Humodour

I ticked the goldifsh and "try everything" option. A good combination in my books; it allows for infinite fun given a sufficiently long gap between repeating something. But I don't believe I'd become a bastard, I'd like to hope.

Well I'd have to put on hold my plan to start taking drugs at age 70. Damn, I was really looking forward to that mixed cocaine & acid trip, too.

Do it! I'm a wine n00b, but I'd enjoy reading about good wines. As long as people refrain from mentioning 100 year old wines they found in their friend's cellar.

Not really. All The Drudge Report does is cherrypick already published articles from other publications, and put links to them in his websight. Apparently he linked to an Australian magazine, that broke the news blackout, which was then picked up by a German newspaper. The Drudge Report merely linked to their story. ****ing New Idea. God I hate that magazine.

New thread, anyone? Not unless you're planning to make a poll or talk about wine instead?

Not really. Turkey can change the hadiths and Koran all it wants. It's got the power to do so. What it perhaps doesn't have the power to do is bring the majority of the Muslim world over to its point of view. Even so, no doubt a schism will form, and many Muslims worldwide would join, seeing a brighter, vibrant, more modern Islam as the logical choice. Sharia law isn't subject to local customs; it is based 90% off religious texts. Some localities might decide that parts of it are or aren't applicable, but in general, Sharia law isn't a local thing. EDIT: And "under constant watch"? So what? You can't fight ideas with bullets. If a new Islam is to form, sanctions against the country it is forming in won't stop it. And said sanctions aren't about to come from the West; the EU supports this move. And can you explain why you think transitional evolution is without merit? Because you're certainly going against the grain of conventional biology there. One of the many reasons I don't see 'stupidity' becoming favourable in humans is the massive compartmentalisation which characterises the human brain. It's one massive equilibrium system which will account for even large deviations relatively smoothly.

Supposedly Australia is still a monarchy as well. Who woulda thunk it.

I don't actually believe it's possible to "dumb-down" a species like humans, Azarkon. You can say what you want about IQ tests, but humans are a fundamentally language and society driven species. These things provide fundamental lower bounds on what our brains can achieve... not to mention little evidence for the heritability of small modern-day intelligence deviations, but much evidence for the extreme plasticity, adaptability and nurturability of the human brain (most people have basically the same brain and capabilities - on a basic level, humans just aren't dumb). If the human species gets dumb, it's not likely to occur in the next few thousand years, and further it's something that we would easily evolve back away from due to increased intelligence individuals becoming fitter again. Walsingham: agreed.

I don't know. To me that separates thinking and reasoning from human nature; as though these are things we just happened to stumble upon by chance, not inevitable by-products of our evolution (a combination of reaction to stimuli, and our evolution of society and altruism, much of which occurred at about 70,000 years ago).

Oops. I'm actually thinking of a red Irish cream ale. Kilkenny isn't a stout.

Heh. Watch Idiocracy. Its potential truth scares me.

Dysgenics/eugenics was used to try and justify genocide. E.g.: the holocaust. Dysgenics is the outcome people feared from lack of eugenics; dysgenics is what people feared because it 'threatened' eugenics. These days we know these irrational fears of dysgenics to be pretty much false; Jews aren't lesser beings, Aryans aren't superior beings.

True that. Those sentences shouldn't have been in my conclusion. I never actually did debating in school nor have I taken a logic/philosophy course for argument structure. Pardon me. Were you wondering how faith came to be part of human nature, evolutionarily? Your first sentence says we've proved certain theorems are true using axioms, but we haven't, since like you said, we don't know those formulae proofs, or the proofs of the base theorems. What you seem to me you're saying is, truth is relative, but it's not... because it's true, in the factual definition sense, that truth is relative. It's not a completely meaningless word because there are alternative definitions of truth, such as it's often used as an expression of agreement with someone about something, or when you're saying something that you're being honest and sincere about. Um? Mathematics is unlike the rest of human reasoning. It is based upon ideal, perfect, axioms which we actively chose to be the basis. From these axioms we can build things, and we can prove things to be exactly true by tracing them back to the axioms. Science, on the other hand, tries to identify what basic axioms the world runs on, but doesn't have any method of verifying their validity, timelessness or consistency. The best it can do is approximate what it thinks are the axioms, and hope there aren't any hidden catches (which there are; see deviation between mechanics at microscopic and macroscopic level for an example), and try to incorporate them as they appear. I've personally proved a fair few theorems in the my maths degree, many of which were proved from the base axioms; it was part of my pure maths unit. Who? Ah, just read your second post. Thanks!

