metadigital

People could PM me their answers; the first correct one I pick out of a hat wins a date with Pixies. (Second prize is two dates.)

And

It was rhetorical.

The treatment that thousands of parents voluntarily send their barely pubescent (male and female) offspring into, when they offer them up as sacrifices Washington DC interns is more disturbing than what a bunch of people want to do in a public convenience.

I asked a question?

That pig didn't get tired of hanging to the ceiling ..!

i think the major point of the article, at least those scientists that contributed to it, is that this void is larger than they expected even considering statistical variation. whether or not this is a valid concern is beyond my understanding of astrophysics, however. There was no mention of the void in my (pretty well up-to-date) physics text book, and (without this observation) we are left theorizing how the universe became so uniform ..! I have a better concept for you, though! *runs around the house looking for long-protected glossy brochure* it is a small booklet (almost a pamphlet, if we were back in the dawn of the print age), sent with my last Scientific American subscription, called "Parallel Universes". Not some beardo-weirdo philosobabble, either. Direct observation leads us to the conclusion that, maybe as little as about 10 to the 10^28 meters from where you stand there is an exact doppleganger of you. (We can currently see about 4x10^26 meters, or 42 billion lightyears, of the universe.) Let's do a thought experiment (because I like them). This article does use protons for its calculations (which is entirely reasonable, mostly) and therefore assumes that the constituents of hadrons (i.e. quarks and any other sub-subatomic particles that we have not witnessed yet, if they exist) would not make that one proton 2^10^118m away slightly different (flavour, colour charge, SOMETHING!) from its putative double over here in front of us. (Say that one bound up in the Hydrocarbon of the plastic keyboard that your finger is near.) Then the article gets a little weirder ...

Oh, as I'm expecting to be around for a few days, I'll re-open the topic.

Doesn't the universe just reboot and start again? (I'm not convinced the Mayans would be able to give a satisfactory answer to that question.) I'm not hostile to religion, per se, but I AM very short tempered with stupidity. (Nb, I am not calling people of faith stoopid, merely clarifying why I may respond slightly differently to someone arguing about cheese flavours and another arguing about who I should believe in and what I must do to show that I am pious.) (Also, it is pretty annoying to compose a serious response that encompasses several replies, references many other factors and makes an intelligent summary of the research, only to be spammed with something infantile and not talking to the point at hand. And some people I don't expect much from, and others I do. ") To be clear, I was actually interested in why you are so devout. Tell me you're a deist and I'll say "good for you!" because it makes no nevermind to me and I might even be tempted to agree at times. (Not really.) I do find it an amazing lottery that you are a Roman Catholic: most of your neighbours in a radius of five thousand miles (apart from South) are NOT Pope apologists (and, for the record, the immigrants from South America are more likely than not to join an Evangelical communion rather than stick with the establishment). A diameter length of the same circle we used to marvel at the remoteness of being born Catholic in the US takes us to the Bosphorus, and there you would more likely than not be a pious Muslim. Because your parents were. Another circle and we're swimming in Hinduism and Buddhism. The popularity of a faith speaks more to a measure of cultural mores than a statement of the vitality of a particular religion. Most of my searching for (religious) meaning has taken me on a quest for wisdom, gained (inelegantly and unpredictably) from the OCD accumulation of knowledge (at least I am working on that theory ). Religion stands up in the middle of my thinking room, festooned with sheafs upon reams of scribbled observations, and tells me to stop thinking. (And don't get me started on prosetylizing religions.) I'd be a lot less critical if the political establishments that call themselves churches would only allow adults to join, rather than encourage the inculcation of young minds before they can think critically. God (apparently) made the world. Humans definitely made religion.

Just a quick note: it is na

Ubisoft do the Splinter Cells and Ghost Recon games.

Phantom of the Opera. Emmy Rossum has the most sublime voice (and is that a seven octave range?) I have heard for a loooooooooooong time.

Cant, I was actually expecting something a little more serious in reply, though I understand how uncomfortable it must be to have cherished beliefs challenged in such a way, so I will continue to expound some thoughts so that you may digest them and perhaps reply in some meaningful way. If I repeat myself it is only because what I have said seems to have fallen on deaf ears. You can use any terms of denigration you wish, the fact remains that I refuse to base my life on something that someone else SAYS is true, regardless of the source. Like it or not, science is about predicting accurately and precisely what will happen in our world. I have no problem with you quoting and attempting to critique Dawkins; actually I hope you keep doing it ... you're an intelligent guy and I hope that one day you might actually start to question the assumptions you have made (see? I can be an optimist). My personal beef with religion is that it is a system that demands faith without critical thinking. Why is this bad? Why should average people trust authority without question? Well, to answer that in full will take a long time. I am only half-way through The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil so I can't give you a full summary of wisdom from the learned behaviouralists who have spent their lives studying how ordinary people are able to completely override their personal belief systems and act in completely evil (but predictable) ways, but I can give you some quick snippets. The first problem is that (Western) religion promotes evil (intuitively) as Dispositional rather than Situational. Overwhelming research demonstrates the counter-intuitive and uncomfortable truth that there is no such chasm between "good" and "evil" people. The second problem with organized religion is that it is a perfect framework to create a "Them-and-Us" scenario. Sure it isn't the only way, but it is one of the most effective, to dehumanize, morally disengage and intellectualize "Others" (heretics, apostates, infidels and unbelievers in this case). In short, the power to create "The Enemy"; to make others into "animals", or "sub-human". I'm sure you'll respond with some lame comment about the unreproachable piety of religious folks (or some other myth). I'm sure you will continue to refuse to look critically at something that you profess is very important in your life (which I still find incredible). But this is the point: you refuse (in any meaningful way) to challenge your blind obedience to (divine) authority (completely divorced from reality and scientific methods of evidential verification, and as interpreted by a human agent, who is "infallible"). Need I refer you to Milgram's Obedience Paradigm? Again, I hear you try to dissociate you, your family and religion from the evil that men do. "I am a good person, my friends and family are good people of good faith," you retort, reasonably. So, I point out, are the Palestinian Suicide Bombers. Sensationalism? Possibly. True? Undoubtably. Don't take my word for it, do some research. Can't happen to me? The recent attempted airport car-bombing in Scotland was perpetrated by a group of medical doctors! To be clear (and head off any temptation you might have to make a glib reply that I am insulting you by comparing you to suicide bombers), my main point in raising this is because organizational religion renders individuals more susceptible to the perils of groupthink and the abuse of roles assigned to them in the system. It is difficult enough to counter the situational and systemic factors that can override the (otherwise good) ethical dispositions of people.

