I have to agree. My daughter's elementary wants to press criminal charges against us for taking her on a 4-day trip to see Grandma on Thanksgiving. We notified the teacher and the school beforehand, got her classwork and homework, and had her turn it in the day she got back. As it turns out, 3 days would have been ok. Because it was 1 day more, I'm harboring a future-gang member and deserve to go to jail! The school officials here are completely insane.
I'll spend my time NOT getting kicked in the balls and telling the person "Thank you sir, may I please have another?" simply to play a game. Especially not when I already have several dozen strewn about my house that I still need to get to.
And it should matter to shareholders of Activision that their current CEO is a walking PR nightmare.
I used to think that too... until I grew up and learned that it's not real. No kidding! Japan figured out that if a giant monster is invading them, all they have to do is put out miniatures on a movie set and the monster will go after those until it gets tired or has to fight another monster, and then retreats to the ocean. I'm guessing the Japanese came up with this idea to save costs on getting their city destroyed, after the first few times.
Hardly. It's just something that messed with the Win32 folder. This could be fixed by a few temps over the weekend if the city government was half-competent.
You're ignoring relativity. Yes, accelerating to that fast in a few seconds would obliterate the person; but done over the course of months/weeks/years, it may not be so messy. From Earth's perspective, they may appear to be a flaming, burning comet screwn across half the solar system, but to them, Earth is simply getting further away, faster.
nature before the industrial revolution was at equilibrium
Perhaps that's what the druids and Al Gore think, but nature hasn't been at an equilibrium since the Earth was a large, boiling ball of magma. There have always been freezouts, extinctions, mass starvations, atmospheric turmoil, earthquakes, scorchers, and overactive predators. We don't know what "warmest temperatures on record!" even means. According to vegetation levels in the biosphere, we just had the best decade on record -- which says "pfuu" to any pre-industrial-revolution-natural-utopia concepts.
I had a good friend who happened to also be an exiled member of Liberia's parliament. He said the major problem they were having were as follows:
Due to the currency trade, it costs about 1 million dollars (adjusted) for them to buy a tractor to farm their lands. Is that unreachable? No. Is it ridiculously overpriced? Yes. Do multiple families have to pull together in order to purchase a single tractor? Obviously.
Once the people have a tractor, and something breaks on it, they have to hire help, and that help has to purchase parts from out of the country -- which screws them again on their currency trade. This maladjusted currency business affects them on their importans and it affects them on their exports.
"Well, what if a kind, European business decided to dump a bunch of tractors on the people and buy up their farmland and run a business from it?" you may ask. That sounds like a good idea, until the business sees that every Euro they make doing business with the Liberians could be 10 Euros if they turned around and sold their produce to their own countries!
In this case, the tyrant is the European Union and their currency exchange rates with the African nations, moreso than dictators who can afford to feed themselves, but stare at a steep wall when it comes to the international commerce they would need in order to supply their own agricultural revolutions.
There is a difference between forcing a monkey smash every letter of the alphabet on a keyboard, including some chance words up to 8-letters in length, and having a monkey voluntarily type out all of the works of Shakespeare, in the order they were written by Shakespeare, and then turn the typewriter into a primitive compiler, using only the information he typed; a compiler (using a language that is much more intricate, error-resolving, and efficient than any of our own) that starts building walking libraries, out of nothing but typewriters and monkeys, who recite the complete works of Shakespeare, in order (while subconsciously discarding any mispellings one of the typewriters could make). The difference is not a small one.
The Miller Urey experiment did manage to show that our atmosphere (and subsequently, the biosphere) knows what to do with excess carbon.
They can use it to check your credit history and decide whether you have to put down a deposit or not. They can also use it to tamper with your credit history, if you stop making payments that you owe them, or if they are simply evil.
Well, that certainly explains why the LHC has to be so big, but... oh wait, I see, it was a typo. In that case, it's slightly smaller than a sugar molecule, I think?
Yes, but there's also when you hire the new guy, fresh from college, and he sits down at his work station. After a few days of getting absolutely no work done, he comes to you and tells you he wants to rewrite the core 50K lines of tested, trusted company code because he thinks it's not written "by the book". To which, the only sane reply is "You touch that code, and I will set you on fire."
