Which basically parses to "it doesn't". Because a space elevator, aside from not being a free lunch, is about as likely as Satan eating snow-cones in mid-August.
Uh, I teach physics. In fact, I'm about to be late for class. 64 MJ/kg is escape energy, circular low orbit is half of that and I actually did and can do the computation(s) myself. In my head. Now, you figure out how to add 32 MJ/kg of total energy to something at 100% efficiency. Let me know how it is done.
Sorry, blew my mod points commenting myself or I'd mod you up, AC! There are probably more than two alternatives, though. For instance, just building better batteries, growing GMO biodiesel, perfecting fusion and just using plug chargers or stationary induction chargers once the grid is so ridiculously power rich that we can afford to drop 50+ kW power points all over the place.
And you have the fundamental problem that solar cells are basically incapable of pushing an actual car with any surface area they are likely to be able to carry, let alone their own surface area. As I noted above, it costs roughly in 1 kW-hour to travel roughly 1 mile. That's kilowatt-HOUR, so even if your "car" were sitting on the top of the atmosphere and getting full sunlight at perihelion, its surface area at 100% efficiency wouldn't provide this much energy in anything like the amount of time you might like to drove that mile.
A 5 KW plant covering 10s of square meters on top of a house, running all day, on a good day can harvest the energy content of a single gallon of gasoline. Sure, efficiencies have to be factored in and can make a difference of a factor of 2 or 3 either way, but basically, unless you build a car with an enormous roof covered in ultralight solar cells, you're not powering a car on sunlight.
As I also pointed out above, there do exist electric "cars" (e.g. the ELF) that can run for a short commute on a daily basis on the sunlight they can harvest or very near that. But these cars are legally bicycles because they are light enough for a single person to pick up and have a top speed of maybe 20-25 mph without a pedal assist.
... and there is simply no sane way that paying a MINIMUM 32 MJ/kg to move a kg from the earth's surface to low earth orbit -- that's the minimum that assumes perfect efficiency, which is all by itself pretty funny, multiply it by maybe 100 or 1000 to get an actual estimate -- is ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to give you a ROI compared to installing solar cells on earth at an identical cost. And then you have to extra problem of getting the energy you harvest in orbit to the ground, which either involves putting a huge receiver somewhere to pick up relatively low intensity downbeamed microwaves (at some major hit in waste heat an inefficiency) OR using less ground area but building a super-maser in orbit that can cook an entire city to extra crispy in a few minutes.
What could go wrong?
Once again, when confronted with an idea that is so very, very, very far away from economically feasible or sane, the right thing to do is club the person suggesting that they will implement it all, with our money (natch!), while keeping ownership and control of the death ray -- I mean "orbital power station" -- is to knock them down and club them with a heavy blunt instrument until they stop twitching.
The guy in the movie about actually pretty much said just that. The only thing it might make sense to lift into orbit for power is solar cells for powering SPACE devices, vehicles, living quarters, or fusion plants once we manage to build one, assuming we can make one small enough and light enough and capable of rejecting heat in a vacuum enough to be able to operate for decades on a small fuel load.
it all depends on how many of these things you need to embed in a mile of roadway in order to transfer enough power to drive a mile at whatever speeds...and it's too early to know how hard that is.
Not so hard, if Fermi didn't live in vain. One gallon of gasoline contains around 32 kW-hours of energy. One car gets (on a good day, an efficient car) around 32 miles per gallon. One car therefore requires roughly one kW-hour of energy to go one mile. Unfortunately, that one car on a normal roadway drives that mile in roughly 100 seconds (all we care about is orders of magnitude, it might be somewhat less or a somewhat more in a city). There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so we require the power to be delivered at the rate of roughly 36 kW, continuously, in order to maintain the energy content of the car and restore one kW-hour of energy to the car in the time it drives a mile. However, it won't be continuous. If the coils are too close together, one will have a serious problem with mutual inductance and back voltage -- the neighboring coils will be working against one another. If we assume a reasonable geometry of 10% of the roadway occupied by the little puppies (that is, allowing for the coils to be actively charging your car 10% of the time as it drives, continuously), it increases the power requirements to be 360 kW.
Now, let's see. The average house uses around 2 kW in steady state (more or less in variable peaks). My neighborhood has around 180 houses. Each coil in the roadway has to be ready to deliver as much power as my entire neighborhood is using on average in order to deliver 1 kW-hour to the car in ten seconds of actual connection time while it is tooling down the road at 40 miles an hour. At the same time, there will be a car off to my side, a car behind me, two cars in front of me, all drawing power from whatever source at these phenomenal peak loads. Worst case scenario, the cars in the roadway line up spaced out in traffic by the ten meter spatial period of the 1 meter coils. Now we have (say) 100 cars all getting charged synchronously, pulling 36 megawatts peak power in a single kilometer of roadway. Multiply it out a bit because people want to think in miles instead of km, and your roadway has to be able to provide (for engineering robustness) roughly 50 MW per lane per mile. A four lane highway 5 miles long would require a GW power plant all by itself to be able to provide peak demand in resonance. And in case you think you can get away with smoothing it out (which is a silly assumption as cars naturally space out in ways that can create a resonance -- they are strictly antibunched compared to a poissonian, and the antibunching is just in the right range to tap whatever spacing you are likely to use) even if you divide that number by ten in order to try to get funding and be paid to investigate an absurdity, every fifty miles of a four lane highway (two each way) would require a GW, 2 GW if you plan to let cars drive at 70 mph, and that still won't have much of a margin, 4 GW per 100 miles.
There is a reason cars burn gasoline (or diesel, or peanut oil, or even ethanol). That reason is that the energy density of gasoline is enormous. A gallon weighs a bit less than 8 pounds and contains 33 kW-hours of energy. The best battery on Earth currently provides energy density of under 3 kW-hour in the same 8 pounds. The simple, hard truth is that gasoline is still about an order of magnitude ahead of our best, most expensive batteries in terms of energy density if not absolute volume. This provides electric cars with a host of reasons to lose any fair competition with them. In order to charge an electric car with the energy equivalent of a single gallon of gasoline, you have to deliver 33 kW-hours of energy. If I put a 5 kW solar system on my roof (at a cost on the order of $10,000) and devoted it to nothing but keeping an electric car charged, I would be able to get no better than the equivalen
... even with mod points to burn I can't resist weighing in on this one. Some ideas are just too dumb for words. Just what sort of energy efficiencies do they think that they are going to manage? Who is going to pay for this "free" (incredibly inefficient) energy? Just how much power will they have to deliver to even break even on a moving vehicle, and how much power will their "transmitter" have to radiate in order for the car's pickup to be able to receive enough power?
Shades of Nikolai Tesla! Why not just put up megawatt Tesla coils ever fifty meters and leave them on all the time! This is an idea that was proven stupid 100 years ago.
But hey, the government has lots of (my) money. I'll just try to think of it as scientific welfare, sort of like climate science. Too bad they aren't spending it on something that isn't quite so obviously a boondoggle, though.
He had me right up to that point. But an assertion that one can measure the position of two kilometer scale objects many, many light years away to a precision OR accuracy of 1 cm (they claim a few THOUSANDTHS of a millimeter) is, frankly, incredible.
One guesses that they do no such thing -- instead they measure the temporal period of the orbit and infer the mutual radius on the basis of its slow shift. Our ability to slice time precisely is far greater than any angular resolution of an optical instrument, so I'm willing to believe that they observe a slow shift in orbital period. But then they aren't measuring orbital radius change to a precision of thousandths of millimeters, they are measuring orbital period, and further, they are assuming that gravitational radiation, which has yet to be directly observed and hence is still at best an attractive (pun intended) hypothesis, is the cause of the shift. But one could imagine other causes. The problem is that their inference begins to be built up out of an increasingly long tower of assumptions -- that (for example) the substantial tidal deformations of the stars as they orbit, the possibility of spin-orbit coupling, or interaction with further bodies unseen are responsible for the period shift and not just gravitational radiation. It always worries me when an experimentalist claims "99% agreement" with a theory in a measurement performed on something that far away -- my own experiences in more mundane research projects in earthly labs is that one almost never gets 99% agreement with a theory simple because it is difficult to measure all that must be measured precisely and accurately enough to get a number that precise.
There are exceptions, of course -- usually exceptions that arise after spending decades making a series of highly precise measurements in a carefully constrained environment, such as measurements of G or the electromagnetic couplings -- but I'd prefer a claim of consistency rather than proof of a theory in things like this, and would prefer it even more if the actual experimental result was announced, not the inference based on further assumptions that become additional Bayesian priors to the conclusion and that are not stated.
This isn't to defend alternatives to dark matter -- I have no dog in either fight -- only to point out that arguments for dark matter always end up being arguments against it being anything else. Of course this is the way it has to be -- dark matter is dark, an invisible fairy, which means that you can make it do anything without fear of refutation because, well, it is invisible. But it is spectacularly difficult to argue for a theory on the basis of null results for alternatives, simply because we may not have thought up the right alternatives yet. What is needed, of course, are direct observations of dark matter to put the matter to rest.
Darned invisible fairies, anyway! Maybe it hangs out in the same fairy bar with magnetic monopoles and Higgs bosons, although it is possible that Mr. Higgs has finally come out into the light of day.
