My sister, who is now a freshman in high school, goes home and sits at the family computer every day after soccer practice. For her, the computer has replaced the phone (or in many cases, added to it, since she'll also talk on the phone).
Luckily, I've set up a home network so that we can all share an ISDN connection and still use the phone.
Now, instead of talking for hours with one or two people at a time, she'll spend hourse with sometimes as many as eight or nine open AOL instant messenger windows talking with friends. In the social network of 15 year old girls, I'd guess that she's a major node.
I doubt anyone would ever claim that the net is dehumanizing her.
I am fully aware of this definition, as it applies to formal logic and debates.
However, I am a firm believer in context.
I would be embarassing myself if I said, in a debate, "you're begging the question!" in a situation where your definition would not apply.
If I say this as a passing remark, not as a critique of another person's argument, it is not improper. The phrase can also mean "demands question be asked" in the proper context.
The party is more important than the man (we don't elect a dictator). Economic freedom is #1. Vote Republican.
I think it's more important to have a judicial branch of government for the next half century that has some respect for the first amendment. Abortion may not be a hot button for you (it's not with me) but remember that the Communications Decency Act was struck down as a violation of free speech.
If such a bill crops up again (and it will), I can't see a Bush-appointed justice going the way of freedom of expression.
(what this means, AC, is that it does not go up when a comment is moderated up. In fact, my posting it twice just increases the likelyhood that one or both will be marked "Redundant", thus reducing my precious, precious karma)
Repeating an interesting post as a topic that came up inside a thread is a common and accepted practice in usenet, you know.
The truth is, I really enjoyed the article. It's well-written (it was in the new yorker) and I thought a lot of slashdotters would like it. If you want to know what I think about karma, look at this post I made a while back.
I posted this in the "Simpsons Rant" thread, but I thought I'd put it in the main discussion thread too.
The real reason for the success of the Simpsons is not Matt Groening, but a writer from the Lampoon, Harvard's in-house humor magazine. Sam Simon, a producer, liked George Meyer's Army Man enough that he tracked Meyer down and hired the whole staff onto the Simpsons.
well, I'm not going to read anything into it. I'd describe myself maybe as a "green libertarian". This doesn't mean green party, just that I'm mostly libertarian but favor regulations where the environment is concerned.
you're right, I shouldn't have assumed that the universe is govened by continuous mathematics. But about this part of your post:
Even putting all of that aside, meaning assuming there was a singularity at some point, there is a more fundamental reason that we don't know what happened "before". Namely, there was no "before". Time started for this universe at the singularity, and it doesn't even make sense to talk about before, because there would have been no such thing.
That's pretty much exactly what I said in the rest of my post. We essentially agree.
I haven't seen all of those quotes, but I recognize the first three and the last two as Dan Quayle's exact words, not Gore's. Especially the third - I specifically remember that one.
In any case, I'd probably have some slip-ups if I made a stump speech every day for a year just campaigning, so it probably doesn't reflect much on either of them.
You're right, evolution is a cult.;-) More specifically, it was Darwin's hoax to see if he could extinguish a nearly 2000-year-old religion.
Sounds like you think the reason scientists have old earth/old universe theories is pure spite toward christianity.
It takes a much greater leap of faith to accept evolution than Creationism. Evolution's tenets don't match up with reality. All the trans-evolution species (read: proof) have conveniently died out with no trace of fossils (and those hoaxes don't count!).
No, they haven't. Witness the transation from fish to amphibian to reptile. They still exist. Of course, many have died out. Do you think fossilization happens to most animals? It needs a certain set of conditions.
Also, there are only a handful of hoaxes, some of which were honest mistakes. They've all been retracted.
Also, a natural representation of the fabricated geologic table (which classifies the ages of the Earth) is found nowhere in the Earth's crust, not even in the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon strikes me as a gigantic problem for young-earthers.
There are tons more refutations, but I won't infuriate you any further with my anti-propaganda. Current science is eating away at the Theory of Evolution more and more every day.
