Recent content by shonagon53

Rasine, you may want to look at my thread "Why global warming is good for mankind", in the section "Earth" on this forum. If global warming continues as it does, Greenland will be a beautiful green land, with no ice and only lush forests and fields, full of mineral resources. You may want to...

May I remind the readers of this post, that in France and Germany, artificial thermal energy pits are already being tested? They're just very deep holes through which water is pumped, which gets heated and then travels back up. One in France (500 metres deep) created half a megawatt...

See, that's interesting. In this kind of debates, it's always interesting to refer to food preferences in different cultures. You simply can't imagine to eat dogs, horses or insects. And still, billions of people do it every day. And they simply can't imagine you to eat such disgusting things...

Fully agree here. It's just a matter of what interests the researcher most. I think that for all "cultural" matters, there can be a fundamental "evolutionary" or socio-biological explanation or at least an explanation referring to "subconscious" and non-reflective dynamics. But then you're...

Please see my post about rebuilding London and New York on Greenland. :smile:

Nah, there are plenty of books already on the differences between Protestantees and Catholics when it comes to scatological habits. Urine's done. :wink:

When Max Weber published his famous hypothesis on the Protestant work ethic and the rise of capitalism, he linked it to the "rationalization" of society. Habermas continued this sociological thought and expanded it into his theories of increasing rationalism, technocracy and democracy. In...

You do have a point about the West's obsession with measuring everything. This morning I received not less than 4 e-mails promising me an easy and cheap way of adding at least 2 inches there where Western man thinks it's important! One of the e-mails included a detailed chart showing the...

Every time I read about global warming (cooling) and climate change, I have a tendency to think: this is such a longterm problem, with very few consequences for our lives; it should be of no concern to us. The other day I read that Greenland's entire icecap could melt by the year 2350 (oh...

It's called a library card. :biggrin:

In Europe, "creationism" is taught in cultural anthropology classes, as a case showing how an entire culture (70% of Americans) can both be materialistically prosperous and culturally poor at the same time ("how is it possible that a materially wealthy culture, can hold such bizarre 19th century...

I hadn't either, and it's in its initial development stage. But it has received quite a lot of coverage so far. When I read this, I was stunned: "The Electric car of General Motors, EV 1, uses 736kg batteries giving a max. range of 145 km without recharge. A battery of 60 kg made with...

Hey, I must admit I'm a complete amateur, but I do read up on it though. :-) I agree that hydrogen is "the best" carrier when it comes to the energy it can store, in abstracto. But it's all the little problems at the side (infrastructure, safety, production and storage, etc...) which will delay...

Good for you, eh. Also, I think most people couldn't bare to live with the idea that everything they do, think, and feel is genetically predetermined in some sense. They would refuse to know and keep some mystery. This is what that old misunderstood chap Nietzsche thought of when he wrote...

Gould was a child of his time. I think most non-experts today (like you and me) would agree that both nature and nurture are important, and it's all a very complex combination of factors. The only ones I'm wary of are the ones who generalize. And you still find those in both camps.