If I had mod today, sir, I would mod you down to Hell for your appalling lack of respect for the Divine Plan. Unfortunately, my arthritis is killing me, my brain is slowly deteriorating due to atherosclerotic plaque and amyloidosis, my appendix is flaring up again, and my children have a lean and hungry look to them that suggests that they are eager to recover all of the resources I consume by continuing to exist in competition with them -- and (I almost forgot) I have no mod points to give or take.
I'm hoping that His Divine Plan includes the mundane discovery by Divinely Inspired Even if Atheistic scientists of how to rebud teeth using stem cells, regrow hair cells in the cochlea ditto, introduce plaque eating autologous phages into my blood stream (ideally ones that can deal with surplus amyloid), inject my cells with the anti-cancer DNA that they lack in sufficient quantity to do much good, rewind my telomeres, and restore my mitochondrial activity to the point where fat melts from my belly and my cells lose their insulin resistance once again. Oh, and trigger at least limited regrowth of nerves previously damaged by all of this rot would be nice as well. Ideally in the next few years, God -- otherwise it will be too late to frustrate my children for a few more decades and force them to demonstrate their own damn fitness...
If it is on wikipedia, it is not news, and there is absolutely nothing different from controlling a ball (1 D) and controlling 1 D of the motion of a toy shark. There are even more complex mindflex games out there that suggest that one could probably rewire one to allow a single person to control the shark. There is a mind controlled UFO (drone) on the market already that is probably much cooler, except oh wait! It isn't an inflatable shark!
[03.02] Therefore, to achieve a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; to subjugate the enemy's army without doing battle is the highest of excellence.
What more is there to say? The fundamental problem with the US is that we lack excellence and elegance in our entire apparatus of foreign policy and the military. Even with clear targets -- like Iraq in wars one and two -- we could not manage to win without doing battle, and we are failing over much of the world right now.
Of course, we (Americans) live in a country with a large military-industrial complex, with an enormous shadow government funded by organized crime (primarily the importation of drugs that have carefully been kept illegal for decades) that has been around so long that it has turned the money-laundered corner into legitimacy, and with a substantial fraction of elected public officials who think that the world is 6000 years old and is going to end in a battle with Satan Himself any day now (and another substantial fraction of elected public officials who mysteriously exit public life far, far richer than they entered it). In such a system if we aren't fighting a government, taxpayer subsidized war for buth and treauty nearly all of the time, be it a "war on drugs", a "war on the commies", a "war against ISIS", a "war against Carbon Dioxide", our corporations simply fund new politicians that will start one, manufacturing facts and portraying them convincingly to the masses as required.
In a sense, war is the secondary consequence of a failure of diplomacy and the political process. That isn't to say that it isn't effective -- naked force, successfully applied, is responsible for most of the structure of the geopolitical world in which we live. But there have been a few small successes that suggest that we may be able to eventually transcend war and surpass even Sun Tzu's highest degree of excellence. If it is good to achieve one's political, economic, and social goals without doing battle in a conflict between two powers, it is surely better to achieve those goals without doing battle on a global basis. As Sun Tzu also says:
Generally in warfare, keeping a nation intact is best, destroying a nation second best..
The best way to fight all wars would be to keep all nations intact by winning them with diplomatic, social, and economic weapons, by fighting them so that everybody wins. This is the best way to sap the will to fight. This is the highest skill.
In modern times, this has never been truer. The US could at any time win any war or any battle. We have nuclear weapons and technological advantages that are truly unstoppable by any other nation, quite possibly by any other confederacy of nations working together. But we cannot win those battles, or wars, leaving the nations we fight intact, so we refrain from using our full power in almost all conflicts. We have also learned what Sun Tzu probably did not know -- that to win a war against a determined enemy, it is sometimes necessary to exterminate them, and we (thankfully) haven't the stomach for this. In wars of this sort, one must be prepared to fight for lifetimes of not-quite-war, of cold war, until the world changes and enemies become friends and allies without force.
Truly, this is right up there with the highest skill.
... the Pope announces that from now on all religious observances in monasteries will be adopted from those of the Unitarian Universalist sort-of-religion. "Hey, it's completely in-house -- our monks will get a lot more work and meditation in not having to waste so much time chanting and going to mass all of the time," he is quoted as saying. "In a few cases it is just plain easier to use the rituals of other religions where using our own would involve a major expenditure or loss of efficiency."
Meantime, President Obama has admitted that he gets most of his best ideas from the John Locke Foundation. "It isn't like their ideas are proprietary," he explained to the press in a surprise announcement. "Besides, every blind squirrel finds an acorn."
There is no word yet upon whether or not ISIS has subcontracted their intelligence service to Mossad as rumored, largely because it has proven nearly impossible to determine whether or not ISIS is aware of the concept of intelligence at all. The Israeli government is playing coy with the issue, refusing to confirm or deny the possibility that ISIS was impressed with the efficiency with which Mossad had infiltrated its ranks. An unnamed ISIS jihadist, when approached by a journalist, was rumored to have whispered to the journalist that they were actually an Israeli intelligence agent right before they cut off the head of the journalist, but the logical contradictions inherent in the rumor make it likely that it was deliberately planted by ISIS...
My copy of scripture does not say G-d did not use evolution to create Life.
Oh? So you are a Christian Socialist who rejects Genesis, which pretty much states that God did not use evolution to create life (along with countless other absurdities)? What about the parts of the New Testament in which Jesus endorses Genesis and the supposed existence of Noah and his Fabulous Ark? That puts some pretty serious constraints on evolution, I do declare! Not to mention the problems with collecting a few million species from all over the Earth, putting them inside a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart at the outside ventilated by a single window less than 1 meter square in area, and keeping them fed and alive for 40 days and nights of rain falling at a rate of an inch a minute, and then replacing them in all of their diverse ecosystems all over the planet right down to small Pacific islands, all using wooden boats that lacked so much as a compass and in a single human lifetime with the labor of a single human family.
So sure, if you are a Christian Socialist who just makes stuff up to avoid the problems with the supposed scriptural basis of your belief set, then your scripture might well say that God created the Universe out of Legos or cubic blocks of stuff mined out of a virtual place that doesn't objectively exist (because places that objectively exist are already part of the Universe) and nobody can ever prove you wrong, but you are mistaken when you claim to be a Christian. You are the believer in a religion you just made up that steals some of its ideas and beliefs from the Abrahamic religions but is a formal heresy in all of them.
Just to be picky.
As for both how and why -- scripture is of course far from silent on both of these points (unless it is scripture you wrote for yourself, of course, when it can contain anything -- or not -- that you like) but no matter what, religion can do no more than make unprovable and usually ethically absurd claims as to why as well. They are precisely equivalent in both provability and reason to asserting that we are all power units in The Matrix and that'sWhy -- because some higher order being needs the power and provides us with a dream world to live in while we do. It's impossible to prove any such claim false in spite of the utter lack of evidence that it is true. All a believer has to do is assert that the Matrix is too well run to ever let you take a capsule and escape it. So sure, we could all be here to participate in a bizarre game that puts reality TV to shame in which if we believe just the right things without evidence (generally as a consequence of the accidents of our birth and how we were raised before we developed the ability to think critically) then we get to go to an invisible place and live there forever in a state of guaranteed happiness, insulated from entropy and evil for eternity, with the optional but commonly accepted adjunct that if we fail to hold just the right beliefs, we are "voted off the island" and believe me, off of the island is not a place you want to be... or, we could use common sense and observation and conclude that the "why" question is unanswerable and hence meaningless.
Besides, we cannot positively exclude the possibility that we are all power units in The Matrix, and everything we think we know is false. There is no good reason to think that this is true, but that is not sufficient (especially under the circumstances) to prove it false. The same is true for the religious explanations -- there is no evidence worthy of the term to support them, but provided you are willing to believe in an insane deity who built a deliberately deceptive Universe and who runs it strangely like a reality simulation for absurd purposes, you can't rule them out logically or empirically, you can only state that they are very unlikely to be true, in a very precise statistical sense. Evolution, on the other hand is very likely to be true in general even as almost any given particular theory of evolution is likely to be false, or at least incomplete. Not as likely as it is that gravitation is a true theory to a much, much higher degree of approximation, but still enough to be casually referred to as "fact", part of the self-consistent network of mutually supported scientific beliefs that represent a system that is at least nearly completely consistent with observational data across the board.
Solipsism cannot be logically or empirically ruled out. Magnetic monopoles cannot be ruled out. Absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence, but it can be used to set probability bounds, and when there is no empirical support for a hypothesis that stands in the company of a near-infinity of alternative equally unsupported hypotheses, the comparatively small family of hypotheses that have reproducible empirical support and that are consistent with other observationally verified and mutually consistent hypotheses have a huge, huge edge in the probable truth game.
... as a VM. Then you can run anything you like (but high end games) from under Linux.
This is by far the best solution. I've been using it since early (still free) vmware days. It also lets you keep functional images of multiple versions of Windows and run WINDOWS software that doesn't run on Windows (any more). I have XP-Pro frozen and encapsulated, virus free, ready to run should I need it or anything inside. I have Windows 7 frozen and encapsulated ditto. I can laugh at broken Vista, my-laptop-is-not-a-tablet Windows 8, and preserve all the work that went into making them semi-functional.