To start: I am against creationism being taught in schools. It's a religious topic that should be discussed in a religious atmosphere, which public schools are not.
However, on the flip side...
I have yet to hear a convincing argument on why Evolution is not considered a religion. Bad science perpetuated by rabid evangelicals who will blindly refute any evidence that says they are wrong, without consideration or test, just so they don't have to admit they might be wrong. Serious, unbrainwashed, consideration on the claims of evolution will render a person a non-believer. Unfortunately, their tracts are written by some of the worlds sleeziest manipulators, which condemn such consideration as a symptom of ignorance. Instead of false prophets, you hearken to false scientists.
"But it's the best we got!" some might say, if they're dettached enough from the hivemind to speak for themselves. Well, if it's wrong, there's no reason to teach it to 4th graders! There are enough things to teach them in the ways of science and biology. You can teach a person science classes for 60 years without resorting to the religious excuses of "evolution did it." and that person will be the better for it. Evolution has done to science what Catholicism did to Europe.
BTW, there is no "atheist club"; most atheists are independent thinkers by definition, otherwise they'd probably be Unitarians (joking, joking). One of the few things that most atheists can agree upon is that there is nothing wrong individual spirituality or religion, as long as it isn't forced on anyone. It's when organized religion tries to force its opinions on everyone that people take issue. Sort of like when the RIAA forces through legislation we don't agree with then uses their clout as a large organization to legally bully you into submission.
In theory, this is true. In practice, it is not. If I dare to call myself a "free-thinking, religious individual" then 95% of atheists will roll their eyes and offer up some ridiculous strawman, as if on command. This is not tolerance, and it is not due to their oppression. It is due to hatred, groupthinking, and the manipulation of high-profile persons in this camp. There is a noticeable difference between a man who is raised without a god in his life, and a man who would label himself an atheist.
For starters, by definition, an atheist must grant that that their belief "that there is no God" is not based on scientific principle. It is based on faith. "Uncertainty" is the scientific approach to a lack of tangible, repeatable observation. To go forward with the inference "I have never seen God before, therefore the men who claim to have seen him must either be lying or crazy, and anyone who listens to them is wrong" is nothing but faith. Atheism is the faith that you will not stand accountable for your actions. It is a gamble made in convenience.
Most importantly, however, is that there IS an atheism camp. Atheism and theism simply cannot coexist as entropic states. The entropy is agnosticism, which atheism abhors for being its logical counterpart.
Ah, but I'm rambling on for too long, to the point where I won't even get to the moral of the story: The morally dead will choose atheism. The baby-killing, wife-cheating, porn-addicted, sociopathic, sexual-experimenting person will choose atheism as an attempt to escape their guilt. For example, the larger and more deviant your porn collection, the harder it is to believe in God. (The reverse is not neccessarily true-- one does not have to be morally damaged to question the existence of God) It is interesting from a psychological standpoint, if not a religious one.
And don't even bother to go telling me how pornography is now thought to be a good thing. So are abortion and divorce, yet here we see how they all cause moral ambiguity in ones' own conscience. Religion has known this as a "deading of the soul" for thousands of years, but to call it such, after the last paragraph, would be too close to circular reasoning for your comfort, I'm sure.
It causes me to wonder if the "transcendental meditation" that Ralph Waldo Emerson was always raving about was functionally disabling this portion of the brain through meditation -- which would raise a greater question like: how/why that's possible.
Plus it would help with the prejudice that religious people have against atheists.
Take a look at the comments for this article, keeping in mind that the article points out that its definition of "Spirituality" is neurologically different from "Religious" and let me know what the atheist club looks like.
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I have to agree. My daughter's elementary wants to press criminal charges against us for taking her on a 4-day trip to see Grandma on Thanksgiving. We notified the teacher and the school beforehand, got her classwork and homework, and had her turn it in the day she got back. As it turns out, 3 days would have been ok. Because it was 1 day more, I'm harboring a future-gang member and deserve to go to jail! The school officials here are completely insane.
But what about the guy who turns off the engine and leaves a post-it with the words "Give a hoot! Don't pollute!"?
