That's a pretty selective set of criteria, but if you're willing to broaden them a bit, there's Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot,... No idea what they would have thought of "Universe Ordained Life", but they weren't exactly religious, either.
There is a SciFi book about this, Calculating God. The plot device is that aliens have discovered that this is indeed testable, and there could not have been anywhere near enough "buds." (That said, the god they find is not most religions' idea of God.)
"Would they get to the bus stop in time, if they ever set out?’
‘Well—theoretically. But it’d be a distance of light-years. And they wouldn’t want to by now: not those old chaps like Tamberlaine and Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar, or Henry the Fifth.’
‘Wouldn’t want to?’
‘That’s right. The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They’d started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back. About fifteen thousand years of our time it took them. We’ve picked out the house by now. Just a little pin prick of light and nothing else near it for millions of miles.’" --C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
(of course that's probably not what you meant, and I too would prefer to live in the countryside to living in the city...)
I am in fact a widower, and I have loved both wives. As for our situation in heaven, I can imagine several scenarios: there won't be sex; there will be free sex; there will be other things so entertaining that sex pales in comparison. And actually, the most probable situation, I suspect, is that there won't be time. But I have no concept of what that would be like.
> And after that they durst not ask him any question at all. > > Which pretty much sums up as Ask not uncomfortable questions, shut thine pie-hole!
I have a rather different take on it (as you probably guessed). Ask questions all you want (there are lots of other questions that people asked Jesus, where the outcome was not "shut up"), but (a) don't ask questions in public that you hope will trap Jesus--it's too likely to backfire; (b) expect that He might answer your question with another question (perhaps because your question was mis-directed); (c) don't expect to completely understand the answer.
FWIW, I don't think (c) is much different from science. When Michelson and Morley measured the speed of light in orthogonal directions, the result was not what they expected, nor did they understand the "answer". And (b) is a teaching method which is certainly not limited to Jesus.
> If the goal is to save one's immortal soul, then it might be a nice thing > to know what one will do with all that time.
I'm going to quote Yoda here: "This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked awayto the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was." I've been in churches where there was a lot of emphasis on the future ("eschatology"). And frankly, I think the church I'm in now, which talks a lot about what our behavior here and now, and very little about the "end times" or heaven, is doing a lot more good, for me, for others in the church, and for the world.
> There are some among humans who think that having > an immortal soul at all would be an unforgivable curse.
I wonder if that's really the issue they have. Putting it differently, if they were given a satisfactory answer to that question, would they convert?
BTW, I appreciate the tone of your reply--civil, not dismissive. There's far too little of that here on \. (and elsewhere, I'm afraid...). I'm hoping I come across the same, but I can't judge that.
I'm not really going to disagree with that (you'll probably find me in church on Sunday), but you might find this SciFi book an interesting read: http://www.amazon.com/Calculat... ("Calculating God")
I haven't read the article yet, so if I were wise I would keep my mouth shut. But...
I think part of the problem has been that too many giant planets have been found in orbits close to their star. A Jovian or super-Jovian class planet that close causes some kind of instability over the eons to the orbits of smaller planets in the habitable zone, or so I've heard. (It has also been proposed that the migration of a Jovian-class planet from its far-out position where it formed to a near-star orbit would wreak havoc with planets in the habitable zone, but this says that's not necessarily true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
At least the widows question has already been asked, and answered, about 2000 years ago; you might have a look at Luke 20:27-40. Beer, not really, but you might take some comfort from the fact that Jesus turned water into wine.
As for what you would do in heaven, the Bible says precious little, maybe because getting hung up on that is missing the point. An afterlife is barely even mentioned in the Old Testament (the Jewish Bible)--some would say it doesn't come up at all there.
And no, the Bible does not mention sitting in clouds, etc.
When you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, do you feel awe? What would you think of a person who thought we should use the Grand Canyon as a garbage dump, because we could dispose of a lot of trash in there without filling it up? (imagine for the sake of argument we didn't have to worry about the Colorado River transporting the trash downstream)
Or if you've never seen the Grand Canyon in person, what about looking up at the sky at night? Do you not feel amazed, awestricken, almost--I'll use that word--worshipful? And what do you feel when you show someone such a sight, and they shrug it off? Isn't there something odd--maybe even wrong--about their attitude?
Or photographs of Saturn, or Pluto, or another galaxy? If you do react emotionally to those pictures (I do), how do you react to someone who considered Cassini or New Horizons or Hubble a stupid waste of time?