But I've been using Linux as a primary desktop since SLS and Slackware (somewhere in the late 90's?), and I personally almost NEVER boot a Windows VM unless it is to run some very specific application that simply doesn't exist under Linux. Do this and you don't NEED to port Windows apps (except for high end games) to Linux -- they are already there!
No snakes have been injured in my bike encounters so far as I've been able to avoid them, but I do ride over a bridge over a wetlands creek and NC is lousy with copperheads and all of the North American poisonous snakes have sustained populations in the state, including coral snakes. I've driven around live copperheads (and one unidentified snake that could have been a water moccasin but I didn't stop to look carefully) several times, so I haven't been injured yet either, as you can pretty easily throw them up into your pedals or worse, into your wheels and thence onto your legs in a highly irritated mood from what I understand from reading bike forums. It sounds like actual bites of humans as opposed to tires are pretty rare, though.
The biggest copperhead I've ever seen living or dead was one roughly four feet long that had been run over by a car and was lying dead right in the lane I was riding to work in, right on the edge of Duke's campus and across from a forested swamp. You could see the crushed part where the tire had gone over it very clearly. The snake itself was as thick as my calf, and the head was easily the size of my clenched fist, maybe 3.5" or 4" wide. I've kicked myself for years for not picking up the body and putting the head out on an anthill to clean off the undamaged skull -- it would have been spectacular -- but it was literally too big to easily carry on my bike and I was on my way in to teach a class and had nowhere to put the corpse in the meantime. It was pretty close to the upper limit on the size of Southern Copperheads (reported to be 53"). But needless to say, since that day I watch CAREFULLY when I ride in the gutter or next to the shoulder in wooded or swampy areas (I ride through Duke Forest and wetlands when I ride into Duke from my house). Copperheads in particular are crepuscular hunters and lie on the edge of paved roads in the evening or early morning for the warmth and as pit vipers, they strike at anything warm and possibly edible in the twilight. They aren't particularly venomous and they often won't even treat a bite for anything but tetanus, but a large snake like that can pump a lot of venom into you if it is annoyed because you step on it or ride over it. This thing had enormous venom glands pooching out its triangular-shaped head.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that they know even elementary things about riding a bike safely. Starting with things like "On the road, a bike is a vehicle and hence should follow all of the rules that pertain to vehicles" such as riding on the right hand side of the road (with traffic, not facing traffic), using signals for turns (and knowing what the signals for turns are!), slow traffic keeping right, being VERY cautious passing any vehicle on the right as a) they don't expect you to be passing them; b) you are probably driving up through their blind spot; c) they can easily e.g. cut you off unexpectedly with an unsignalled right turn or by pulling over towards the curb or shoulder. And so on. Bikes follow the rules of vehicles, but not exactly the rules of vehicles, because common sense has to play a role too and bikes cannot go fast enough to keep up with cars, can be difficult to see or keep track of when one is driving a car or truck, can easily be cut off or forced into a parked vehicle or pothole or road hazard and are particularly vulnerable if hit. Even things like wearing a bike helmet or using some sort of rear view mirror need to be taught because some people think commuting on a bike down a busy street as a brittle-boned adult with your head six or seven feet above the ground is the same as riding it as a bendy-boned kid in a quiet neighborhood cul-de-sac with their head four feet above the ground (and the kid should be wearing a helmet TOO because closed head injuries can ruin your whole day -- for the rest of all of your brain-dead days.
And don't even get me started about riding at night. The closest I've ever come to killing somebody -- lifetime -- was driving my car across Duke's Campus Drive (a road that connects East and West Campus). I was crossing it on a dirt road, and at that time there was a stop sign but no nearby street lights so it was completely dark except for my headlights, which were very slightly angled up as the cross-road was on a gentle slope relative to Campus Drive. I stop. Look left -- nothing but black. Look right -- stygian dark. Glance right again, left again, and start to accelerate. JUST as I start to punch it forward, looking straight ahead, a bike flashes directly in front of my vehicle. No lights. Driver wearing dark clothes and no helmet, face turned towards me, terrified eyes wide open as he realizes that I'm moving straight at him. My foot moving faster than thought to mash the brakes so I missed him by a whole foot. And he vanishes into the night.
And the worst part of it is -- I'm sure that he thinks he was in the right, had the right of way, bikes can do anything they want, the laws of the road or mere laws of common sense don't apply to bike riders. If I'd hit him and by any miracle NOT killed him (he was booking, the collision would have thrown him ten or twenty feet in the air with no helmet) I'm sure he would have sued me and of course who knows what would have happened to me in the hands of the law regardless of the letter. At the very least I would have had to live with killing/maiming some other human, my fault or not.
I'd say that you can't fix stupid, but stupid wasn't the problem if the kid was a Duke student (as was very likely). Ignorant, yes, stupid, probably not. One hopes that the numb-nut learned from the experience and invested in a BIKE LIGHT, as even riding between campuses on a road that IS the moral equivalent of a neighborhood cul-de-sac down an unlit stretch shared with cars and then running RIGHT IN FRONT OF a car that is stopped at a stop sign and about to go when they cannot possibly see you can kill you just as dead as an ISIS IED.
Other advantages of a license -- right now in NC, if one reads through chapter 20 (the vehicular laws of the state) one discovers that bicycles are considered to be vehicles and subject to all of the laws of the state except where they cannot be applicable. However, this just makes the laws themselves inconsistent, as small children can ride bicycles on c
Yeah, one major part of the problem is that even in supposedly "bike friendly" towns where they have a "bike lane", that lane ranges from 8 inches wide to less than a meter wide. Sometimes several times within a stretch of 1/3 of mile. There is often crap in it -- branches, leaves, rocks, bottles -- or open grates over storm drains. In the summertime south they can even have middling large poisonous snakes in it, especially early morning or late evening.
I'd love to ride my bike to work, and sometimes do in spite of the fact that the "bike lanes" I ride in have all of the features on the list above -- averaging around 18 inches in width (but actually disappearing altogether without warning as the road passes under an overpass where the pylons come down right on the edge of the road so there isn't any shoulder either). I've been blown past by full-scale dump trucks going 55+ mph and missing me by whole feet.
I lived in Durham for decades without hearing of a single bike fatality and few accidents. In the last few years, friends of mine have been killed or been dumped in the ICU for weeks, all because of precisely the conditions you list above -- you're damned if you ride in the lane because it provides the illusion of having enough room but when it is 8" wide, it doesn't, and you're damned if you ride out in the lane because there are folks on the road you don't think you should be there or are drunk and are driving massive vehicles at unsafe speeds even before you show up in their sights.
Personally, I think that if official policy is "riding bikes is good, reduces energy consumption, promotes good cardiovascular health" then government needs to make a serious commitment to making safe bikeways. In my opinion, that means unobstructed, clean bike lanes at least 1 meter wide NOT including gutter/grate or curb if present, and not borrowing from the road shoulder. It also means providing protected dedicated function bikeways that parallel things like 4 to 6 lane roads where biking will NEVER be safe, so you aren't forced to ride on roads that are dangerous to cars, let alone bikes, to get from point A to point B.
Finally, yeah, it wouldn't be crazy to license bike riders who plan to ride on non-neighborhood streets, even if it is a one time license that you get after you prove you understand the rules of the road and how they practically pertain to bikes. Accidents are often caused by bikers, not just by car or truck or motorcycle drivers. I've watched people biking down the road on the wrong side, thinking that they are some sort of pedestrian.
Look, it doesn't make sense to believe that an entity exists that created a Universe whose visible extent is 28 billion light years across, whose inferable extent is perhaps ten times that (at least, there is no upper bound that can be established), that contains at least order of Avogadro's number of stars. On the basis of the available evidence, on the basis of our knowledge of things like information theory and the principles of causality and how "intelligence" works, the assertion is absurd in the extreme. So let's start with that.
However, I'm referring to the Standard Model of (Abrahamic) God:
Note that one standard attribute is omniscience. Of course, you are free to wrestle with the inconsistent concept any way you like to avoid the serious problems with consistency created by the standard model, but then you can hardly blame others if they brand you heretic and tie you to a metaphorical stake surrounded by kindling (or, in the case of modern Islam, cut your head off). It is not impossible to construct a moderately consistent picture of God -- Pandeism or Panendeism come very close -- but the problem with either one is sentience and theodicy. The Abrahamic faiths are explicitly dualistic, as well (although Vedantic Hinduism, fundamentally a monist pandeism, is not).
