I would argue that Quantumn Mechanics better reflects the mind than the other way around. The only reason Quantumn is so disturbing is that it forces us to consider two possibilities at the same time. Our entire lives are lived making choice, that we think are logical, but once you get past the excuses and a rationalization, they turn out to be arbitrary. Or worse, someone else's arbitrary choice.
Our brain is perfectly equipped for dealing with more than one possibility at a time. It's a massive parallel computer, and it's regularly juggling mutually exclusive tasks so we don't even notice.
However, the concious mind can only deal with one possibilty at a time. We have elaborate computing techniques for reducing possibilities, predjudice, logic, and language. Language is perhaps the biggest driver of single possibility thinking. When we say something, it is generally to the exclusion of something else. Once we say something, we can't take it back. This massive shared delusion we call "Literature", while it allows us to share ideas, it reinforces the notion that things can only happen one way at a time.
And generally the most literate people are the ones least likely to engage in parallel thinking. (Grumbles the frustrated science fiction writer wannabee who has a story stuck in his head, but he can't tell it all at once.)
Though with all that pipework and the dumbbell, you would be hard-pressed not to make your picturephone look like some sort of S&M apparatus, or a sex toy on Viagra.
Actually being an effective pilot is more about being able to deal with confined spaces for hours (sometimes days) at a time. For fighter jocks, you have to withstand high G-forces, and they generally requires training with weights.
Besides, the computer does most of the aiming these days anyway.
Exactly who are you branding as "Christians" here?
The Catholics? Eastern Orthodox or Roman? The Protestents? Methodist, Baptist, Episcipalian, Prebereterian, Quaker, Anglican, 7th day Adventists, Mormons, etc, etc, etc.
Why not just talk about all those "Colored folk", or those "Gooks". They all share a common trait. They all must think alike too.
The Christian Right is neither. Now pick a different term when discussing those morons.
Man, of all the generations to have started that anti-smoking fad, why did it have to be the baby boomers? Why couldn't they be content to die of lung cancer so that I'm not paying an assload of taxes to keep them in a lifestyle to which they become accustomed.
I hate to be crass here, but their quest for immortality is damn inconvienient! I mean by the time I'm their age they'll have all the cures for the various nasty cancers and...
Then my kids will bitch about how long I'm living.
Er, no. Evangalism is not about making converts. It's about making sure that anyone we meet knows there is more to existance than the Earthly rules of dog eat dog.
Christians are very big on the seperation of Church and State. From the very mouth of Christ we have: "Render onto God what is God's, and Caeser what is Caeser's." [Matthew 22:21] Church is not supposed to be tied up in earthly affairs, most especially Government. Prima Face.
Now I will grant you, there are a vast number of simpletons who interpret Evangalism to be "we need to make everyone just like us..." I don't know what to call them. They aren't Christian, and the aren't Right. They bang their bible because they can't figure out how to open it.
Don't knock a religion for the actions of a few pig-headed followers.
Porn by itself is ok. Images and depictions of eroticism are as old as civilization itself. (Indeed, the Bible is rife with some rather lurid descriptions of who did whom and how.)
Now under the Jewish faith, you are judged by your actions. I think we all can imagine a few of God's ordinances we break as a result of watching porn.
Christians have a harder time. To a Christian, fantisizing about adultery or fornication is as bad as doing it. Of course, it's also assumed that we are all sinners at heart. So while God isn't pleased by it, he still loves us.
Thus watching porn, in of itself, is ok. The emotions and desires that it stirs up are part of our sinning nature. Even without the porn, the corruption is there.
What the big guy upstairs cares about is what you do to overcome that corruption? Do you let your boys out to play then fall asleep? Not ideal, but mostly harmless. Now, acting on those desires in other ways... well we are back to being judged by our actions again, aren't we.
I'm glancing through the New Testiment, and I find a lot of passages about the corrupting influences of money. I don't see a thing about porn.
We would all have to speak Hebrew and Greek to actually quote the Bible properly.
There are a lot of word in ancient languages that would in modern english represent several ideas simultaneously. In the lord's prayer some denomimations use "trespasses", others use "debts". Whatever word Christ ACTUALLY said was a meant both.
You can't mince words with the Bible, people. You are reading a translation (from Hebrew to Greek) of a translation (from Greek to Latin) of a translation (from Latin to English.) Granted, Paul's writings started off in Greek. You only have 3 levels of translation for large chunks of the New Testiment.