Half of the time I drink Corona without citrus, and half the people I know (the men) do the same. It tastes and smells fine (as fine as any beer can taste or smell, which, let's be subjective, isn't good; it's an acquired taste). I've had more bad beer in brown bottles than I've had bad Coronas. It's just beer, mate. Don't go on a crusade about conspiracy theories by beer manufacturers to fool the masses; they don't exactly drink it because it tastes or smells nice in the first place. I will make an exception to that: Kilkenny Stout actually tastes good. If ambrosia existed, I bet it was Kilkenny.

How do you know gravity will do that? What evidence do you have that gravity will continue to act the same way every day? Because somebody told you that it does? Because you learnt about it in science? Did you prove it yourself? Did you prove the things upon which your proof of gravity is based on? You have faith that the proofs of gravity are true. You have faith that the fundamental laws of the universe won't change. You have faith in the people who make these laws and proofs. No, faith is intimately tangled up with belief and assumption. It is part of human neural wiring to be predisposed to faith; we can't make assumptions without it; we can't decide whether one thing is more important than another, because that requires a judgement about what is more likely, what the consequences will be (something we have faith in; whether we are strong in that faith or not, and whether or not that faith is in fact misplaced). Faith should not be confused with blind, inflexible devotion; while this is a subset of faith, it is not faith itself. Even in mathematics, which is built upon fundamental axioms which we don't have faith are true, but instead dictate are true, we must have faith, because the higher levels of maths are built upon mounds and mounds of axioms. We often prove many of these theorems through the axioms, but not all of them. The ones we don't prove we have faith are correct; that 100's of years of peer-review aren't wrong (and sometimes they are, though this is more often the case in physics than maths). For example, do you know how to prove the quadratic formula holds for the real numbers using the ordered field axioms? Take a stab at it here. It is quite fun (if you don't mind spending 10 hours doing something mind-numbing): http://www.calvin.edu/~rpruim/courses/m361...s-print-pp4.pdf More often in maths, we prove things are true using theorems we've previously proved are true (either by axioms or further theorems we've proved are true by axioms). But even in this case, we often use many identities or formulae without knowing their proofs, or without knowing the proofs of the base theorems. Conclusion: Faith is, in fact, a fundamental part of human nature. The fact that we have it might predisposes us to inventing and refining religion when we gather in significantly large groups, and some people might be more predisposed to faith with weak evidence than others, but religion is not inherently part of human nature, nor inherently part of faith.

Eugenics has no inherent link with government, politics or violence. These things have merely used eugenics as a scapegoat in the past, for things like genocide.

That's not eugenics. I suggest you read up on both the eugenics of the early 20th century (even this form is often completely unrelated to how you describe it), as well as what the theoretical definition actually is. You'd be surprised how often we practice it today, and how much more we practice it in medicine as each day passes. What you describe is more an attempt at preventing perceived dysgenics. So no, I can't yet see why eugenics in inherently evil; I completely recognise the potential for abuse, but I don't see abuse as the hallmark of eugenics. It's simply a disgusting shame that the first attempts at eugenics lead to abuse. A brief introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics I suppose I should qualify my defence of eugenics with my personal stance on it: I support prenatal screening of many genetic diseases and defects (not all, but some). I am less supportive of forced termination of pregnancies, and more in favour of the parents having 100% choice in the matter. I support birth control (including abortion up at a small length of time after fertilisation). I support in vitro fertilisation, sperm banks, and choice of sperm donor. I support limited, ethical genetic engineering, should it ever be perfected in humans.