Dualism has serious problems -- and I mean mathematical, semantic, ontological, conceptual problems, problems that I do not think can be consistently resolved. One of the very simplest is the problem of "creation", something that we literally have never observed to occur (the physical law in question is "Conservation of Mass-Energy" in case you were wondering). All we have ever seen happen in the real world is for stuff to move around and change form. We never ever observe creation. The human concept of creation is itself an inconsistent myth without any evidence -- when we "make" something, we make it out of something else, invariably and without exception. A second problem is mere set theory. Suppose there is a God (set) and a disjoint Cosmos (set) where I use the term Cosmos to describe a spacetime continuum as distinct from "the Universe" a term I reserve for everything that has objective existence. The Universe, for example, could contain multiple Cosmi, and some theories of quantum mechanics suggest that it does, although personally I think that the evidence supporting this so far is weak in the extreme. But it could also be that our visible Cosmos exists, as does a Lord of the Rings Cosmos or a "Christopher Stascheff Cosmos", with potentially different physics or where magic works. God is supposedly unitary (or again, it Is Not God) in anything like a standard model religion, so clearly:
Universe = God U \sum Cosmi
Stating that "God created the Universe" all by itself is inconsistent -- this is the ontological argument run backwards. Since God (if God exists) logically must be a subset of all things that exist, God did not create all things that exist. If you imagine God and a disjoint Cosmos, the union of the two is strictly greater than God, so the God you have imagined is not God.
This is a small taste of the problems you encounter when you try to figure out how God can think, or how God can experience time or be sentient. Time in physics is a dimension. Experiential time, the time that orders your sentient thoughts, is strictly based on entropy. This is straight up stuff -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... quantifies it and sets limits. Combine this with information theory and encoding, since knowledge in the mind is a process derived from a (very!) imperfect encoding of realit
There are some possibilities that you missed. This one, for example:
* God is a good experimentalist, and like all good experimentalists, he rarely intervenes with the way things play out in his creation/experimental system. He sits back and passively observes, for hundreds or thousands of years at a time, and Jesus is the product of "Ok, I'm tired of the dynamic that the most intelligent carbon units have gotten into; let's see what happens if I have one of them teach some ethical principles to the others."
I didn't miss it, because this is an inconsistent possibility (not that it is possible to come up with a coherent and consistent theory of God, but that's a REALLY long discussion) Let's see. How could God be a good experimentalist? Well we usually perform experiments to learn something where we don't know the outcome. But God is omniscient, and cannot NOT know the outcome (and remain God), at least not unless you want to become a Hindu monist pandeist and imagine Mahavishnu/Brahma splitting its omniscient universal self (Brahman) into all of the many sparks of life (Atman) that have forgotten the perfect knowledge of Brahman. However, this view is generally opposed by most Abrahamic theologists because it destroys the essential dualism required to have a God to worship who can punish and reward and make the whole system work (not to mention that it contradicts pretty much all of the sacred texts of the family of religions).
Now, God could also be an experimentalist by playing dice with the Universe -- just rolling out a big, unknown Universe with no idea how it will all come out, a big reality simulation, just to see what happens, and then he could sit there blaming the lifeforms that emerge for being precisely what the dice he used plus the ruleset he used produced and invent ANOTHER pair of realities, one in which those lifeforms can live forever being tortured by demonic merciless robots, one in which those lifeforms can all sit around and chant praises for eternity to make him feel Really Important. But I hope that we agree that this is a rather ugly picture of God as well.
Besides, you're contradicting a number of essential statements from the Gospels, notably John, and your comment stinks of the Arian heresy that was stamped out post Nicaea (with fire and steel). Jesus is the alpha and omega, dude, and was there at the beginning and will be there at the end. So God cannot decide to send us Jesus to teach us ethical principles because there is no real difference between Jesus and God. Jesus/God sent himself, as he knew he would at the beginning, to produce precisely the outcome he predestined at the end. If you are damned, you have no choice in the matter as you were damned from the beginning of time. Not that the Gospels are consistent on this point. But let's have a look:
Mark 4:11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: 4:12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.
Mark 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
Matthew: 11:25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.
So, apparently, Jesus and God are different, Jesus is not God and doesn't even claim to be good! He deliberately teaches those predestined to be saved in parables so that ordinary people won't get it and WON'T be converted and saved. Thanks, Jesus! I'll adopt his methods in my physics class, I guess, and teach physics using metaphors instead of equations just so I can flunk all of the students I confuse. Hey, it's OK! It was predestined! But it is Matthew that directly contradicts your asse
You might want to read something like Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus", or look at some historical examples of the game of "telephone" and how easily it can generate spurious information, as opposed to church propaganda. I agree that it is probably more likely than not that a unitary Jesus existed, but it isn't more likely than not as in 99% likely, it is more likely than not maybe 60-40 or 70-30, and it is certain that we know nothing reliable about Jesus' life outside of -- maybe -- his sayings. Luke and Matthew disagree categorically about his birth and don't even have it occurring during the same decade or the reign of the same Herod. Mark (the oldest synoptic and likely source for the material in the other two) starts with Jesus fully grown, appearing more or less out of nowhere (and ends, in the earliest extant manuscripts, with Jesus dead and in the tomb and with no resurrection -- the last 16 verses of Mark are later additions). None of the synoptics were written by eyewitnesses (obviously), all were written (probably) after the fall of the temple, and there is a clear progression in "miraculousness" with their probable age, as one would expect from people embellishing and adding new myths and legends to support a newborn cult against all of its competitors. And we have nothing like original source material. The Bible you know is the result of copies of copies of copies of... copies of manuscripts ultimately leading to some poor mistranslations that were transformed into dogma once the printing press was invented. Ehrman began as a born again Christian who studied the New Testament because he wanted to learn the word of God as it was actually written down, and is now an agnostic who ultimately concluded that there is no such thing in this world, that its original content is lost forever and is irretrievable. Which is inconsistent with the usual "true believer" belief in its infallibility, in the idea that it is a gift from God to guide us, that it is a reliable guide to life or even merely a true account of the Jesus who might or might not be documented there.
As for Josephus -- quite aside from the fact that he is not an eyewitness, writing in the mid-90's CE, he mentions Jesus three times. All three are subject to very serious doubt. For one thing, we have nothing like a reliable chain of transmission for Josephus any more than we do the Bible. Do you have any idea at all what the oldest copy of Josephus extant is dated back to? Let's guess that the answer is no. The answer is (IIRC) the twelfth century for the Cyriac copy. Again, we have copies of copies of copies, usually written in languages that aren't even the original language of the manuscript, copies of translations of the manuscript that were copied and preserved by the very church that post-Constantine found it useful. Nearly all scholars who study Josephus agree that at least part of the references to Jesus in Antiquities are insertions. But which ones? There is widespread belief in there being an "authentic kernel" that was his original text, but the problem with extracting it is (aside from the fact that it is literally impossible to do because we cannot at this time differentiate forgery from original by anything but guesswork and cannot even be certain there IS any original left) that at best, the result of such a process is open to considerable doubt. It is a matter of guessing, and of course any guess would be subject to enormous personal bias on the part of the guesser -- there is no objective way to determine the truth.
and note that there is pretty good reason to think that all of the references to Jesus in Antiquities are insertions, or at least have been corrupted irretrievably, and there is at least some reason to think that the entire Testimonium is a forgery deliberately inserted by Eusebius. It
In order to be sentient beings that are truly free, one must be given a choice.
It would be interesting to discuss precisely what you mean by this, since in one sense I have a near infinity of choices I make instant to instant -- to strike the letter "*" in between the previous quotes, for example (where I had to think for a second about just which key would best make my point and so I involved my true sentient freedom, I suppose) and in another if the laws of physics are actually what they appear to be, in some fundamental sense I will never be free. But let's assume for grins that you mean "moral" choice. Leaving aside the absolute absurdity of the inheritability of sin and punishing people for something that in fact they did not do (as I personally was not there in the mythical garden you refer to, and neither was anybody else, because it is a myth, a metaphor, not an actual description of something that actually happened), let's see what the true moral choice before you is.
I think that we'll all agree that in general believing in a falsehood is a bad thing. If you disagree, then obviously we have little more to discuss. Furthermore, I certainly hope that you'll agree that our knowledge of the world around us is highly imperfect. After all, you are implicitly asserting that all of physics, biology, chemistry, astrophysics, genetics, and countless other pieces of evidence-supported knowledge are incorrect when you start speaking of a Tree of Knowledge as if it were something that actually existed in a strictly bounded timeframe that is nowhere near the length of the observational record we can infer from simple observations and physical laws and that is described in an absolutely absurd myth that is contradicted on every single assertion that it makes by scientifically observed fact. No matter what certainty you wish to accord your "knowledge" derived from a myth thousands of years old with no possible reliable provenance compared to simple matters you can verify with your own eyes and understanding, the mere fact that I in the very best of faith disagree means that at least one of us has imperfect knowledge of the world, and only a tiny bit of insight into the imperfection of our brains and senses should be sufficient to convince you that the only honest conclusion is that neither one of us can be certain of our knowledge of the real world around us. We have little choice but to doubt it.
We therefore have a moral responsibility to believe the most that which we can doubt the least, in some mathematically and logically defensible sense, given the entire body of our observational knowledge. So here is a simple, logical argument for you. Let's start with Thomas Paine:
"If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie." (Paine 1794)
This is actually completely inadequate as a statistical statement. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are what is meant by "nature going out of its course". We have never observed these laws to be substantively violated, in far more than milllions of observations. In addition, I think that we have to agree that in addition to being mistaken about imperfect beliefs, humans are prone to lie, to make things up, to con people, to tell them falsehoods for the fun of it, to hide guilt, or for personal gain. Human testimony is enormously unreliable. Hearsay testimony is so unr
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Which basically parses to "it doesn't". Because a space elevator, aside from not being a free lunch, is about as likely as Satan eating snow-cones in mid-August.
