^blankfist:
I heard somewhere the other day that during the Great Depression something like 40% of employment was in the farming industry. Now that makes up something like 4%.


I'm not sure about the actual numbers, but that trend seems reasonable.

Far fewer people are needed for the same amount of agricultural output now compared to the early 1900s. That happens with any industry that transitions from human labor to automation.

>> ^longde:

Revisionist history



Please enlighten me to what part is revisionist.

I'm quite afraid that the narrative that describes Israel's independence as foreign Jews occupying the homeland of Arab Palestinians often starts it's revisions with questioning the holocaust itself.

Not even Arab scholars question the main points I've outlined. The Jewish Palestinians had significant numbers before 1900, and the 40's saw a civil war between Jewish and Arab Palestinians. Arab scholars are even well agreed that the entire Arab world united to drive the Jews into the sea. The main difference between their version and the one I described is that they remember it as the great catastrophe, for the failure to exterminate all Jewish Palestinians. I'm content to see it as a triumph of the Jewish people after having just lost several million to the holocaust 5 years earlier.

OK, I was able to find an academic source on daily water turnover (and therefore requirements) that mentioned the 40 ml/KG/day. However, the study was done on children, with the 40 ml/KG/day relating to 15 year-olds. Still, there are plenty of authoritative sources out there (in the far reaches of the intertubes) that cite similar or identical turnover rates. A quick search for "human water requirements per day" should get you some decent information. Even the USDA suggests drinking "a lot" of water (3.7 L for men, 2.7 for women) every day. (source)

It's not magic or a made up number, it's a simple in/out calculation. Urine accounts for between 500 and 1,000 ml of water loss, sweating and evaporation of water through breathing--or insensible water loss--accounts for another 450-1900 ml, and feces counts for a couple hundred ml as well (source). So if you're losing two to three liters of water every day, shouldn't you replace it? Wouldn't that be the logical conclusion?

Also, water in the food you eat accounts for only about 20% of your daily intake. (source)

Of course, your environment, activity level, age, weight, sex and other factors can play a part in how much water your body needs. Also, I'm not a doctor, just some guy with access to a search engine, so don't take my word for it.

19,000 maybe >> ^HollywoodBob:

OK who else thinks this was a dramatic reenactment of real events in the middle-east some 1900 odd years ago, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent?

Okay..since my sarcasm didn't quite drive the point home, I'll explain why this is a misguided idea:

Tanning Salons
-Vitamin D is synthesized in the body after exposure to sunlight. Anyone living far enough from the equator is bound to be deficient in Vitamin D. In fact, go ahead and plot cancer incidence by latitude and you'll see what I mean. Vitamin D prevents cancer and heart disease.

Beef
- Read about Vilhjalmur_Stefansson. In the early 1900s he underwent a scientific study where he ate nothing but meat for a year...and came out healthier than when he went in. Also read about all-meat diets and ketosis. Prolonged ketosis is a cure for diabetes, heart disease and cancer - not to mention periodontal disease. In scientific studies, terminally ill patients who were so far gone they were beyond "medical science" had their tumors go into remission and even clear up completely on a ketosis diet. Cancer cells have a lot of insulin receptors - they respond to glucose, take away the glucose and the cancer starves. Read about it.

Pork
- Same as beef.

Alcohol
- In many countries, 1 in 3 people have some form of mental illness sometime in their lives. Alcohol helps a lot of people cope with society. How the hell do you think I cope with all the (50% of the population) sub-100 IQ zombies walking around?

Oil used for deep-frying
- Fat is not unhealthy. Cholesterol does not cause heart disease, nor is it a good predictor of those who will get heart disease. Only ~3% of arterial plague is cholesterol by composition - the vast majority is calcium. Vitamin D helps regulate calcium...this goes back to the tanning salons.

Gasoline -- especially because it gives people an incentive to WALK when they're going less than 2 miles to a store, instead of driving.
- I don't think the cost of gasoline has ever factored into a lazy persons decision of whether to walk. The burning of fossil fuels and the creation of air pollution is a national health hazard (akin to me walking up and dumping toxic waste on you) and so YES this should be taxed because pollution is a hidden cost of industry; but the funds shouldn't go to Medicare they should go to giant air-scrubbers which help de-pollute the air.

Coal
- Same as gas

Natural Gas
- Same as coal.

Sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup, Junk Food in general, & Cigarettes
- Okay, maybe you have some kind of argument here because these are legitimately detrimental to your health, but only used in excess. So unless you find a way to tax "excess" or define "excess" I can't see an argument for taxing the stray cigarette or potatoe chip.

how about the oughtsie wattsies. We should also bring back early 1900s jazz slang. It's the bee's knees

Mandatory service... Might have made sense in the 1800s or even the early 1900s. Now it's just dumb.

OK who else thinks this was a dramatic reenactment of real events in the middle-east some 1900 odd years ago, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent?

His defense of hide the decline is pathetic. The entire thing about Jones and Mann's work is the matching of proxy data like tree rings to the measured temperature record. I can't find the full text of the email anywhere, but if the quote is referring to hiding a decline in temperature reconstructions from tree-rings, then it clearly is a major problem. The reason being that Jones and Mann's most famous contribution to climate study is the hockey stick graph, showing that based on proxy data, like TREE RINGS, the temperatures from 1000 through 1900 show stable temperatures, and from 1900 through to today temperature increasing like never before in the last one thousand years.