Skimmed it. Quick thoughts: faith needn't be associated with religion in any way. But yes, belief and faith are intrinsic parts of human reasoning and decision making. I have faith that what people tell me about gravity is true. I have faith the gravity will act tomorrow like it did today.

Could you define eugenics? And perhaps explain why the concept is inherently evil?

I think this is the first move from an Islamic group that I have ever found myself actually looking forward to. I hold a grudge against Turkey for the Armenian Genocide and the invasion of Cyprus, but I must admit it is my favourite of all Islamic countries; perhaps not least of all because it doesn't practice Sharia Law and is in fact a secular democracy - not an easy feat for a 99.8% Muslim country. It appears that the people and government of Turkey are actively seeking progress in politics, economics and human rights, and for that I applaud them.

immaterial. stupid law or no, i agree with it. you can put a lemon in your beer all day, that doesn't mean i have to like such beers. if it was a good beer to begin with, it wouldn't need a lemon. If the cake was good to begin with, it wouldn't need sugar! immaterial again. beer gets out of the carton all the time and exposed to light (sunlight is worse) on a regular basis. beers in clear glass go "skunky" faster, period, whether you like it or not. Err, like you said - the UV is the problem. They don't go "skunky" faster, they go "skunky" faster when exposed to UV. You practice good storage of beer (such as drinking the **** soon after buying it, refrigerating when not drinking it, storage in a dark place, etc) and you haven't got a problem. I'll give you a hint: Yeast requires a small temperature range to grow (at most 10 to 37 Celsius). Fridges operate a few degrees above freezing (0 Celsius). You can say that the clear bottles ruin beer all you like, but I've yet to drink a Corona or Tooheys Extra Dry that didn't taste like the reason I bought it in the first place. Anyway, Walsingham is right; enough on that.

Firstly, you're confusing consensual blocking of offensive material with deliberate and blanket censorship - a pretty glaring mistake if you ask me. But even so, that's still a fundamentally flawed argument, for a multitude of reasons, but I'll point out the most obvious: 'We' find the blocked material offensive. 'We' have no problem with filters which selectively and accurately block "child porn". 'We' sometimes authorise our governments and ISPs to do this (whether through election or active participation in a filter). In the end the power lies with the people, and most significantly the individual. The case for Pakistan does not go as above. It goes: They (the people of Pakistan) do not unanimously find said material offensive. Those who find it offensive undoubtedly aren't even of a unanimous consensus that it should be blocked. Those that believe it should be blocked, no doubt don't believe that non-offensive material should also be blocked. In the end, 'they' (the people of Pakistan) don't believe YouTube should be blocked, yet their government does so anyway. As a result, this is not a matter of consensual agreement in the need for censorship, nor even concensual participation in a filter; it's an oppressive authoritarian move to suppress ideas and philosophies which the government would rather its people didn't have access to.

Well, no surprise there. That country has been going down hill ever since it split from India.

That's really stupid, IMO. excuse me? apparently you don't know anything about beer. 1) if it requires an additive, it is not done. additionally, look up the word reinheitsgebot. 2) if it is in a clear bottle, there is a chance that the remaining yeast can become active when exposed to sunlight rendering the beer all but undrinkable. nearly every quality beer in the world is bottled with dark glass. this is well known among any and all brewers. why corona does not do this is beyond me. yeah, something's stupid... taks 1) a stupid old German law about not adding some things to beer for political reasons? Oh noes, I put a lemon in it! 2) Beer is sold in cartons. I'm pretty sure the cartons aren't see-through.

I suspected this was a topic on random musings, but it appears Walsingham is in actuality voraciously interested in the topic at hand.