Uh, I teach physics. In fact, I'm about to be late for class. 64 MJ/kg is escape energy, circular low orbit is half of that and I actually did and can do the computation(s) myself. In my head. Now, you figure out how to add 32 MJ/kg of total energy to something at 100% efficiency. Let me know how it is done.
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Precisely. This is just WPA for scientists, if this is the claimed target of the research.
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Sorry, blew my mod points commenting myself or I'd mod you up, AC! There are probably more than two alternatives, though. For instance, just building better batteries, growing GMO biodiesel, perfecting fusion and just using plug chargers or stationary induction chargers once the grid is so ridiculously power rich that we can afford to drop 50+ kW power points all over the place.
Yeah, sort of like driving a pot over an inductive cookrange! You won't need to worry about keeping warm in the winter...
And you have the fundamental problem that solar cells are basically incapable of pushing an actual car with any surface area they are likely to be able to carry, let alone their own surface area. As I noted above, it costs roughly in 1 kW-hour to travel roughly 1 mile. That's kilowatt-HOUR, so even if your "car" were sitting on the top of the atmosphere and getting full sunlight at perihelion, its surface area at 100% efficiency wouldn't provide this much energy in anything like the amount of time you might like to drove that mile.
A 5 KW plant covering 10s of square meters on top of a house, running all day, on a good day can harvest the energy content of a single gallon of gasoline. Sure, efficiencies have to be factored in and can make a difference of a factor of 2 or 3 either way, but basically, unless you build a car with an enormous roof covered in ultralight solar cells, you're not powering a car on sunlight.
As I also pointed out above, there do exist electric "cars" (e.g. the ELF) that can run for a short commute on a daily basis on the sunlight they can harvest or very near that. But these cars are legally bicycles because they are light enough for a single person to pick up and have a top speed of maybe 20-25 mph without a pedal assist.
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... and there is simply no sane way that paying a MINIMUM 32 MJ/kg to move a kg from the earth's surface to low earth orbit -- that's the minimum that assumes perfect efficiency, which is all by itself pretty funny, multiply it by maybe 100 or 1000 to get an actual estimate -- is ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to give you a ROI compared to installing solar cells on earth at an identical cost. And then you have to extra problem of getting the energy you harvest in orbit to the ground, which either involves putting a huge receiver somewhere to pick up relatively low intensity downbeamed microwaves (at some major hit in waste heat an inefficiency) OR using less ground area but building a super-maser in orbit that can cook an entire city to extra crispy in a few minutes.
What could go wrong?
Once again, when confronted with an idea that is so very, very, very far away from economically feasible or sane, the right thing to do is club the person suggesting that they will implement it all, with our money (natch!), while keeping ownership and control of the death ray -- I mean "orbital power station" -- is to knock them down and club them with a heavy blunt instrument until they stop twitching.
The guy in the movie about actually pretty much said just that. The only thing it might make sense to lift into orbit for power is solar cells for powering SPACE devices, vehicles, living quarters, or fusion plants once we manage to build one, assuming we can make one small enough and light enough and capable of rejecting heat in a vacuum enough to be able to operate for decades on a small fuel load.
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it all depends on how many of these things you need to embed in a mile of roadway in order to transfer enough power to drive a mile at whatever speeds...and it's too early to know how hard that is.
Not so hard, if Fermi didn't live in vain. One gallon of gasoline contains around 32 kW-hours of energy. One car gets (on a good day, an efficient car) around 32 miles per gallon. One car therefore requires roughly one kW-hour of energy to go one mile. Unfortunately, that one car on a normal roadway drives that mile in roughly 100 seconds (all we care about is orders of magnitude, it might be somewhat less or a somewhat more in a city). There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so we require the power to be delivered at the rate of roughly 36 kW, continuously, in order to maintain the energy content of the car and restore one kW-hour of energy to the car in the time it drives a mile. However, it won't be continuous. If the coils are too close together, one will have a serious problem with mutual inductance and back voltage -- the neighboring coils will be working against one another. If we assume a reasonable geometry of 10% of the roadway occupied by the little puppies (that is, allowing for the coils to be actively charging your car 10% of the time as it drives, continuously), it increases the power requirements to be 360 kW.
Now, let's see. The average house uses around 2 kW in steady state (more or less in variable peaks). My neighborhood has around 180 houses. Each coil in the roadway has to be ready to deliver as much power as my entire neighborhood is using on average in order to deliver 1 kW-hour to the car in ten seconds of actual connection time while it is tooling down the road at 40 miles an hour. At the same time, there will be a car off to my side, a car behind me, two cars in front of me, all drawing power from whatever source at these phenomenal peak loads. Worst case scenario, the cars in the roadway line up spaced out in traffic by the ten meter spatial period of the 1 meter coils. Now we have (say) 100 cars all getting charged synchronously, pulling 36 megawatts peak power in a single kilometer of roadway. Multiply it out a bit because people want to think in miles instead of km, and your roadway has to be able to provide (for engineering robustness) roughly 50 MW per lane per mile. A four lane highway 5 miles long would require a GW power plant all by itself to be able to provide peak demand in resonance. And in case you think you can get away with smoothing it out (which is a silly assumption as cars naturally space out in ways that can create a resonance -- they are strictly antibunched compared to a poissonian, and the antibunching is just in the right range to tap whatever spacing you are likely to use) even if you divide that number by ten in order to try to get funding and be paid to investigate an absurdity, every fifty miles of a four lane highway (two each way) would require a GW, 2 GW if you plan to let cars drive at 70 mph, and that still won't have much of a margin, 4 GW per 100 miles.
There is a reason cars burn gasoline (or diesel, or peanut oil, or even ethanol). That reason is that the energy density of gasoline is enormous. A gallon weighs a bit less than 8 pounds and contains 33 kW-hours of energy. The best battery on Earth currently provides energy density of under 3 kW-hour in the same 8 pounds. The simple, hard truth is that gasoline is still about an order of magnitude ahead of our best, most expensive batteries in terms of energy density if not absolute volume. This provides electric cars with a host of reasons to lose any fair competition with them. In order to charge an electric car with the energy equivalent of a single gallon of gasoline, you have to deliver 33 kW-hours of energy. If I put a 5 kW solar system on my roof (at a cost on the order of $10,000) and devoted it to nothing but keeping an electric car charged, I would be able to get no better than the equivalen
... even with mod points to burn I can't resist weighing in on this one. Some ideas are just too dumb for words. Just what sort of energy efficiencies do they think that they are going to manage? Who is going to pay for this "free" (incredibly inefficient) energy? Just how much power will they have to deliver to even break even on a moving vehicle, and how much power will their "transmitter" have to radiate in order for the car's pickup to be able to receive enough power?
Shades of Nikolai Tesla! Why not just put up megawatt Tesla coils ever fifty meters and leave them on all the time! This is an idea that was proven stupid 100 years ago.
But hey, the government has lots of (my) money. I'll just try to think of it as scientific welfare, sort of like climate science. Too bad they aren't spending it on something that isn't quite so obviously a boondoggle, though.
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He had me right up to that point. But an assertion that one can measure the position of two kilometer scale objects many, many light years away to a precision OR accuracy of 1 cm (they claim a few THOUSANDTHS of a millimeter) is, frankly, incredible.
One guesses that they do no such thing -- instead they measure the temporal period of the orbit and infer the mutual radius on the basis of its slow shift. Our ability to slice time precisely is far greater than any angular resolution of an optical instrument, so I'm willing to believe that they observe a slow shift in orbital period. But then they aren't measuring orbital radius change to a precision of thousandths of millimeters, they are measuring orbital period, and further, they are assuming that gravitational radiation, which has yet to be directly observed and hence is still at best an attractive (pun intended) hypothesis, is the cause of the shift. But one could imagine other causes. The problem is that their inference begins to be built up out of an increasingly long tower of assumptions -- that (for example) the substantial tidal deformations of the stars as they orbit, the possibility of spin-orbit coupling, or interaction with further bodies unseen are responsible for the period shift and not just gravitational radiation. It always worries me when an experimentalist claims "99% agreement" with a theory in a measurement performed on something that far away -- my own experiences in more mundane research projects in earthly labs is that one almost never gets 99% agreement with a theory simple because it is difficult to measure all that must be measured precisely and accurately enough to get a number that precise.
There are exceptions, of course -- usually exceptions that arise after spending decades making a series of highly precise measurements in a carefully constrained environment, such as measurements of G or the electromagnetic couplings -- but I'd prefer a claim of consistency rather than proof of a theory in things like this, and would prefer it even more if the actual experimental result was announced, not the inference based on further assumptions that become additional Bayesian priors to the conclusion and that are not stated.
This isn't to defend alternatives to dark matter -- I have no dog in either fight -- only to point out that arguments for dark matter always end up being arguments against it being anything else. Of course this is the way it has to be -- dark matter is dark, an invisible fairy, which means that you can make it do anything without fear of refutation because, well, it is invisible. But it is spectacularly difficult to argue for a theory on the basis of null results for alternatives, simply because we may not have thought up the right alternatives yet. What is needed, of course, are direct observations of dark matter to put the matter to rest.