If you can feel awe at those things (and I'm assuming you do--if you don't, then my argument is for nought); and if you feel that is somehow a proper feeling (and you are disappointed at people who don't appreciate them); then why shouldn't we rightly have the same feelings toward God? Wouldn't it be _proper_ to feel that same way, only more so, towards a God who created a universe in which the Grand Canyon, Saturn, and galaxies exist? Wouldn't it be somehow nonsensical to have those feelings towards His creation, but not towards Him? (Or not to have those feelings of awe towards anything at all.)
I don't think the issue God sees with non-worship is one of ego; I think the issue He sees with it is a lack of appreciation for things outside oneself. Or perhaps God does see an ego problem with non-worshippers--but its their problem, not His.
It's been known since 1957 that people do not use finite state languages; we use languages with at least the complexity of context free phrase structure grammar (Chomsky's claim back then was that grammars of languages had transformational power). And whether a language is finite state has nothing to do with how many words it has (as long as there's at least one); it's possible to use a phrase structure grammar with only one word (although it can be more difficult to prove that such a language is not finite state, and obviously you'd be rather limited in what you can say). Nor does it have anything to do with how many inflections the words have.
You should go to Hong Kong some time. I felt tall for the first time in my life (I'm a 5'8" male). At least until I got into an elevator with some Germans...
I dunno about the genetics, but about the languages: A small group of nearly extinct Siberian languages (not believed to be related, btw, to Indo European languages) is quite likely related to the Na-Dene languages of North America (Tlingit, Navajo/ Dene, Slave, Carrier, and perhaps a dozen other Athabaskan languages whose names I don't recall). You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... And the Inuit ("Eskimo") languages around the polar regions are related. But afaik, there is no indication that any other language outside of the Americas is related to any other language of the Americas, nor is there evidence that any of the Na-Dene languages are related to any other native American languages.
Wow, a seriously bad article. Nearly everything it says about Basque (except for its being a language isolate) is wrong. E.g. "The structure of the Basque language is also very distinctive, it is said to contain only nouns, verbs, and suffixes." Hundreds of languages fit that description: having suffixes and lacking adjectives. But Basque isn't one of them; it has adjectives (see e.g. http://mylanguages.org/basque_..., or the Wikipedia article on Basque grammar), and at least two prefixes. And the article is wrong about Basque vowels (it does have the 'ee' vowel, what linguists would write as/i/)--in fact it has all the vowels that Spanish has (and one dialect has an additional one).
As for Basque being an isolate, hundreds of languages are isolates, with no known related languages.
I'm a linguist, those inaccuracies jumped out; I can't comment on the accuracy of the other points.
I suppose your posting was a joke, although the linked-to-page appears not to be.
>> The problem is that for those of us who grew up with alphabetic writing systems >How does that help the original menu system. It was categorized, not alphabetic
I wasn't clear, I guess: I wasn't referring to the order, I simply meant that the menus were written in an alphabetic writing system (that's how we write English), instead of with icons. In the ribbon, I never look at the icons, because most of them are meaningless to me; instead, I read the labels, and the icons just get in the way.
> What makes the ribbon powerful is your ability to customize it
That is true now, it was not true of the original ribbon; it was like a Ford that you could have in any color you wanted, so long as it was black.
>> Like in Word, everything under the Mailings tab. > Not useful for you but I can assure those features are often used in smaller businesses.
I guess if you're sending out Word docs in spam mail, that might be true. But I can't think of any time I've gotten Word docs where it looked like someone might have used Word's "mailing" features. So to me it's just a symptom of Word putting things in front of me that neither I nor anyone else I know ever uses.
> From an end user perspective I can agree that one needs to relearn where things are and most people don't like having to adjust.
In the last five or so years, I've adjusted to the changes in Word by learning LaTeX. It does "legal" section numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1...) right the first time, something which I've never gotten to work reliably in any version of Word. Afaict, rather than fixing the bugs in section numbering, in the last ten years Word has made it almost impossible to set it up. (There are websites that tell how to set it up: it looks incredibly hard to get right.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty selective set of criteria, but if you're willing to broaden them a bit, there's Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot,... No idea what they would have thought of "Universe Ordained Life", but they weren't exactly religious, either.
There is a SciFi book about this, Calculating God. The plot device is that aliens have discovered that this is indeed testable, and there could not have been anywhere near enough "buds." (That said, the god they find is not most religions' idea of God.)
"Would they get to the bus stop in time, if they ever set out?’