I've heard them all. Just last weekend, I went to a "Case for Creation" seminar put on by the ICR, and sat in an audience who kept yelling "Amen!" and "Praise Jesus!" at random. Every time the lecturer waved around another tired, blatantly false distortion or lie (like their gross misinterpretation of the Second Law of thermodynamics, for instance) the audience laughed with uproarious approval. They probably had an Old Tyme bookburning party after I left.
Evolution is more than a theory, though; it is a cultural movement. It is one man's fantasies embraced by bigoted, hate-mongering intellectuals who have no goal but to bring about the downfall of Christianity.
Young Earth Creationists are hate-mongering anti-intellectuals who think that scientists are trying to attack them.
Guess what- scientists in a wide range of disciplines including cosmology, astronomy, biology, and geology don't even have you and your kind on their mind when they present their theories. They are pursuing a greater understanding. Every once in a while they might be reminded that there are people out there that can walk into any museum of natural history in cities across the globe, and flat out deny almost everything on display.
Why is the belief in Evolution so bad? Here's a test: Would you flinch at shooting me dead? No? Why not? After all, I'm just a worthless mass of cells. People who are pro-choice-to-slaughter claim to have the "right" to execute their babies (up to 12 weeks old! after birth! This is based on court testimony concerning live-birth abortions) because they are not conscious, and therefore not real people.
So an evolutionist must be a nihilist? I suggest you see what secular humanism is all about. Lack of a belief in a god does not imply a lack of morality. I personally would not shoot you, because my sense of morality is based upon the rights of others. I have no moral problem with a person doing something as long as they don't hurt somebody else. For the record, I'm against abortion except in cases of incest and health risks to the mother (she has rights too, after all).
A person without the conscience of God in his heart will do anything if he can get away with it. Just like Hollow Man. I fear that the evolution movement will lead to a world of people like Hollow Man -- people who would kill anybody for selfish reasons. (I hear echoes of "It's MY body! It's my choice!")
You're an idiot. People need not be Christians, or even theists, to function in a civil society.
Evolution is evil because it is an assault on life, love, and civility.
Evolution is a theory which attempts to explain the origins of the wide variety of species we see. Whatever it might influence people to beliefve does not have any bearing on its validity as a scientific theory.
What is evolution? It is a hodgepodge of wild speculations by science fiction fanatics developed under the guise of "science".
To be scientific, a theory must be falsifiable. When you seek only to find things which we do not currently know the answer to, and then argue that this is proof that "God did it", that's not science. If you don't like science, fine. But don't confuse science and faith.
In contrast, the truth of Creationism is simple, elegant, and inescapable. How did life begin? We are created by a timeless, supernatural being. (How can something be timeless? I believe that there is no time; time is an illusion that humans perceive and use to define the relationships between events.)
I agree that time is an illusion, and this is important to remember in the context of the Big Bang. See my post on that subject.
In a way, this is quite silly. If you've heard of the anthropomorphic principle, you know what I'm talking about.
It's silly to reason that since conditions need to be just so for us to exist, it must have been designed. If they were not just so, we wouldn't be around to ponder what might have been if they were. If fundamental constants were different, something wildly unimaginable but equally 'cool' could happen instead. Intelligence might form in a completely different way.
Does the rich man, in his rich, gated community, look out the window and wonder why he sees no poor people when supposedly they are far more numerous than rich people?
Out of all possible universes, the ones incapable of supporting carbon-based life will have no carbon-based people to ask such questions, so why should we be so surprised that we are here?
Indeed - if the Big Bang happened, then why? Did everything just come from nothingness one day?
A simple answer is that science cannot predict anything before the Big Bang, because it is a singularity, meaning a discontinuity in a universe otherwise governed by continuous mathematics. Paths of stars, quasars, and galaxies can be computed back in time up until then, until you reach a point where volume is zero, making density infinite. It's certainly valid to point out that science cannot say anything about what may have happened before then.
However, there is another very intriguing possibility: the concept of time before the Big Bang is meaningless.
A two-dimensional analogy is the surface of the earth. For a long time, people assumed the earth was flat. Why would they think anything else? There was the ground, down below, and the sky above, and things fell down. As a result of this assumption, they knew that it must either be infinite, so that you could just sail and sail and sail forever without seeing the same place twice, or there must be an edge you could fall off of. Most people assumed the latter.