Darned invisible fairies, anyway! Maybe it hangs out in the same fairy bar with magnetic monopoles and Higgs bosons, although it is possible that Mr. Higgs has finally come out into the light of day.
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If I had mod today, sir, I would mod you down to Hell for your appalling lack of respect for the Divine Plan. Unfortunately, my arthritis is killing me, my brain is slowly deteriorating due to atherosclerotic plaque and amyloidosis, my appendix is flaring up again, and my children have a lean and hungry look to them that suggests that they are eager to recover all of the resources I consume by continuing to exist in competition with them -- and (I almost forgot) I have no mod points to give or take.
I'm hoping that His Divine Plan includes the mundane discovery by Divinely Inspired Even if Atheistic scientists of how to rebud teeth using stem cells, regrow hair cells in the cochlea ditto, introduce plaque eating autologous phages into my blood stream (ideally ones that can deal with surplus amyloid), inject my cells with the anti-cancer DNA that they lack in sufficient quantity to do much good, rewind my telomeres, and restore my mitochondrial activity to the point where fat melts from my belly and my cells lose their insulin resistance once again. Oh, and trigger at least limited regrowth of nerves previously damaged by all of this rot would be nice as well. Ideally in the next few years, God -- otherwise it will be too late to frustrate my children for a few more decades and force them to demonstrate their own damn fitness...
... including readily available toys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If it is on wikipedia, it is not news, and there is absolutely nothing different from controlling a ball (1 D) and controlling 1 D of the motion of a toy shark. There are even more complex mindflex games out there that suggest that one could probably rewire one to allow a single person to control the shark. There is a mind controlled UFO (drone) on the market already that is probably much cooler, except oh wait! It isn't an inflatable shark!
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What more is there to say? The fundamental problem with the US is that we lack excellence and elegance in our entire apparatus of foreign policy and the military. Even with clear targets -- like Iraq in wars one and two -- we could not manage to win without doing battle, and we are failing over much of the world right now.
Of course, we (Americans) live in a country with a large military-industrial complex, with an enormous shadow government funded by organized crime (primarily the importation of drugs that have carefully been kept illegal for decades) that has been around so long that it has turned the money-laundered corner into legitimacy, and with a substantial fraction of elected public officials who think that the world is 6000 years old and is going to end in a battle with Satan Himself any day now (and another substantial fraction of elected public officials who mysteriously exit public life far, far richer than they entered it). In such a system if we aren't fighting a government, taxpayer subsidized war for buth and treauty nearly all of the time, be it a "war on drugs", a "war on the commies", a "war against ISIS", a "war against Carbon Dioxide", our corporations simply fund new politicians that will start one, manufacturing facts and portraying them convincingly to the masses as required.
In a sense, war is the secondary consequence of a failure of diplomacy and the political process. That isn't to say that it isn't effective -- naked force, successfully applied, is responsible for most of the structure of the geopolitical world in which we live. But there have been a few small successes that suggest that we may be able to eventually transcend war and surpass even Sun Tzu's highest degree of excellence. If it is good to achieve one's political, economic, and social goals without doing battle in a conflict between two powers, it is surely better to achieve those goals without doing battle on a global basis. As Sun Tzu also says:
The best way to fight all wars would be to keep all nations intact by winning them with diplomatic, social, and economic weapons, by fighting them so that everybody wins. This is the best way to sap the will to fight. This is the highest skill.
In modern times, this has never been truer. The US could at any time win any war or any battle. We have nuclear weapons and technological advantages that are truly unstoppable by any other nation, quite possibly by any other confederacy of nations working together. But we cannot win those battles, or wars, leaving the nations we fight intact, so we refrain from using our full power in almost all conflicts. We have also learned what Sun Tzu probably did not know -- that to win a war against a determined enemy, it is sometimes necessary to exterminate them, and we (thankfully) haven't the stomach for this. In wars of this sort, one must be prepared to fight for lifetimes of not-quite-war, of cold war, until the world changes and enemies become friends and allies without force.
Truly, this is right up there with the highest skill.
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... the Pope announces that from now on all religious observances in monasteries will be adopted from those of the Unitarian Universalist sort-of-religion. "Hey, it's completely in-house -- our monks will get a lot more work and meditation in not having to waste so much time chanting and going to mass all of the time," he is quoted as saying. "In a few cases it is just plain easier to use the rituals of other religions where using our own would involve a major expenditure or loss of efficiency."
Meantime, President Obama has admitted that he gets most of his best ideas from the John Locke Foundation. "It isn't like their ideas are proprietary," he explained to the press in a surprise announcement. "Besides, every blind squirrel finds an acorn."
There is no word yet upon whether or not ISIS has subcontracted their intelligence service to Mossad as rumored, largely because it has proven nearly impossible to determine whether or not ISIS is aware of the concept of intelligence at all. The Israeli government is playing coy with the issue, refusing to confirm or deny the possibility that ISIS was impressed with the efficiency with which Mossad had infiltrated its ranks. An unnamed ISIS jihadist, when approached by a journalist, was rumored to have whispered to the journalist that they were actually an Israeli intelligence agent right before they cut off the head of the journalist, but the logical contradictions inherent in the rumor make it likely that it was deliberately planted by ISIS...
My copy of scripture does not say G-d did not use evolution to create Life.
Oh? So you are a Christian Socialist who rejects Genesis, which pretty much states that God did not use evolution to create life (along with countless other absurdities)? What about the parts of the New Testament in which Jesus endorses Genesis and the supposed existence of Noah and his Fabulous Ark? That puts some pretty serious constraints on evolution, I do declare! Not to mention the problems with collecting a few million species from all over the Earth, putting them inside a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart at the outside ventilated by a single window less than 1 meter square in area, and keeping them fed and alive for 40 days and nights of rain falling at a rate of an inch a minute, and then replacing them in all of their diverse ecosystems all over the planet right down to small Pacific islands, all using wooden boats that lacked so much as a compass and in a single human lifetime with the labor of a single human family.
So sure, if you are a Christian Socialist who just makes stuff up to avoid the problems with the supposed scriptural basis of your belief set, then your scripture might well say that God created the Universe out of Legos or cubic blocks of stuff mined out of a virtual place that doesn't objectively exist (because places that objectively exist are already part of the Universe) and nobody can ever prove you wrong, but you are mistaken when you claim to be a Christian. You are the believer in a religion you just made up that steals some of its ideas and beliefs from the Abrahamic religions but is a formal heresy in all of them.
Just to be picky.
As for both how and why -- scripture is of course far from silent on both of these points (unless it is scripture you wrote for yourself, of course, when it can contain anything -- or not -- that you like) but no matter what, religion can do no more than make unprovable and usually ethically absurd claims as to why as well. They are precisely equivalent in both provability and reason to asserting that we are all power units in The Matrix and that's Why -- because some higher order being needs the power and provides us with a dream world to live in while we do. It's impossible to prove any such claim false in spite of the utter lack of evidence that it is true. All a believer has to do is assert that the Matrix is too well run to ever let you take a capsule and escape it. So sure, we could all be here to participate in a bizarre game that puts reality TV to shame in which if we believe just the right things without evidence (generally as a consequence of the accidents of our birth and how we were raised before we developed the ability to think critically) then we get to go to an invisible place and live there forever in a state of guaranteed happiness, insulated from entropy and evil for eternity, with the optional but commonly accepted adjunct that if we fail to hold just the right beliefs, we are "voted off the island" and believe me, off of the island is not a place you want to be... or, we could use common sense and observation and conclude that the "why" question is unanswerable and hence meaningless.
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Besides, we cannot positively exclude the possibility that we are all power units in The Matrix, and everything we think we know is false. There is no good reason to think that this is true, but that is not sufficient (especially under the circumstances) to prove it false. The same is true for the religious explanations -- there is no evidence worthy of the term to support them, but provided you are willing to believe in an insane deity who built a deliberately deceptive Universe and who runs it strangely like a reality simulation for absurd purposes, you can't rule them out logically or empirically, you can only state that they are very unlikely to be true, in a very precise statistical sense. Evolution, on the other hand is very likely to be true in general even as almost any given particular theory of evolution is likely to be false, or at least incomplete. Not as likely as it is that gravitation is a true theory to a much, much higher degree of approximation, but still enough to be casually referred to as "fact", part of the self-consistent network of mutually supported scientific beliefs that represent a system that is at least nearly completely consistent with observational data across the board.
Solipsism cannot be logically or empirically ruled out. Magnetic monopoles cannot be ruled out. Absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence, but it can be used to set probability bounds, and when there is no empirical support for a hypothesis that stands in the company of a near-infinity of alternative equally unsupported hypotheses, the comparatively small family of hypotheses that have reproducible empirical support and that are consistent with other observationally verified and mutually consistent hypotheses have a huge, huge edge in the probable truth game.
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... as a VM. Then you can run anything you like (but high end games) from under Linux.
This is by far the best solution. I've been using it since early (still free) vmware days. It also lets you keep functional images of multiple versions of Windows and run WINDOWS software that doesn't run on Windows (any more). I have XP-Pro frozen and encapsulated, virus free, ready to run should I need it or anything inside. I have Windows 7 frozen and encapsulated ditto. I can laugh at broken Vista, my-laptop-is-not-a-tablet Windows 8, and preserve all the work that went into making them semi-functional.
