Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...
  • What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
  • This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
  • The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
  • The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
  • It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Global warming kills through cold?

Girl, 8, dies of hypothermia in Negev | Jerusalem Post

The girl, from one of the Bedouin villages in the area, is the fifth to die this week as a result of the unusually cold weather.

Yes, the cold in Israel and the surrounding region is that bad. People who don't usually dress in anything more insulating than a few layers of thin woven fabrics are getting cold enough to die.

With respect to the global warming controversy, this should point up exactly how shallow, superficial, and naively simplistic the thinking of the Chicken Little crowd is.

Allow me to repeat something: as the Earth gets warmer as it heads out of a glacial period, ice retreats and since nature abhors a vacuum as they say, plant life grows in hard on the glaciers' heels. As plant life takes root where once ice covered the land, it dies, decomposes, and the plethora of microbial life on Earth which handles that release methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other things from the organic materials.

Human and other mammalian life thrives in warmer times as the region that can support them increases dramatically from the dead of the glacial period. They fart methane among other things, they defecate and urinate and those wastes add to the decomposition gas output. Did you think all our septic treatment plants didn't have to put the poop somewhere to compost?

Or they burn it and carbon dioxide is output.

The Earth continues to get warmer. Whether or not we have fossil fuels. Ice has happened before, it will happen again, and mankind's extra output may be the only thing that staves off that ice for any time, but don't count on it. As long as the continents remain in their current arrangement allowing the global ocean circulatory patterns we have, as well as their interaction with the air currents above, we will likely keep going back and forth between deep freeze and somewhat warm.