Now while they are translations, they are amoung the best ever researched. Each chapter and verse carries the same idea as the original version. But analyzing quotes word for word is ludicrous.
Now, of course every one of you chuckleheads clicking on the link to gawk are all but assuring that the next time my kid has to do a report on Pocahantis or something she gets an eyefull.
Mental note: Junior and Juniorette should not be surfing under daddy's settings.
And BTW, that's pretty damn tame compared to old school usenet. Ah, a.b.p.tasteless. Bringing you people shredded by elevators, human road kills, gunshot victims, and more!
If everyone stopped being a damn WHORE to the bosses in all levels, then we would have a nice fair system.
I hear that. For the first few years of my career I was a brown nosing ferret. "Jump, Jump, oooo How high!." It was after being utterly screwed a few times by the folks upstairs that I realized that when I bust my ass, they look good. But good doesn't trickle down. I also learned that when you stop jumping through hoops, they start getting mad at you.
It finally took having a heart to heart with my boss about the fact that there is a life outside these walls. Yes, believe it or not, bosses are human too.
I think it's like sharks. There are almost no recorded attacks by sharks on divers in the water. (Unless of course they were feeding sharks and had a nice pile of bait strapped to them.)
Why? Scuba divers don't look like food. Almost all shark attacks on humans are on the surface, where they mistake us for seals, or injured whales.
Bosses can smell fear. They know who they can intimidate. If you stand your ground, and don't act like a victim, they have to change modes and treat you like something else.
Or they just invent a reason to fire you. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Have they fixed the goofiness with reiserfs and 2.6. On my RAID array I get random oddities, like a user who owns a file but can't access it. And our Veritas Backup Exec client won't decend down to a reiserfs mounted volume.
Sure I could wipe and reformat the array, but the bugger is 100GB and my last restore took 48 hours.
The United States is a third world country that hit the lottery. We were the last man standing after WWII. People bought our stuff because most of the rest of the manufacturing base in the world was bombed flat. Rather than invest that money into improving education, we squandered it as profit, has a moon shot or 4, and built a really big road system.
We are now sliding back into a largely agrarian economy. About the only thing we produce that the rest of the world wants is food. For a while it was computers, but in our absolute lust for profit we sold the production capacity to Asia for cheap.
We have a first rate University system, but increasingly our own students aren't educated enough to use them. We can spend 600 billion dollars protecting ourselves from missiles that don't exist, but we can't spend 6 cents on education without some regulatory string attached to it.
We have fine hospitals that none can afford. When my wife delivered our baby, we were surrounded on all sides by women with no insurance, who often had no pre-natal care. And that stuff is cheap at twice the price.
We have sports fields that are subsidized by taxpayers that few citizens could afford tickets to. Our schools are scraping change, but we can cut massive tax breaks for a couple of billionaires to build a new ballpark.
And hey, I am an American. Born here. Educated here. Live here. But this place is a playground for the rich. There is the resort, but outside the resort is abject poverty.
One man's "Macroecononic Machinations" is another man's deflation. If prices go into a downward spiral than things will cost less over time. That's all well and good, the American consumer has muttled through inflation, deflation is surviable too.
Except of course that a lot of people have money sunk into their "nest egg", their house. They expect to sell it for more than they paid for it. Deflation is going to be a disaster for real-estate, which is about the only shining spot in the economy right now.
What, you thought downward pressure of prices only affected consumer goods?
And don't forget about the stock market. That whole house of cards was built on people dumping money in. People with less cash on hand have less to invest, which leads to less churn, which leads to everyone who has money in the market being stuck with what they have. Unless they are willing to sell it for less.
Deflation will be an unmitigated disaster for our economy.
The road to destruction is often wide and well paved.
The day of judgement I'm more worried about is the one that decides my immortal soul. My job I really can't take seriously enough to play these games.
I state things the way I see them. That way I don't have to remember what the story is. Have I had to move on to better things at times for it? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No. It's called maturity. If something isn't going to work, it is better to realize it early.
And in bad situatuins, it is good to be the first one in the lifeboat.
My "lifestyle" consists of trying to come up with enough money to feed my wife, child, and keep a roof over our head.
My only "luxury" car was bought in 2000. (Paid off, thank you very much.) My "luxury" villa is a 1600 square foot row home. (29 years to go on the mortgage, woohoo.) My "luxury" computer has parts that are at least 5 years old. (When you build it yourself, upgrades are cheap.) I take the bus to work.
Despite this austere lifestyle I regularly have to scrounge change for coffee. Now if this is extravigent, I would hate to see how you would have me live.