I am for smaller government for one BIG reason: the principle-agent problem (translated to a political scenario): the further the distance between government and the people, the less effective, more costly and greater the abuses.

Feel free to elaborate.

Same. Interactions carried by massless quanta between objects travel at the fastest possible speed. According to Coloumb's Law, electromagnetic forces travel at the fastest speed possible, the speed of light, owing to the fact that the quanta (photons) possess no mass. (At high ambient energies, the em forces "combine" with weak nuclear forces, to produce the "electroweak" force.) Gravitational interactions are still so small and remote that they remain much of a mystery. Like electromagnetic interactions, the quanta (tentatively named the "graviton") has no mass (certainly nothing that we have detected so far), so it interacts on every particle according to the product of the masses and inversely of the distance apart. We owe the downwards fall of the apple to the fact that matter (specifically the matter of the apple and the Earth) is electrically neutral to an accuracy of far better than 1 part in 10^20 (which is how much stronger the electromagnetic interaction is than gravity). In other words, if only one atom in 10^20 would have to lose an electron for the force of gravity to be balanced out by the electromagnetic force repulsing the bodies. Interestingly, the recession speed of distant galaxies (the further they are away, the faster they are receding: Hubble's Law) does not mean that they are travelling faster, as their redshift might indicate as a function of the Doppler Effect; rather this redshift/recession speed indicates how fast SPACE ITSELF is expanding. Wrap your head around that one.

You mean wins.

Actually, as has been said previously, any scientist (atheist by another name in this thread) would purposefully and joyfully adopt WHATEVER hypothesis that answers the questions we ask of it. The problem is that religion doesn't answer questions meaningfully, it just gives a hollow "because God did / said / willed it". And the proof is not much more complex than the fact that explaining the universe with something even more complex, like a creator, is just ADDING to the complexity and improbability, not reducing it. (I'm paraphrasing, though I'm sure you'll ask me for more details ... which I will be happy to provide. Or, you could read the book. ) Dawkins is passionate and animated against religion for a completely different reason to the one you have cited (I'm assuming you haven't read The God Delusion and are just reacting to some quoted fragments, like the one you have above, otherwise you would know this); rather he is against religion because of the entrenched mental abuse that it fosters and inflicts -- especially on the young. E.g. telling a seven year old girl, who's school friend has just died from some horrific disease like cancer, that her dear friend will be tormented in Hell forever, simply because she wasn't a Catholic. The resultant real and documented trauma that the little girl suffered is a perfect example of this. (This is an actual letter from a woman of our age, who responded to one of his earlier books.) There are good people of faith, I have no doubt, but their faith is placed in the most bizarre of things. One might reasonably ask why we have such a complex belief in existence (and some -- I won't say opportunists, let's call them those who are looking for an easy answer -- would see this complexity as some flavour of validity). If we treat ideas as capable of some verisimilitude of a life cycle (which is still somewhat controversial, though as a model it has merit), we can see how some of these seemingly unrelated and odd factors might have come about. To quote Dawkins again: Or maybe an all powerful deity, who could divinely inspire any and all beings, requires us to feel guilty about being made imperfect, and compels us to tell everyone else what has only been revealed to us, and kill/ostracise those who disagree.

I would just like to register my shock and amazement, as well as add my unreserved congratulations to the Chancellor ... it's not often I'm surprised, and even less so because of how well a person behaves ..!

Anyone still interested in Starcraft 2?

I've got System Mechanic Pro 6.0 (partially) installed (I had to disable the anti-hacker application as it kept crashing NwN2), so I can customise the boot process with a high degree of granularity and control.

Oh the irony. When I want a worthless opinion from a loud mouthed know-nothing, I'll be sure to look you up though. They've been working on this since April of 05... it's over half way through 2007 now... how much longer do they expect people to wait? Seriously how much longer are you going to wait? I have other things to do in the meantime rather than just moan about a voluntary modification to a game that was released years ago. If and when it is released I will install the game and the mod, if only to see how the team have implemented their ideas. As I have already played the game I have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Why you think that ridiculing the developers will have ANY (positive) effect is beyond sense, though I can suggest some other reasons for your posting. To be clear, there is no edict that stipulates that everyone has to be nice, or even in agreement; but you cannot be rude (or defamatory) to others on this public forum of a private gaming company:

There are innate concepts of "fair play" (morality) in all humans (and possibly other species) that belie your logic. Given a conundrum, 98% (i.e. everyone as a first approximation, and allowing for the special case of psychopathy) will respond the same way to ethical dilemm

I'm assuming you are trying to be funny by being as rude as you are. All the same, I'll thank you for not insulting the team. (Illiud Latine dici non potest.)

I think you know more about the subject(s) than the author of the test.