‘Well—theoretically. But it’d be a distance of light-years. And they wouldn’t want to by now: not those old chaps like Tamberlaine and Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar, or Henry the Fifth.’
‘Wouldn’t want to?’
‘That’s right. The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They’d started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back. About fifteen thousand years of our time it took them. We’ve picked out the house by now. Just a little pin prick of light and nothing else near it for millions of miles.’" --C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
(of course that's probably not what you meant, and I too would prefer to live in the countryside to living in the city...)
North Korea, too: http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
There are no Dilithium crystals in our Sun. Maybe in the Klingon star, but not ours.
> If you are a widower, and you remarry...
I am in fact a widower, and I have loved both wives. As for our situation in heaven, I can imagine several scenarios: there won't be sex; there will be free sex; there will be other things so entertaining that sex pales in comparison. And actually, the most probable situation, I suspect, is that there won't be time. But I have no concept of what that would be like.
> And after that they durst not ask him any question at all.
>
> Which pretty much sums up as Ask not uncomfortable questions, shut thine pie-hole!
I have a rather different take on it (as you probably guessed). Ask questions all you want (there are lots of other questions that people asked Jesus, where the outcome was not "shut up"), but (a) don't ask questions in public that you hope will trap Jesus--it's too likely to backfire; (b) expect that He might answer your question with another question (perhaps because your question was mis-directed); (c) don't expect to completely understand the answer.
FWIW, I don't think (c) is much different from science. When Michelson and Morley measured the speed of light in orthogonal directions, the result was not what they expected, nor did they understand the "answer". And (b) is a teaching method which is certainly not limited to Jesus.
> If the goal is to save one's immortal soul, then it might be a nice thing
> to know what one will do with all that time.
I'm going to quote Yoda here: "This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked awayto the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was." I've been in churches where there was a lot of emphasis on the future ("eschatology"). And frankly, I think the church I'm in now, which talks a lot about what our behavior here and now, and very little about the "end times" or heaven, is doing a lot more good, for me, for others in the church, and for the world.
> There are some among humans who think that having
> an immortal soul at all would be an unforgivable curse.
I wonder if that's really the issue they have. Putting it differently, if they were given a satisfactory answer to that question, would they convert?
BTW, I appreciate the tone of your reply--civil, not dismissive. There's far too little of that here on \. (and elsewhere, I'm afraid...). I'm hoping I come across the same, but I can't judge that.
And the only reason the simulation hasn't been shut down is that the "Shut Down" command is under a menu that says "Start."
Thank God for Windows!
No, but I think it's in the way of a hyperspace by-pass.
> and therefore God, and hence Baby Jesus
I'm not really going to disagree with that (you'll probably find me in church on Sunday), but you might find this SciFi book an interesting read: http://www.amazon.com/Calculat... ("Calculating God")
I haven't read the article yet, so if I were wise I would keep my mouth shut. But...
I think part of the problem has been that too many giant planets have been found in orbits close to their star. A Jovian or super-Jovian class planet that close causes some kind of instability over the eons to the orbits of smaller planets in the habitable zone, or so I've heard. (It has also been proposed that the migration of a Jovian-class planet from its far-out position where it formed to a near-star orbit would wreak havoc with planets in the habitable zone, but this says that's not necessarily true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
At least the widows question has already been asked, and answered, about 2000 years ago; you might have a look at Luke 20:27-40. Beer, not really, but you might take some comfort from the fact that Jesus turned water into wine.
As for what you would do in heaven, the Bible says precious little, maybe because getting hung up on that is missing the point. An afterlife is barely even mentioned in the Old Testament (the Jewish Bible)--some would say it doesn't come up at all there.
And no, the Bible does not mention sitting in clouds, etc.
When you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, do you feel awe? What would you think of a person who thought we should use the Grand Canyon as a garbage dump, because we could dispose of a lot of trash in there without filling it up? (imagine for the sake of argument we didn't have to worry about the Colorado River transporting the trash downstream)
Or if you've never seen the Grand Canyon in person, what about looking up at the sky at night? Do you not feel amazed, awestricken, almost--I'll use that word--worshipful? And what do you feel when you show someone such a sight, and they shrug it off? Isn't there something odd--maybe even wrong--about their attitude?
Or photographs of Saturn, or Pluto, or another galaxy? If you do react emotionally to those pictures (I do), how do you react to someone who considered Cassini or New Horizons or Hubble a stupid waste of time?