Since when is 70 hours/week, paying off school loans, and sucking it up every year as your health insurance rates skyrocket "fat and happy."
Look at American productivity numbers. The amount of work we do per capita exceed that of the Japanese, who we used to stereotype for working too hard. These companies were built on the work and sweat of the employees, and rather than share in the profit we are being sent off to the glue factory.
I don't know whether you are trolling, but you really struck a nerve.
Sure the companies that engage in this practice get higher profits. However, the population in general gets an eroded tax base. Unemployed people don't pay taxes. People who trade in a $80k/y white collar job for a $20k/y blue jacket at Wal-mart have a good deal less disposable income to spend.
Slashdot Mirror
Well saterdays was the only way he could get a 9 letter word to interect with "JELLOES", a 7 letter dessert advertised by Bill Cosby in the 1980's.
Our brain is perfectly equipped for dealing with more than one possibility at a time. It's a massive parallel computer, and it's regularly juggling mutually exclusive tasks so we don't even notice.
However, the concious mind can only deal with one possibilty at a time. We have elaborate computing techniques for reducing possibilities, predjudice, logic, and language. Language is perhaps the biggest driver of single possibility thinking. When we say something, it is generally to the exclusion of something else. Once we say something, we can't take it back. This massive shared delusion we call "Literature", while it allows us to share ideas, it reinforces the notion that things can only happen one way at a time.
And generally the most literate people are the ones least likely to engage in parallel thinking. (Grumbles the frustrated science fiction writer wannabee who has a story stuck in his head, but he can't tell it all at once.)
My problem is that I usually try to show a colleague what I thought was a finished solution, only to discover a fundimental problem. Think Sisyphis.
Though with all that pipework and the dumbbell, you would be hard-pressed not to make your picturephone look like some sort of S&M apparatus, or a sex toy on Viagra.
Besides, the computer does most of the aiming these days anyway.
The Catholics? Eastern Orthodox or Roman? The Protestents? Methodist, Baptist, Episcipalian, Prebereterian, Quaker, Anglican, 7th day Adventists, Mormons, etc, etc, etc.
Why not just talk about all those "Colored folk", or those "Gooks". They all share a common trait. They all must think alike too.
The Christian Right is neither. Now pick a different term when discussing those morons.
I hate to be crass here, but their quest for immortality is damn inconvienient! I mean by the time I'm their age they'll have all the cures for the various nasty cancers and ...
Then my kids will bitch about how long I'm living.
Christians are very big on the seperation of Church and State. From the very mouth of Christ we have: "Render onto God what is God's, and Caeser what is Caeser's." [Matthew 22:21] Church is not supposed to be tied up in earthly affairs, most especially Government. Prima Face.
Now I will grant you, there are a vast number of simpletons who interpret Evangalism to be "we need to make everyone just like us..." I don't know what to call them. They aren't Christian, and the aren't Right. They bang their bible because they can't figure out how to open it.
Don't knock a religion for the actions of a few pig-headed followers.
Between this mental image and the "Indian Woman" google search I'm going to scrub my brain with a brillo pad.
Now under the Jewish faith, you are judged by your actions. I think we all can imagine a few of God's ordinances we break as a result of watching porn.
Christians have a harder time. To a Christian, fantisizing about adultery or fornication is as bad as doing it. Of course, it's also assumed that we are all sinners at heart. So while God isn't pleased by it, he still loves us.
Thus watching porn, in of itself, is ok. The emotions and desires that it stirs up are part of our sinning nature. Even without the porn, the corruption is there.
What the big guy upstairs cares about is what you do to overcome that corruption? Do you let your boys out to play then fall asleep? Not ideal, but mostly harmless. Now, acting on those desires in other ways... well we are back to being judged by our actions again, aren't we.
I'm glancing through the New Testiment, and I find a lot of passages about the corrupting influences of money. I don't see a thing about porn.
We would all have to speak Hebrew and Greek to actually quote the Bible properly.
There are a lot of word in ancient languages that would in modern english represent several ideas simultaneously. In the lord's prayer some denomimations use "trespasses", others use "debts". Whatever word Christ ACTUALLY said was a meant both.
You can't mince words with the Bible, people. You are reading a translation (from Hebrew to Greek) of a translation (from Greek to Latin) of a translation (from Latin to English.) Granted, Paul's writings started off in Greek. You only have 3 levels of translation for large chunks of the New Testiment.
Now while they are translations, they are amoung the best ever researched. Each chapter and verse carries the same idea as the original version. But analyzing quotes word for word is ludicrous.