But we know now that there's a third possibility - the surface does indeed go on in opposite directions without ever coming to an edge - IN TWO DIMENSIONS! If you add a third spatial dimension, it is suddenly simplified to a surface which wraps around in all directions and connects back to itself, forming a smooth surface. Are there any boundaries - any "rough edges" or discontinuities at the north pole, like you would worry about with a flat earth? No! It's all a nice, self-contained package, with no beginnings or endings to worry about.
Now let's keep this analogy in mind as we talk about the nature of time. Until very recently, time was a very straightforward concept to us - it just plods on at a normal pace. If it's 12:00 Mountain Time for me and you're in New York, it's 12:00 Mountain Time for you, too (and 2:00 Eastern). If we stand far apart and fire two guns, we can make them fire at the same time, right? Well, no. I'll hear mine first, and you'll hear yours first. Well then we just put the judge halfway in the middle right? Well, no. We have to take into account relative speeds (such as the linear and angular motion of the planet we are standing on). The point is that, when you really examine it, the concept of two events occuring simultaneously is an imaginary, invented concept.
Our concept of time has been shown to be a distortion of reality which is built into our perceptions of the universe. Common sense tells us there is a universal clock, by which it is the same time no matter where you are. This is the foundation upon which Newtonian physics is based, and works well when you are not dealing with very large speeds.
The theory of relativity discarded this, and that theory has huge implications for the nature of time - namely, that it is inextricably tied to space, as a four-dimensional space-time. The Newtonian laws still work of course, but they are a special case of a much more general set of laws, and work when the speeds involved are insignificant relative to that of light. It is very hard to think in these terms, since our minds are wired to think in three dimensions with a constant forward-moving time.
However, when you make time into another axis along which events are plotted, the Big Bang is no longer an "explosion" but a description of the shape of our four-dimensional universe. As the time component increases, the space component expands. If you consider that time can be curved, just as space is curved by a massive object, the entire four-dimensional space-time can, in fact, be continuous.
In other words, the Big Bang is not necessarily a boundary with a void on the other side that you would "fall into" if you traveled back far enough. It could be more like the north pole - you can go north for a while until you reach the north pole, and then you can't go north anymore. But you're just at another spot on a continuous, curved two-dimensional surface.
The Big Bang could be just another spot on a continuous, curved four-dimensional surface.
This is known as the "no boundary" proposal. It is, of course, a theory - just like everything else in science, and hasn't been proven. It is a very valid theory though, and has been worked on a great deal by such physicists as Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Julian Luttrel, and Jonathan Halliwell.
As it turns out, they split them. Gore supporters include Apple Computer's Steve Jobs, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, and John Doerr, the venture capitalist who has backed many Internet companies. Bush's include Cisco's John Chambers, former Netscape president and CEO Jim Barksdale, and Michael Dell of Dell Computer Corporation.
Is it just me or does bush have the PHBs, and Gore have the "visionaries"?
Granted, they're all suits, but I like Gore's suits much better than Bush's suits. Andreessen or Barksdale? I'd go with Andreessen any day of the week.
Of course, I'd be more interested in Jamie Zawinski's vote...
Read more about this non open-source OS in a ZDNet story here."
Ever read that Onion story about they gay man that saved a girl's life when her house caught fire? They went on and on about the hero (who likes to hug and kiss other men) that selflessly put her life ahead of his own.
That's like using one of those cryogenic freeze/life support chambers from science fiction (like 2001 and 2010) and leaving a group of people in it for a billion years, and then taking them out and wondering why they haven't evolved. HELLO! They were FROZEN
Ok, I really mangled that formatting so here it is again.
Doesn't this contradict both religions?
Contrary to popular fundie belief, evolution is not a religion. It is completely independant from any and all religious beliefs.
When reading scientific articles, I always expect them to have something saying "25 billion years," et cetera.
This can be easily explained - you are stupid (or at least ignorant, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). The Earth is only 4.6 billion years old. The universe is much older, but I think current estimates put it at about 14 billion years, though I could be wrong.