If you can feel awe at those things (and I'm assuming you do--if you don't, then my argument is for nought); and if you feel that is somehow a proper feeling (and you are disappointed at people who don't appreciate them); then why shouldn't we rightly have the same feelings toward God? Wouldn't it be _proper_ to feel that same way, only more so, towards a God who created a universe in which the Grand Canyon, Saturn, and galaxies exist? Wouldn't it be somehow nonsensical to have those feelings towards His creation, but not towards Him? (Or not to have those feelings of awe towards anything at all.)
I don't think the issue God sees with non-worship is one of ego; I think the issue He sees with it is a lack of appreciation for things outside oneself. Or perhaps God does see an ego problem with non-worshippers--but its their problem, not His.
It's been known since 1957 that people do not use finite state languages; we use languages with at least the complexity of context free phrase structure grammar (Chomsky's claim back then was that grammars of languages had transformational power). And whether a language is finite state has nothing to do with how many words it has (as long as there's at least one); it's possible to use a phrase structure grammar with only one word (although it can be more difficult to prove that such a language is not finite state, and obviously you'd be rather limited in what you can say). Nor does it have anything to do with how many inflections the words have.
> there are always methods of getting something done in secrecy
Yeap, worked real well for the Germans and Japanese in WWII.
Someone should mod you 26 points.
You should go to Hong Kong some time. I felt tall for the first time in my life (I'm a 5'8" male). At least until I got into an elevator with some Germans...
I dunno about the genetics, but about the languages: A small group of nearly extinct Siberian languages (not believed to be related, btw, to Indo European languages) is quite likely related to the Na-Dene languages of North America (Tlingit, Navajo/ Dene, Slave, Carrier, and perhaps a dozen other Athabaskan languages whose names I don't recall). You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... And the Inuit ("Eskimo") languages around the polar regions are related. But afaik, there is no indication that any other language outside of the Americas is related to any other language of the Americas, nor is there evidence that any of the Na-Dene languages are related to any other native American languages.
Wow, a seriously bad article. Nearly everything it says about Basque (except for its being a language isolate) is wrong. E.g. "The structure of the Basque language is also very distinctive, it is said to contain only nouns, verbs, and suffixes." Hundreds of languages fit that description: having suffixes and lacking adjectives. But Basque isn't one of them; it has adjectives (see e.g. http://mylanguages.org/basque_..., or the Wikipedia article on Basque grammar), and at least two prefixes. And the article is wrong about Basque vowels (it does have the 'ee' vowel, what linguists would write as /i/)--in fact it has all the vowels that Spanish has (and one dialect has an additional one).
As for Basque being an isolate, hundreds of languages are isolates, with no known related languages.
I'm a linguist, those inaccuracies jumped out; I can't comment on the accuracy of the other points.
I suppose your posting was a joke, although the linked-to-page appears not to be.
From the OP: "We're not creating this for [illegal activity]. And OK, maybe it's being used for that, but that's not what we're about!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
>> The problem is that for those of us who grew up with alphabetic writing systems
>How does that help the original menu system. It was categorized, not alphabetic
I wasn't clear, I guess: I wasn't referring to the order, I simply meant that the menus were written in an alphabetic writing system (that's how we write English), instead of with icons. In the ribbon, I never look at the icons, because most of them are meaningless to me; instead, I read the labels, and the icons just get in the way.
> What makes the ribbon powerful is your ability to customize it
That is true now, it was not true of the original ribbon; it was like a Ford that you could have in any color you wanted, so long as it was black.
>> Like in Word, everything under the Mailings tab.
> Not useful for you but I can assure those features are often used in smaller businesses.
I guess if you're sending out Word docs in spam mail, that might be true. But I can't think of any time I've gotten Word docs where it looked like someone might have used Word's "mailing" features. So to me it's just a symptom of Word putting things in front of me that neither I nor anyone else I know ever uses.
> From an end user perspective I can agree that one needs to relearn where things are and most people don't like having to adjust.
In the last five or so years, I've adjusted to the changes in Word by learning LaTeX. It does "legal" section numbering (1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1...) right the first time, something which I've never gotten to work reliably in any version of Word. Afaict, rather than fixing the bugs in section numbering, in the last ten years Word has made it almost impossible to set it up. (There are websites that tell how to set it up: it looks incredibly hard to get right.)
And with that I'll agree with you 110%! (And no, I'm not being sarcastic, just realistic :-).)
Of course. Just like you do realize you detected the sarcasm without any auditory or visual cues.
I have felt a great disturbance in the Force.
Yeah, right.
What's fashion got to do with it? I want to *use* a computer, not pretend it's a fashion show.