But I've been using Linux as a primary desktop since SLS and Slackware (somewhere in the late 90's?), and I personally almost NEVER boot a Windows VM unless it is to run some very specific application that simply doesn't exist under Linux. Do this and you don't NEED to port Windows apps (except for high end games) to Linux -- they are already there!
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No snakes have been injured in my bike encounters so far as I've been able to avoid them, but I do ride over a bridge over a wetlands creek and NC is lousy with copperheads and all of the North American poisonous snakes have sustained populations in the state, including coral snakes. I've driven around live copperheads (and one unidentified snake that could have been a water moccasin but I didn't stop to look carefully) several times, so I haven't been injured yet either, as you can pretty easily throw them up into your pedals or worse, into your wheels and thence onto your legs in a highly irritated mood from what I understand from reading bike forums. It sounds like actual bites of humans as opposed to tires are pretty rare, though.
The biggest copperhead I've ever seen living or dead was one roughly four feet long that had been run over by a car and was lying dead right in the lane I was riding to work in, right on the edge of Duke's campus and across from a forested swamp. You could see the crushed part where the tire had gone over it very clearly. The snake itself was as thick as my calf, and the head was easily the size of my clenched fist, maybe 3.5" or 4" wide. I've kicked myself for years for not picking up the body and putting the head out on an anthill to clean off the undamaged skull -- it would have been spectacular -- but it was literally too big to easily carry on my bike and I was on my way in to teach a class and had nowhere to put the corpse in the meantime. It was pretty close to the upper limit on the size of Southern Copperheads (reported to be 53"). But needless to say, since that day I watch CAREFULLY when I ride in the gutter or next to the shoulder in wooded or swampy areas (I ride through Duke Forest and wetlands when I ride into Duke from my house). Copperheads in particular are crepuscular hunters and lie on the edge of paved roads in the evening or early morning for the warmth and as pit vipers, they strike at anything warm and possibly edible in the twilight. They aren't particularly venomous and they often won't even treat a bite for anything but tetanus, but a large snake like that can pump a lot of venom into you if it is annoyed because you step on it or ride over it. This thing had enormous venom glands pooching out its triangular-shaped head.
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Sure, but that doesn't mean that they know even elementary things about riding a bike safely. Starting with things like "On the road, a bike is a vehicle and hence should follow all of the rules that pertain to vehicles" such as riding on the right hand side of the road (with traffic, not facing traffic), using signals for turns (and knowing what the signals for turns are!), slow traffic keeping right, being VERY cautious passing any vehicle on the right as a) they don't expect you to be passing them; b) you are probably driving up through their blind spot; c) they can easily e.g. cut you off unexpectedly with an unsignalled right turn or by pulling over towards the curb or shoulder. And so on. Bikes follow the rules of vehicles, but not exactly the rules of vehicles, because common sense has to play a role too and bikes cannot go fast enough to keep up with cars, can be difficult to see or keep track of when one is driving a car or truck, can easily be cut off or forced into a parked vehicle or pothole or road hazard and are particularly vulnerable if hit. Even things like wearing a bike helmet or using some sort of rear view mirror need to be taught because some people think commuting on a bike down a busy street as a brittle-boned adult with your head six or seven feet above the ground is the same as riding it as a bendy-boned kid in a quiet neighborhood cul-de-sac with their head four feet above the ground (and the kid should be wearing a helmet TOO because closed head injuries can ruin your whole day -- for the rest of all of your brain-dead days.
And don't even get me started about riding at night. The closest I've ever come to killing somebody -- lifetime -- was driving my car across Duke's Campus Drive (a road that connects East and West Campus). I was crossing it on a dirt road, and at that time there was a stop sign but no nearby street lights so it was completely dark except for my headlights, which were very slightly angled up as the cross-road was on a gentle slope relative to Campus Drive. I stop. Look left -- nothing but black. Look right -- stygian dark. Glance right again, left again, and start to accelerate. JUST as I start to punch it forward, looking straight ahead, a bike flashes directly in front of my vehicle. No lights. Driver wearing dark clothes and no helmet, face turned towards me, terrified eyes wide open as he realizes that I'm moving straight at him. My foot moving faster than thought to mash the brakes so I missed him by a whole foot. And he vanishes into the night.
And the worst part of it is -- I'm sure that he thinks he was in the right, had the right of way, bikes can do anything they want, the laws of the road or mere laws of common sense don't apply to bike riders. If I'd hit him and by any miracle NOT killed him (he was booking, the collision would have thrown him ten or twenty feet in the air with no helmet) I'm sure he would have sued me and of course who knows what would have happened to me in the hands of the law regardless of the letter. At the very least I would have had to live with killing/maiming some other human, my fault or not.
I'd say that you can't fix stupid, but stupid wasn't the problem if the kid was a Duke student (as was very likely). Ignorant, yes, stupid, probably not. One hopes that the numb-nut learned from the experience and invested in a BIKE LIGHT, as even riding between campuses on a road that IS the moral equivalent of a neighborhood cul-de-sac down an unlit stretch shared with cars and then running RIGHT IN FRONT OF a car that is stopped at a stop sign and about to go when they cannot possibly see you can kill you just as dead as an ISIS IED.
Other advantages of a license -- right now in NC, if one reads through chapter 20 (the vehicular laws of the state) one discovers that bicycles are considered to be vehicles and subject to all of the laws of the state except where they cannot be applicable. However, this just makes the laws themselves inconsistent, as small children can ride bicycles on c
Yeah, one major part of the problem is that even in supposedly "bike friendly" towns where they have a "bike lane", that lane ranges from 8 inches wide to less than a meter wide. Sometimes several times within a stretch of 1/3 of mile. There is often crap in it -- branches, leaves, rocks, bottles -- or open grates over storm drains. In the summertime south they can even have middling large poisonous snakes in it, especially early morning or late evening.
I'd love to ride my bike to work, and sometimes do in spite of the fact that the "bike lanes" I ride in have all of the features on the list above -- averaging around 18 inches in width (but actually disappearing altogether without warning as the road passes under an overpass where the pylons come down right on the edge of the road so there isn't any shoulder either). I've been blown past by full-scale dump trucks going 55+ mph and missing me by whole feet.
I lived in Durham for decades without hearing of a single bike fatality and few accidents. In the last few years, friends of mine have been killed or been dumped in the ICU for weeks, all because of precisely the conditions you list above -- you're damned if you ride in the lane because it provides the illusion of having enough room but when it is 8" wide, it doesn't, and you're damned if you ride out in the lane because there are folks on the road you don't think you should be there or are drunk and are driving massive vehicles at unsafe speeds even before you show up in their sights.
Personally, I think that if official policy is "riding bikes is good, reduces energy consumption, promotes good cardiovascular health" then government needs to make a serious commitment to making safe bikeways. In my opinion, that means unobstructed, clean bike lanes at least 1 meter wide NOT including gutter/grate or curb if present, and not borrowing from the road shoulder. It also means providing protected dedicated function bikeways that parallel things like 4 to 6 lane roads where biking will NEVER be safe, so you aren't forced to ride on roads that are dangerous to cars, let alone bikes, to get from point A to point B.
Finally, yeah, it wouldn't be crazy to license bike riders who plan to ride on non-neighborhood streets, even if it is a one time license that you get after you prove you understand the rules of the road and how they practically pertain to bikes. Accidents are often caused by bikers, not just by car or truck or motorcycle drivers. I've watched people biking down the road on the wrong side, thinking that they are some sort of pedestrian.
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Look, it doesn't make sense to believe that an entity exists that created a Universe whose visible extent is 28 billion light years across, whose inferable extent is perhaps ten times that (at least, there is no upper bound that can be established), that contains at least order of Avogadro's number of stars. On the basis of the available evidence, on the basis of our knowledge of things like information theory and the principles of causality and how "intelligence" works, the assertion is absurd in the extreme. So let's start with that.
However, I'm referring to the Standard Model of (Abrahamic) God:
http://whywontgodhealamputees....
or if you want a less polemic definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note that one standard attribute is omniscience. Of course, you are free to wrestle with the inconsistent concept any way you like to avoid the serious problems with consistency created by the standard model, but then you can hardly blame others if they brand you heretic and tie you to a metaphorical stake surrounded by kindling (or, in the case of modern Islam, cut your head off). It is not impossible to construct a moderately consistent picture of God -- Pandeism or Panendeism come very close -- but the problem with either one is sentience and theodicy. The Abrahamic faiths are explicitly dualistic, as well (although Vedantic Hinduism, fundamentally a monist pandeism, is not).