Mental note: Junior and Juniorette should not be surfing under daddy's settings.
And BTW, that's pretty damn tame compared to old school usenet. Ah, a.b.p.tasteless. Bringing you people shredded by elevators, human road kills, gunshot victims, and more!
Mental Note...
Why be content washing their mouths out when we can get the trachea too.
I hear that. For the first few years of my career I was a brown nosing ferret. "Jump, Jump, oooo How high!." It was after being utterly screwed a few times by the folks upstairs that I realized that when I bust my ass, they look good. But good doesn't trickle down. I also learned that when you stop jumping through hoops, they start getting mad at you.
It finally took having a heart to heart with my boss about the fact that there is a life outside these walls. Yes, believe it or not, bosses are human too.
I think it's like sharks. There are almost no recorded attacks by sharks on divers in the water. (Unless of course they were feeding sharks and had a nice pile of bait strapped to them.)
Why? Scuba divers don't look like food. Almost all shark attacks on humans are on the surface, where they mistake us for seals, or injured whales.
Bosses can smell fear. They know who they can intimidate. If you stand your ground, and don't act like a victim, they have to change modes and treat you like something else.
Or they just invent a reason to fire you. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Sure I could wipe and reformat the array, but the bugger is 100GB and my last restore took 48 hours.
They don't call it the "kernel of the month" club for nothing.
An un-paid intern position I might add.
The United States is a third world country that hit the lottery. We were the last man standing after WWII. People bought our stuff because most of the rest of the manufacturing base in the world was bombed flat. Rather than invest that money into improving education, we squandered it as profit, has a moon shot or 4, and built a really big road system.
We are now sliding back into a largely agrarian economy. About the only thing we produce that the rest of the world wants is food. For a while it was computers, but in our absolute lust for profit we sold the production capacity to Asia for cheap.
We have a first rate University system, but increasingly our own students aren't educated enough to use them. We can spend 600 billion dollars protecting ourselves from missiles that don't exist, but we can't spend 6 cents on education without some regulatory string attached to it.
We have fine hospitals that none can afford. When my wife delivered our baby, we were surrounded on all sides by women with no insurance, who often had no pre-natal care. And that stuff is cheap at twice the price.
We have sports fields that are subsidized by taxpayers that few citizens could afford tickets to. Our schools are scraping change, but we can cut massive tax breaks for a couple of billionaires to build a new ballpark.
And hey, I am an American. Born here. Educated here. Live here. But this place is a playground for the rich. There is the resort, but outside the resort is abject poverty.
Except of course that a lot of people have money sunk into their "nest egg", their house. They expect to sell it for more than they paid for it. Deflation is going to be a disaster for real-estate, which is about the only shining spot in the economy right now.
What, you thought downward pressure of prices only affected consumer goods?
And don't forget about the stock market. That whole house of cards was built on people dumping money in. People with less cash on hand have less to invest, which leads to less churn, which leads to everyone who has money in the market being stuck with what they have. Unless they are willing to sell it for less.
Deflation will be an unmitigated disaster for our economy.
The day of judgement I'm more worried about is the one that decides my immortal soul. My job I really can't take seriously enough to play these games.
I state things the way I see them. That way I don't have to remember what the story is. Have I had to move on to better things at times for it? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No. It's called maturity. If something isn't going to work, it is better to realize it early.
And in bad situatuins, it is good to be the first one in the lifeboat.
My only "luxury" car was bought in 2000. (Paid off, thank you very much.) My "luxury" villa is a 1600 square foot row home. (29 years to go on the mortgage, woohoo.) My "luxury" computer has parts that are at least 5 years old. (When you build it yourself, upgrades are cheap.) I take the bus to work.
Despite this austere lifestyle I regularly have to scrounge change for coffee. Now if this is extravigent, I would hate to see how you would have me live.
Look at American productivity numbers. The amount of work we do per capita exceed that of the Japanese, who we used to stereotype for working too hard. These companies were built on the work and sweat of the employees, and rather than share in the profit we are being sent off to the glue factory.
I don't know whether you are trolling, but you really struck a nerve.
Sure the companies that engage in this practice get higher profits. However, the population in general gets an eroded tax base. Unemployed people don't pay taxes. People who trade in a $80k/y white collar job for a $20k/y blue jacket at Wal-mart have a good deal less disposable income to spend.
Which brings us back to trade...
Why draw the lines along National Borders? Simple, the people with pitchforks and torches are in this country.