I'll spend my time NOT getting kicked in the balls and telling the person "Thank you sir, may I please have another?" simply to play a game. Especially not when I already have several dozen strewn about my house that I still need to get to.
And it should matter to shareholders of Activision that their current CEO is a walking PR nightmare.
I won't buy an Activision game as long as Bobby Kotick is CEO.
Just as color TV shows no interest in catering to the colorblind, you must accept that there will be popular technologies that do not cater to you.
I used to think that too... until I grew up and learned that it's not real. No kidding! Japan figured out that if a giant monster is invading them, all they have to do is put out miniatures on a movie set and the monster will go after those until it gets tired or has to fight another monster, and then retreats to the ocean. I'm guessing the Japanese came up with this idea to save costs on getting their city destroyed, after the first few times.
Hardly. It's just something that messed with the Win32 folder. This could be fixed by a few temps over the weekend if the city government was half-competent.
You're ignoring relativity. Yes, accelerating to that fast in a few seconds would obliterate the person; but done over the course of months/weeks/years, it may not be so messy. From Earth's perspective, they may appear to be a flaming, burning comet screwn across half the solar system, but to them, Earth is simply getting further away, faster.
Twins paradox, and all that.
nature before the industrial revolution was at equilibrium
Perhaps that's what the druids and Al Gore think, but nature hasn't been at an equilibrium since the Earth was a large, boiling ball of magma. There have always been freezouts, extinctions, mass starvations, atmospheric turmoil, earthquakes, scorchers, and overactive predators. We don't know what "warmest temperatures on record!" even means. According to vegetation levels in the biosphere, we just had the best decade on record -- which says "pfuu" to any pre-industrial-revolution-natural-utopia concepts.
We could just build the spaceships out of inside-out LHC tunnels!
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable
Then they shouldn't teach evolution in biology classes :)
I had a good friend who happened to also be an exiled member of Liberia's parliament. He said the major problem they were having were as follows:
Due to the currency trade, it costs about 1 million dollars (adjusted) for them to buy a tractor to farm their lands. Is that unreachable? No. Is it ridiculously overpriced? Yes. Do multiple families have to pull together in order to purchase a single tractor? Obviously.
Once the people have a tractor, and something breaks on it, they have to hire help, and that help has to purchase parts from out of the country -- which screws them again on their currency trade. This maladjusted currency business affects them on their importans and it affects them on their exports.
"Well, what if a kind, European business decided to dump a bunch of tractors on the people and buy up their farmland and run a business from it?" you may ask. That sounds like a good idea, until the business sees that every Euro they make doing business with the Liberians could be 10 Euros if they turned around and sold their produce to their own countries!
In this case, the tyrant is the European Union and their currency exchange rates with the African nations, moreso than dictators who can afford to feed themselves, but stare at a steep wall when it comes to the international commerce they would need in order to supply their own agricultural revolutions.
Because we haven't built our base there yet.
Those commies should have just made their mines biodegradable!
There is a difference between forcing a monkey smash every letter of the alphabet on a keyboard, including some chance words up to 8-letters in length, and having a monkey voluntarily type out all of the works of Shakespeare, in the order they were written by Shakespeare, and then turn the typewriter into a primitive compiler, using only the information he typed; a compiler (using a language that is much more intricate, error-resolving, and efficient than any of our own) that starts building walking libraries, out of nothing but typewriters and monkeys, who recite the complete works of Shakespeare, in order (while subconsciously discarding any mispellings one of the typewriters could make). The difference is not a small one.
The Miller Urey experiment did manage to show that our atmosphere (and subsequently, the biosphere) knows what to do with excess carbon.
They can use it to check your credit history and decide whether you have to put down a deposit or not. They can also use it to tamper with your credit history, if you stop making payments that you owe them, or if they are simply evil.
So 150 GeV would be just over 50 elephants!
Well, that certainly explains why the LHC has to be so big, but... oh wait, I see, it was a typo. In that case, it's slightly smaller than a sugar molecule, I think?
So 150 GeV would be just over 50 elephants!