But, this article doesn't. It says that it was from before the dinosaurs but, according to evolutionists, dinosaurs live way back when 100+ billion years ago.
Again you are stupid. Are you a troll? Congrats, you got a response from me.
It says 250 Million which is considerably shorter. It dosn't follow evolutionary beliefs, nor does it follow christian beliefs. Christians (for the most part) believe that the world isn't very old, say 5,000 years ('round-about).
Actually, they say 6,000. You don't even know what your own beliefs are.
250 Million is considerable longer than 5,000 years.
No shit.
Those are just my ponderings...
They say a mind that has been stretched will never return to its original shape. What you need is a full-body wedgie.
Doesn't this contradict both religions?
Contrary to popular fundie belief, evolution is not a religion. It is completely independant from any and all religious beliefs.
When reading scientific articles, I always expect them to have something saying "25 billion years," et cetera.
This can be easily explained - you are stupid (or at least ignorant, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). The Earth is only 4.6 billion years old. The universe is much older, but I think current estimates put it at about 14 billion years, though I could be wrong.
But, this article doesn't. It says that it was from before the dinosaurs but, according to evolutionists, dinosaurs live way back when 100+ billion years ago.
Again you are stupid. Are you a troll? Congrats, you got a response from me.
It says 250 Million which is considerably shorter. It dosn't follow evolutionary beliefs, nor does it follow christian beliefs. Christians (for the most part) believe that the world isn't very old, say 5,000 years ('round-about).
Actually, they say 6,000. You don't even know what your own beliefs are.
250 Million is considerable longer than 5,000 years.
No shit.
Those are just my ponderings...
They say a mind that has been stretched will never return to its original shape. What you need is a full-body wedgie.
Ordinarily, yes. In fact, that is exactly how it used to read. However, you'd be surprised at how much people will notice when you switch it around.
My official explanation is that the mouth is not an active storage class (like a stack or queue) but one of a fixed number of places the foot can go. Or, if you like, a number of states it may occupy. It is actually longhand for the number 0, as it is an enumerated type. This is easy to remember while coding, as the 0 looks like a gaping mouth.
This makes sense because in the act of inserting the foot into the mouth, the foot is playing the active role and doing the inserting- the mouth is not seeking out the foot and wrapping itself around it.
Also, since the foot goes into the mouth quite often, the default value for the location argument is mouth (at least with object 'me', meaning me, it is) so I could have left the 'mouth' out but I kept it in the interest of readability.
Plus, if I ever decide to do a 'rewrite', well, the apology is already there in my sig...
Slashdot Mirror
My sister, who is now a freshman in high school, goes home and sits at the family computer every day after soccer practice. For her, the computer has replaced the phone (or in many cases, added to it, since she'll also talk on the phone). Luckily, I've set up a home network so that we can all share an ISDN connection and still use the phone. Now, instead of talking for hours with one or two people at a time, she'll spend hourse with sometimes as many as eight or nine open AOL instant messenger windows talking with friends. In the social network of 15 year old girls, I'd guess that she's a major node. I doubt anyone would ever claim that the net is dehumanizing her.
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I am fully aware of this definition, as it applies to formal logic and debates.
However, I am a firm believer in context.
I would be embarassing myself if I said, in a debate, "you're begging the question!" in a situation where your definition would not apply.
If I say this as a passing remark, not as a critique of another person's argument, it is not improper. The phrase can also mean "demands question be asked" in the proper context.
Language is a living, breathing thing.
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The party is more important than the man (we don't elect a dictator). Economic freedom is #1. Vote Republican.
I think it's more important to have a judicial branch of government for the next half century that has some respect for the first amendment. Abortion may not be a hot button for you (it's not with me) but remember that the Communications Decency Act was struck down as a violation of free speech.
If such a bill crops up again (and it will), I can't see a Bush-appointed justice going the way of freedom of expression.
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Why won't it be adopted here on /.?
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Judging by the ad, we are in the "laugh at you" stage (giving M$ the benefit of the doubt)
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Sorry to say, the guy's name was Roger Myers.