Wait you'll say, if that was true it should've been evident in the original study for all to see. The answer is that it in fact is. If you go look at the studies by Jones and Mann on their hockey stick graph, their appendix will link you to graphs of the raw proxy data, including tree rings, that they used. It is plain to see that the proxy data does not change AT ALL after 1900, yet somehow the reconstruction that is made with that data spikes up like mad at that point. The paper and email reference in essence the same thing, the use of the measured temperature record to calibrate select years of the proxy data to get a better result. It's not without reason that there has been a lot of questioning of the statistical methods used to create their reconstruction. In 10 years time this will be a foot note.

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
Closing in on 2000 dead fixes. You the man obsessive-compulsive weirdo.

Fixed.

And I "lost" about 1800-1900 fixes in the siftocalypse too. They just disappeared and never came back. I mostly do it just to take short breaks from reading, working.

People today are working longer and harder than before.

Really? That's not how my grandparents remembered the early 1900's.

What a wonderful diatribe. But, could anyone please tell me actually how he defines these self-evident categories that he sets up? How does he understand "public religion?" And why is it juxtaposed with "personal faith?" What in the world would religion be if it was not public? Religion is social and it has found its inherent expression throughout histories and cultures precisely in public practices. It is, by its very nature, public.

The difficulty with his positions in this video is that he is blind to the limitations of his understanding of religion...probably b/c of his thoroughly modern mindset. Modernism and the rise of the individual has told us that beliefs are the core of religion and, therefore, are best seen as private or personal. And then, of course, any foray of religion into the public arena (however he would define it) is seen as overstepping its righful bounds and encroaching on others.

Both pre and post-modern understandings show us how limited this view is, and he would do well to do some more readings from centuries other than the 1900's. Religion and faith are best understood as rooted in practices and practices are always public. The real truth here is he has his own religion...and it is classic liberalism and it's patron saint...the Cartesian I.

I beg to differ...

How about the panic of 1797, lasting 3 years
Depression of 1807 lasting 7 years
Panic of 1819 lasting 5 years
Recession of 1833-34 lasting 1 year
Panic of 1837 lasting 2 years
Depression of 1839-43 lasting 4 years (attributed largely to Jackson, one of the worst in history)
Recession of 1845-46 lasting a year
recession of 1847-48 lasting a year
recession of 1853-54 1 year
Panic of 1857 18 months
recession of 1860-61 8 months
recession of 1865-67 lasting 32 months
recession of 1869-70 lasting 18 months
panic of 1873 and the ensuing long depression lasting 65 months
recession of 1882-85 lasting 38 months
recession of 1887-88 lasting 13 months
recession of 1890-91 lasting 10 months
Panic of 1893 lasting 17 months
Panic of 1896 lasting 18 months
Recession of 1899-1900 lasting 18 months
Recession of 1902-04 lasting 23 months
panic of 1907 lasting 13 months
panic of 1910-11 lasting 24 months

Bang up job the old monetary policy was doing...

I think there have been major social upheavals every 30 years or so in human society ever since the industrial revolution (1864 - Civil War, 1900 - Gilded Age, 1930 - Great Depression/WWII, 1960 - Civil Rights/Vietnam, 1980 - Ronald Reagan/Monetarist revolution, 2000's Iraq/Great Recession). I think we're seeing another upheaval now, I just hope it won't get quite so bad as some of the others in my list -- I hope we're going to end up comparing the 2010's more to the 1960's than the 1930's or 1860's. I suspect I'll live through one more major upheaval, assuming my lifespan ends up being somewhat average, and assuming the rate of social change isn't accelerating.

There's a part of me that thinks Kurzweil is right about a Singularity coming -- that the rate of technological advancement will speed up exponentially, and exceed our wildest expectations. I think there's a nonzero chance I'll live long enough to see the start of such a thing, but I think it could just as easily be a century or two away, and not decades.

I do think environmental issues are going to become a massive, unmistakable concern sooner rather than later. I don't think it will be the end of humanity or anything like that, but I suspect we're going to have to either rapidly retool our economy once people snap out of denial, or have a big economic crash coupled with major crop shortages and famine, and then rapidly retool our economy. I would even argue that environmental issues have played a nontrivial role in the current economic hardship, and that the time has come to really start enacting plans for moving away from fossil fuels, and start looking into more medium-to-long term issues like biodiversity and fresh water supply.

As for the freak globe-spanning natural disasters, there's no way to know about those. They could as easily happen tomorrow as they could a couple million years from now. Hopefully those will wait until post-Singularity when we'll be better equipped to deal with something like that...

Definitely *geek there.

And ARGH! That shows why George Lucas is so WRONG in 'updating' his old movies and doing his damnedest to not let anyone see the originals. The ORIGNAL never had a STUPID 2D plane shock wave emanating from the Death Star... and this is supposed to be a HISTORY of SFX, well, that's not the original is it, that's not from 1976.

Oh, nooo, why would you put Spiderman in there? Some of the most obvious CG character animation in a big budget film ever... baaaad example.

And ALSO to take the one really bad effect in the WHOLE of Benginman Button... the 'youthening' of Brad Pitt (everything else was indeed superb) as an example... *sigh*

And hate to break it to the maker of this, but seeing as the first clip is from a film in 1900, and the last in 2008.. um... this'd be 108 years of inspiration.

I don't think I'd want to be in this guy's class really.