Passionate hobbyists are often a great source of technical information, and usually more objective than industry sources. The thing to watch out for is people who have become so absorbed by their hobby, they start to put great subjective weight on distinctions that would be without difference to a "normal" person. Audio gear, gourmet food, fine wine, running shoes... It's XKCD 915 all the way down. I also recommend Penn & Teller: Bullshit! S03E12 ("The Best") on this subject.
Good for the hobbyists, if it enhances their enjoyment, but if you're a casual, microscopic variations are going to be dwarfed by other factors.
I think we're giving too much credit to audiophiles. We're talking people who might have discussions on their forums about whether audio buffers in memory allocated with malloc or in memory allocated with C++'s `new` sounds best. Stuff which doesn't have "microscopic effects dwarfed by other factors" but stuff which has literally no effect.
Agreed. I was just mentioning it because people don't seem to realise that we are on the verge of losing it (and it may actually be that it is too late).
Of course we should fight to preserve as much as we can. Nobody wants to live in a bunker on mars. Almost...
1) maybe those species aren’t as unchanged as we think, because our evidence of the past is limited to things like skeletons, and maybe the skeletal structure of the shark didn’t change much, but other aspects did.
But more likely…
2) maybe unchanging requires a stable environment with stable selection pressures - but humans have had a rollercoaster of change in selection pressures, possibly more than any other species.
Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.
The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.
But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.
"I'm told there is a relationship, but I can't prove it."
John knows who his uncles are. His father is Walter Charles Dvorak born in Minneapolis to John Steve Dvorak (also born in Minneapolis). August Dvorak and all of his siblings (none of them Walter) were all born in McLeod County to IMMIGRANT Joseph Dvorak. If there's a connection it goes back to Bohemia.
I don’t think anyone can lay claim to a plot of land in perpetuity. Reverence should and does fade over time. Maybe when you are initially buried, that plot of earth belongs to you for a while, but after hundreds of years, it’s the other way round: you belong to the earth.
By the way, I don’t think you deserve downvotes for expressing your opinion.
-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.
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