Dualism has serious problems -- and I mean mathematical, semantic, ontological, conceptual problems, problems that I do not think can be consistently resolved. One of the very simplest is the problem of "creation", something that we literally have never observed to occur (the physical law in question is "Conservation of Mass-Energy" in case you were wondering). All we have ever seen happen in the real world is for stuff to move around and change form. We never ever observe creation. The human concept of creation is itself an inconsistent myth without any evidence -- when we "make" something, we make it out of something else, invariably and without exception. A second problem is mere set theory. Suppose there is a God (set) and a disjoint Cosmos (set) where I use the term Cosmos to describe a spacetime continuum as distinct from "the Universe" a term I reserve for everything that has objective existence. The Universe, for example, could contain multiple Cosmi, and some theories of quantum mechanics suggest that it does, although personally I think that the evidence supporting this so far is weak in the extreme. But it could also be that our visible Cosmos exists, as does a Lord of the Rings Cosmos or a "Christopher Stascheff Cosmos", with potentially different physics or where magic works. God is supposedly unitary (or again, it Is Not God) in anything like a standard model religion, so clearly:
Universe = God U \sum Cosmi
Stating that "God created the Universe" all by itself is inconsistent -- this is the ontological argument run backwards. Since God (if God exists) logically must be a subset of all things that exist, God did not create all things that exist. If you imagine God and a disjoint Cosmos, the union of the two is strictly greater than God, so the God you have imagined is not God.
This is a small taste of the problems you encounter when you try to figure out how God can think, or how God can experience time or be sentient. Time in physics is a dimension. Experiential time, the time that orders your sentient thoughts, is strictly based on entropy. This is straight up stuff -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... quantifies it and sets limits. Combine this with information theory and encoding, since knowledge in the mind is a process derived from a (very!) imperfect encoding of realit
There are some possibilities that you missed. This one, for example:
* God is a good experimentalist, and like all good experimentalists, he rarely intervenes with the way things play out in his creation/experimental system. He sits back and passively observes, for hundreds or thousands of years at a time, and Jesus is the product of "Ok, I'm tired of the dynamic that the most intelligent carbon units have gotten into; let's see what happens if I have one of them teach some ethical principles to the others."
I didn't miss it, because this is an inconsistent possibility (not that it is possible to come up with a coherent and consistent theory of God, but that's a REALLY long discussion) Let's see. How could God be a good experimentalist? Well we usually perform experiments to learn something where we don't know the outcome. But God is omniscient, and cannot NOT know the outcome (and remain God), at least not unless you want to become a Hindu monist pandeist and imagine Mahavishnu/Brahma splitting its omniscient universal self (Brahman) into all of the many sparks of life (Atman) that have forgotten the perfect knowledge of Brahman. However, this view is generally opposed by most Abrahamic theologists because it destroys the essential dualism required to have a God to worship who can punish and reward and make the whole system work (not to mention that it contradicts pretty much all of the sacred texts of the family of religions).
Now, God could also be an experimentalist by playing dice with the Universe -- just rolling out a big, unknown Universe with no idea how it will all come out, a big reality simulation, just to see what happens, and then he could sit there blaming the lifeforms that emerge for being precisely what the dice he used plus the ruleset he used produced and invent ANOTHER pair of realities, one in which those lifeforms can live forever being tortured by demonic merciless robots, one in which those lifeforms can all sit around and chant praises for eternity to make him feel Really Important. But I hope that we agree that this is a rather ugly picture of God as well.
Besides, you're contradicting a number of essential statements from the Gospels, notably John, and your comment stinks of the Arian heresy that was stamped out post Nicaea (with fire and steel). Jesus is the alpha and omega, dude, and was there at the beginning and will be there at the end. So God cannot decide to send us Jesus to teach us ethical principles because there is no real difference between Jesus and God. Jesus/God sent himself, as he knew he would at the beginning, to produce precisely the outcome he predestined at the end. If you are damned, you have no choice in the matter as you were damned from the beginning of time. Not that the Gospels are consistent on this point. But let's have a look:
Mark 4:11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:
4:12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.
Mark 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
Matthew: 11:25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.
So, apparently, Jesus and God are different, Jesus is not God and doesn't even claim to be good! He deliberately teaches those predestined to be saved in parables so that ordinary people won't get it and WON'T be converted and saved. Thanks, Jesus! I'll adopt his methods in my physics class, I guess, and teach physics using metaphors instead of equations just so I can flunk all of the students I confuse. Hey, it's OK! It was predestined! But it is Matthew that directly contradicts your asse
Mod +1 Funny.
You might want to read something like Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus", or look at some historical examples of the game of "telephone" and how easily it can generate spurious information, as opposed to church propaganda. I agree that it is probably more likely than not that a unitary Jesus existed, but it isn't more likely than not as in 99% likely, it is more likely than not maybe 60-40 or 70-30, and it is certain that we know nothing reliable about Jesus' life outside of -- maybe -- his sayings. Luke and Matthew disagree categorically about his birth and don't even have it occurring during the same decade or the reign of the same Herod. Mark (the oldest synoptic and likely source for the material in the other two) starts with Jesus fully grown, appearing more or less out of nowhere (and ends, in the earliest extant manuscripts, with Jesus dead and in the tomb and with no resurrection -- the last 16 verses of Mark are later additions). None of the synoptics were written by eyewitnesses (obviously), all were written (probably) after the fall of the temple, and there is a clear progression in "miraculousness" with their probable age, as one would expect from people embellishing and adding new myths and legends to support a newborn cult against all of its competitors. And we have nothing like original source material. The Bible you know is the result of copies of copies of copies of... copies of manuscripts ultimately leading to some poor mistranslations that were transformed into dogma once the printing press was invented. Ehrman began as a born again Christian who studied the New Testament because he wanted to learn the word of God as it was actually written down, and is now an agnostic who ultimately concluded that there is no such thing in this world, that its original content is lost forever and is irretrievable. Which is inconsistent with the usual "true believer" belief in its infallibility, in the idea that it is a gift from God to guide us, that it is a reliable guide to life or even merely a true account of the Jesus who might or might not be documented there.
As for Josephus -- quite aside from the fact that he is not an eyewitness, writing in the mid-90's CE, he mentions Jesus three times. All three are subject to very serious doubt. For one thing, we have nothing like a reliable chain of transmission for Josephus any more than we do the Bible. Do you have any idea at all what the oldest copy of Josephus extant is dated back to? Let's guess that the answer is no. The answer is (IIRC) the twelfth century for the Cyriac copy. Again, we have copies of copies of copies, usually written in languages that aren't even the original language of the manuscript, copies of translations of the manuscript that were copied and preserved by the very church that post-Constantine found it useful. Nearly all scholars who study Josephus agree that at least part of the references to Jesus in Antiquities are insertions. But which ones? There is widespread belief in there being an "authentic kernel" that was his original text, but the problem with extracting it is (aside from the fact that it is literally impossible to do because we cannot at this time differentiate forgery from original by anything but guesswork and cannot even be certain there IS any original left) that at best, the result of such a process is open to considerable doubt. It is a matter of guessing, and of course any guess would be subject to enormous personal bias on the part of the guesser -- there is no objective way to determine the truth.
I would suggest that you read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and note that there is pretty good reason to think that all of the references to Jesus in Antiquities are insertions, or at least have been corrupted irretrievably, and there is at least some reason to think that the entire Testimonium is a forgery deliberately inserted by Eusebius. It
In order to be sentient beings that are truly free, one must be given a choice.
It would be interesting to discuss precisely what you mean by this, since in one sense I have a near infinity of choices I make instant to instant -- to strike the letter "*" in between the previous quotes, for example (where I had to think for a second about just which key would best make my point and so I involved my true sentient freedom, I suppose) and in another if the laws of physics are actually what they appear to be, in some fundamental sense I will never be free. But let's assume for grins that you mean "moral" choice. Leaving aside the absolute absurdity of the inheritability of sin and punishing people for something that in fact they did not do (as I personally was not there in the mythical garden you refer to, and neither was anybody else, because it is a myth, a metaphor, not an actual description of something that actually happened), let's see what the true moral choice before you is.
I think that we'll all agree that in general believing in a falsehood is a bad thing. If you disagree, then obviously we have little more to discuss. Furthermore, I certainly hope that you'll agree that our knowledge of the world around us is highly imperfect. After all, you are implicitly asserting that all of physics, biology, chemistry, astrophysics, genetics, and countless other pieces of evidence-supported knowledge are incorrect when you start speaking of a Tree of Knowledge as if it were something that actually existed in a strictly bounded timeframe that is nowhere near the length of the observational record we can infer from simple observations and physical laws and that is described in an absolutely absurd myth that is contradicted on every single assertion that it makes by scientifically observed fact. No matter what certainty you wish to accord your "knowledge" derived from a myth thousands of years old with no possible reliable provenance compared to simple matters you can verify with your own eyes and understanding, the mere fact that I in the very best of faith disagree means that at least one of us has imperfect knowledge of the world, and only a tiny bit of insight into the imperfection of our brains and senses should be sufficient to convince you that the only honest conclusion is that neither one of us can be certain of our knowledge of the real world around us. We have little choice but to doubt it.
We therefore have a moral responsibility to believe the most that which we can doubt the least, in some mathematically and logically defensible sense, given the entire body of our observational knowledge. So here is a simple, logical argument for you. Let's start with Thomas Paine:
"If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie." (Paine 1794)
This is actually completely inadequate as a statistical statement. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are what is meant by "nature going out of its course". We have never observed these laws to be substantively violated, in far more than milllions of observations. In addition, I think that we have to agree that in addition to being mistaken about imperfect beliefs, humans are prone to lie, to make things up, to con people, to tell them falsehoods for the fun of it, to hide guilt, or for personal gain. Human testimony is enormously unreliable. Hearsay testimony is so unr