. I think I'm possessive but not in a demanding way. Falling in love can happen at any time and I don't own my partner, so if I truly wanted nothing more than to be happy, I'd have no right to keep her all to myself. That doesn't mean I have to like sharing her though, and that unwelcome feeling is probably proof enough that I'm not the kind of person for it.

In my previous relationship, I loved it when we'd act all lovey-dovey with each other, give each other "the look", and then basically turn into sex fiends. I find it arousing beyond measure when a usually reserved girl gives in to lust entirely. Anticipation, the act of leaving me hanging juuuuuuuuuust long enough, is the most pleasurable torture imaginable. I don't know whether that counts as an actual kink though, so here's another one I know will count.

I love tearing off clothes. A girl who is willing to show up wearing only hand-me-downs that I can utterly rip apart is a girl I'd marry, and that's coming from someone who doesn't think well of marriage. I also like the creaking of a bed, sex in naughty locations (the middle of a sports field is especially high on my places-to-do-it list), dirty talk and playing with her breasts, but I guess that last one isn't all that unusual.

Judging from the list above, you might think that I want sex to be as animalistic as possible, but that's not the case. On the contrary, moments like the ones I mentioned above should only happen every so often in order for them to be as effective as they can be. It's their rarity, their whimsical timing and the possibility to catch me off guard that makes them so arousing.

Against my better judgement I hope that I haven't disgusted anyone.

Bad Religion --- Ten In 2010

- Original and current impression?
- Top 3 favourite subjects in high school?
- Have you ever crowd surfed?
- If you had to move to any country (permanently), which one would you pick?
- Are you eagerly awaiting Kingdom Hearts 3?

I feel the same way. Some of my own friends who I deemed highly intelligent happened to be racist to a fault (adding this last snippet because almost everyone's a teensy bit racist). It made me more skeptical to their other opinions, but not in such a way that it distracts me from the actual content of their arguments.

I don't dislike Belgians; I am Belgian. Dutchmen are people from The Netherlands, remember?
Anyway, that last point was more of a joke than anything else. Obviously I would date any girl if she fit the requirements and I fit hers, regardless of nationality.

Spoiler

On a vaguely related note, Dutch girls are on average more beautiful than Belgian girls, at least in my irrelevant opinion.

Dutchmen and Belgians have a rather...special relationship. Think of it as a sugary, light-hearted English vs Scots kind of thing. It's difficult to illustrate, but I'll try anyhow.
They are jealous of our beer, we are jealous of their sports achievements. We are jealous of their (usually) progressive policies and better traffic infrastructure, they are jealous of (most of) us knowing more languages. The Dutch can't stand our dialects, we can't stand their accent. They make jokes about us, we make jokes about them. They're often the same jokes in fact, just replace "Belgians" with "Dutchmen" and vice-versa and you're good to go when you cross the border.
Prejudices and clichés reign supreme. Belgians, according to Dutchmen, are prude and sore losers at their best and aggressive dumb hicks at their worst. Dutchmen, according to Belgians, are loud, arrogant, stingy horn dogs. Dutchmen think our tendency for self-depreciation is stupid (we prefer calling it modesty), Belgians think Dutchmen have a built-in need to be the center of attention wherever they go (they prefer to call it being sociable). All of that being said, it's usually all in good fun.

My stance is in fact mild by comparison. That part was true. There are Belgians who won't take anything seriously when it's said with a Dutch accent (and vice-versa). I am not one of those people, far from it.
But yes, I did sulk when The Netherlands had more gold medals after last year's Olympics than we did (even though The Netherlands spends good money on sports infrastructure, making it only natural). And yes, I did gloat when Belgium gave the Dutch football team a 2-4 beating (even though it was a friendly). I am being irrational on both accounts, but cut me some slack, why don't you?

You're forgiven, but I did expect you to notice the tongue-in-cheek tone of that post.

Never did, silly person.

...

If he beat Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon, how much of a threat could North Korea possibly be?

I'm interes-

Well, fuck.

I see people in this thread who aren't much fun at parties...