Music. Everything to do with music and audio production. Interested in science and mathematics greatly, although I can't really pretend to know anything.
A fair, democratic music industry where media saturation isn't the goal for promotion. Something new that incorporates the current internet trends so artists can make a living and the people that like their music can help them make it. Music shouldn't be a get rich quick scheme for rock stars, it should be something you're passionate about enough to make regardless of whether you make any money.
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A comment on Conversation: Is neural activity truly the basis for thoughts, feelings, and perceptions?
A reply on Talk: Robin Ince: Science versus wonder?
It seems like you didn't really listen to what Robin said. He specifically gives the example that knowing that the biological mechanism for love exists and that it is the source of the immense love he feels for his wife doesn't make him feel that love any less. The point he is making is that there is wonder in the real, proven facts of the world without having to make things up like astrology, homeopathy and a God taking away all free will by having "an ineffable plan" and whatnot.
"how we feel creates all the meaning we need"
And this is the beautiful fact which means atheists can be happy too. As mentioned above, your last paragraph states that if someone feels joy doing something bad, a rationalist (or philosophical materialist) wouldn't do anything about it because the villain's perceptions of meaning, right and wrong is just as valid as our friendly rationalist's.
This is absurd. Evidence points towards the fact that most people feel bad about killing someone. It wouldn't be very evolutionarily advantageous if this didn't happen. Nevertheless, for me personally and probably for Ince, knowing that it is an evolutionary predilection for us to feel terrible about punching a stranger in the face doesn't make us feel any less bad about it.
Absolute moral truth is a dangerous thing, as it can always, always be reinterpreted to mean something else. That danger doesn't come from science.
A comment on Conversation: Exams are ineffective and should be abolished and replaced with course work
For what is effectively a vocational course, this is pretty much coursework and an exam all at once. We have a limited time frame to complete the production in and thus cannot constantly refer back to books or Google-fu, we have to use our existing knowledge to make fast decisions. It's an accurate depiction of our industry, which is why this works.
Obviously, this wouldn't apply to everything. It could apply to most though. Mathematics, for example. A test to see if you remember the forumlae to solve new problems seems to be the best way of checking you have actually learnt how to do something. Exams that contain a realistic element, such as a timed cooking test or a test to write a newspaper article, are a great way of reinforcing knowledge.
However, at the risk of some particularly galling flashbacks, the English Literature exam I did for GCSE seemed pointless. We did not have the copy of the book we were meant to be analysing and there was no reason at all for our analyses to be timed. I understand a test of your ability to write something quickly in, for example, a journalism where deadlines must be met, but to analyse a novel in half an hour for no apparent reason seemed like a waste of time and an exercise in prose retention. As you may have noticed, I did not particularly like my GCSE English class.
A reply on Conversation: Would you eat "in vitro" meat?
I don't think there's anything simple about that fact, it would require society itself to radically change. Most people are happy to just eat what they know they like, and if they like, they'll continue to eat lots of it.
Lab meat may be a way of reducing the environmental impact of the enormous meat consumption in the short term. If hamburgers can be grown on demand in a lab then we won't have loads of cows farting their global warming into the atmosphere and there obviously won't be as much waste.
I don't claim to know the exact difference between the environmental impact of loads of scientists science-ing up some beef and loads of cows being generally cow-ish, but it seems that the sheer amount of farming required to produce as much meat as is being consumed is using far too many resources, which is a point I agree with you on.
I think lab meat may be a short term solution to the problem of epic resource consumption, but the long term solution would obviously be a reduction in the amount of meat eaten.