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um, actually my Karma is frozen at 59.
(what this means, AC, is that it does not go up when a comment is moderated up. In fact, my posting it twice just increases the likelyhood that one or both will be marked "Redundant", thus reducing my precious, precious karma)
Repeating an interesting post as a topic that came up inside a thread is a common and accepted practice in usenet, you know.
The truth is, I really enjoyed the article. It's well-written (it was in the new yorker) and I thought a lot of slashdotters would like it. If you want to know what I think about karma, look at this post I made a while back.
so basically, go to hell.
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I posted this in the "Simpsons Rant" thread, but I thought I'd put it in the main discussion thread too.
The real reason for the success of the Simpsons is not Matt Groening, but a writer from the Lampoon, Harvard's in-house humor magazine. Sam Simon, a producer, liked George Meyer's Army Man enough that he tracked Meyer down and hired the whole staff onto the Simpsons.
The rest is history.
You can read a nice long story about it here:
http://www.snpp.com/other/inte rvi ews/meyer00.html
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Forgot to include my link.
m l
Btw, it's Meyer, I misspelled it before.
Here's a long story about George Meyer, who is a comic genius and a really cool guy. It's long, but a great read.
http://www.snpp.com/other/interviews/meyer00.ht
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You can thank Matt Groening for the early simpsons (choking, causing heads to throb, tyrant homer, the bartman, "don't have a cow, man").
The real genius behind the Simpsons is George Myer and his fellow writers from Harvard's Lampoon and Army Man. I think most of them are gone.
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well, I'm not going to read anything into it. I'd describe myself maybe as a "green libertarian". This doesn't mean green party, just that I'm mostly libertarian but favor regulations where the environment is concerned.
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you're right, I shouldn't have assumed that the universe is govened by continuous mathematics. But about this part of your post:
Even putting all of that aside, meaning assuming there was a singularity at some point, there is a more fundamental reason that we don't know what happened "before". Namely, there was no "before". Time started for this universe at the singularity, and it doesn't even make sense to talk about before, because there would have been no such thing.
That's pretty much exactly what I said in the rest of my post. We essentially agree.
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Hey dittoboy,
I haven't seen all of those quotes, but I recognize the first three and the last two as Dan Quayle's exact words, not Gore's. Especially the third - I specifically remember that one.
In any case, I'd probably have some slip-ups if I made a stump speech every day for a year just campaigning, so it probably doesn't reflect much on either of them.
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Ok, dittoboy...
;-) More specifically, it was Darwin's hoax to see if he could extinguish a nearly 2000-year-old religion.
:-)
You're right, evolution is a cult.
Sounds like you think the reason scientists have old earth/old universe theories is pure spite toward christianity.
It takes a much greater leap of faith to accept evolution than Creationism. Evolution's tenets don't match up with reality. All the trans-evolution species (read: proof) have conveniently died out with no trace of fossils (and those hoaxes don't count!).
No, they haven't. Witness the transation from fish to amphibian to reptile. They still exist. Of course, many have died out. Do you think fossilization happens to most animals? It needs a certain set of conditions.
Also, there are only a handful of hoaxes, some of which were honest mistakes. They've all been retracted.
Also, a natural representation of the fabricated geologic table (which classifies the ages of the Earth) is found nowhere in the Earth's crust, not even in the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon strikes me as a gigantic problem for young-earthers.
There are tons more refutations, but I won't infuriate you any further with my anti-propaganda. Current science is eating away at the Theory of Evolution more and more every day.
I've heard them all. Just last weekend, I went to a "Case for Creation" seminar put on by the ICR, and sat in an audience who kept yelling "Amen!" and "Praise Jesus!" at random. Every time the lecturer waved around another tired, blatantly false distortion or lie (like their gross misinterpretation of the Second Law of thermodynamics, for instance) the audience laughed with uproarious approval. They probably had an Old Tyme bookburning party after I left.
Evolution is more than a theory, though; it is a cultural movement. It is one man's fantasies embraced by bigoted, hate-mongering intellectuals who have no goal but to bring about the downfall of Christianity.
Young Earth Creationists are hate-mongering anti-intellectuals who think that scientists are trying to attack them.