Some left-handed scientist just discovered that when puoS krauQ is cut through, it turns out symmetrical.
Yes, but there's also when you hire the new guy, fresh from college, and he sits down at his work station. After a few days of getting absolutely no work done, he comes to you and tells you he wants to rewrite the core 50K lines of tested, trusted company code because he thinks it's not written "by the book". To which, the only sane reply is "You touch that code, and I will set you on fire."
To start: I am against creationism being taught in schools. It's a religious topic that should be discussed in a religious atmosphere, which public schools are not.
However, on the flip side...
I have yet to hear a convincing argument on why Evolution is not considered a religion. Bad science perpetuated by rabid evangelicals who will blindly refute any evidence that says they are wrong, without consideration or test, just so they don't have to admit they might be wrong. Serious, unbrainwashed, consideration on the claims of evolution will render a person a non-believer. Unfortunately, their tracts are written by some of the worlds sleeziest manipulators, which condemn such consideration as a symptom of ignorance. Instead of false prophets, you hearken to false scientists.
"But it's the best we got!" some might say, if they're dettached enough from the hivemind to speak for themselves. Well, if it's wrong, there's no reason to teach it to 4th graders! There are enough things to teach them in the ways of science and biology. You can teach a person science classes for 60 years without resorting to the religious excuses of "evolution did it." and that person will be the better for it. Evolution has done to science what Catholicism did to Europe.
BTW, there is no "atheist club"; most atheists are independent thinkers by definition, otherwise they'd probably be Unitarians (joking, joking). One of the few things that most atheists can agree upon is that there is nothing wrong individual spirituality or religion, as long as it isn't forced on anyone. It's when organized religion tries to force its opinions on everyone that people take issue. Sort of like when the RIAA forces through legislation we don't agree with then uses their clout as a large organization to legally bully you into submission.
In theory, this is true. In practice, it is not. If I dare to call myself a "free-thinking, religious individual" then 95% of atheists will roll their eyes and offer up some ridiculous strawman, as if on command. This is not tolerance, and it is not due to their oppression. It is due to hatred, groupthinking, and the manipulation of high-profile persons in this camp. There is a noticeable difference between a man who is raised without a god in his life, and a man who would label himself an atheist.
For starters, by definition, an atheist must grant that that their belief "that there is no God" is not based on scientific principle. It is based on faith. "Uncertainty" is the scientific approach to a lack of tangible, repeatable observation. To go forward with the inference "I have never seen God before, therefore the men who claim to have seen him must either be lying or crazy, and anyone who listens to them is wrong" is nothing but faith. Atheism is the faith that you will not stand accountable for your actions. It is a gamble made in convenience.
Most importantly, however, is that there IS an atheism camp. Atheism and theism simply cannot coexist as entropic states. The entropy is agnosticism, which atheism abhors for being its logical counterpart.
Ah, but I'm rambling on for too long, to the point where I won't even get to the moral of the story: The morally dead will choose atheism. The baby-killing, wife-cheating, porn-addicted, sociopathic, sexual-experimenting person will choose atheism as an attempt to escape their guilt. For example, the larger and more deviant your porn collection, the harder it is to believe in God. (The reverse is not neccessarily true-- one does not have to be morally damaged to question the existence of God) It is interesting from a psychological standpoint, if not a religious one.
And don't even bother to go telling me how pornography is now thought to be a good thing. So are abortion and divorce, yet here we see how they all cause moral ambiguity in ones' own conscience. Religion has known this as a "deading of the soul" for thousands of years, but to call it such, after the last paragraph, would be too close to circular reasoning for your comfort, I'm sure.
It causes me to wonder if the "transcendental meditation" that Ralph Waldo Emerson was always raving about was functionally disabling this portion of the brain through meditation -- which would raise a greater question like: how/why that's possible.
Plus it would help with the prejudice that religious people have against atheists.
Take a look at the comments for this article, keeping in mind that the article points out that its definition of "Spirituality" is neurologically different from "Religious" and let me know what the atheist club looks like.
FTFA: "spirituality does not seem to involve exactly the same regions of the brain as religion."
;)
No, but it gives religious people the chance to say that atheists love to jump to conclusions