Guess what- scientists in a wide range of disciplines including cosmology, astronomy, biology, and geology don't even have you and your kind on their mind when they present their theories. They are pursuing a greater understanding. Every once in a while they might be reminded that there are people out there that can walk into any museum of natural history in cities across the globe, and flat out deny almost everything on display.
Why is the belief in Evolution so bad? Here's a test: Would you flinch at shooting me dead? No? Why not? After all, I'm just a worthless mass of cells. People who are pro-choice-to-slaughter claim to have the "right" to execute their babies (up to 12 weeks old! after birth! This is based on court testimony concerning live-birth abortions) because they are not conscious, and therefore not real people.
So an evolutionist must be a nihilist? I suggest you see what secular humanism is all about. Lack of a belief in a god does not imply a lack of morality. I personally would not shoot you, because my sense of morality is based upon the rights of others. I have no moral problem with a person doing something as long as they don't hurt somebody else. For the record, I'm against abortion except in cases of incest and health risks to the mother (she has rights too, after all).
A person without the conscience of God in his heart will do anything if he can get away with it. Just like Hollow Man. I fear that the evolution movement will lead to a world of people like Hollow Man -- people who would kill anybody for selfish reasons. (I hear echoes of "It's MY body! It's my choice!")
You're an idiot. People need not be Christians, or even theists, to function in a civil society.
Evolution is evil because it is an assault on life, love, and civility.
Evolution is a theory which attempts to explain the origins of the wide variety of species we see. Whatever it might influence people to beliefve does not have any bearing on its validity as a scientific theory.
What is evolution? It is a hodgepodge of wild speculations by science fiction fanatics developed under the guise of "science".
To be scientific, a theory must be falsifiable. When you seek only to find things which we do not currently know the answer to, and then argue that this is proof that "God did it", that's not science. If you don't like science, fine. But don't confuse science and faith.
In contrast, the truth of Creationism is simple, elegant, and inescapable. How did life begin? We are created by a timeless, supernatural being. (How can something be timeless? I believe that there is no time; time is an illusion that humans perceive and use to define the relationships between events.)
I agree that time is an illusion, and this is important to remember in the context of the Big Bang. See my post on that subject.
Everything is of God.
Have a nice day
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anthropomorphic... sheesh. Stupid spellcheck. That's supposed to be 'anthropic', of course.
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In a way, this is quite silly. If you've heard of the anthropomorphic principle, you know what I'm talking about.
It's silly to reason that since conditions need to be just so for us to exist, it must have been designed. If they were not just so, we wouldn't be around to ponder what might have been if they were. If fundamental constants were different, something wildly unimaginable but equally 'cool' could happen instead. Intelligence might form in a completely different way.
Does the rich man, in his rich, gated community, look out the window and wonder why he sees no poor people when supposedly they are far more numerous than rich people?
Out of all possible universes, the ones incapable of supporting carbon-based life will have no carbon-based people to ask such questions, so why should we be so surprised that we are here?
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Indeed - if the Big Bang happened, then why? Did everything just come from nothingness one day?
A simple answer is that science cannot predict anything before the Big Bang, because it is a singularity, meaning a discontinuity in a universe otherwise governed by continuous mathematics. Paths of stars, quasars, and galaxies can be computed back in time up until then, until you reach a point where volume is zero, making density infinite. It's certainly valid to point out that science cannot say anything about what may have happened before then.
However, there is another very intriguing possibility: the concept of time before the Big Bang is meaningless.
A two-dimensional analogy is the surface of the earth. For a long time, people assumed the earth was flat. Why would they think anything else? There was the ground, down below, and the sky above, and things fell down. As a result of this assumption, they knew that it must either be infinite, so that you could just sail and sail and sail forever without seeing the same place twice, or there must be an edge you could fall off of. Most people assumed the latter.
But we know now that there's a third possibility - the surface does indeed go on in opposite directions without ever coming to an edge - IN TWO DIMENSIONS! If you add a third spatial dimension, it is suddenly simplified to a surface which wraps around in all directions and connects back to itself, forming a smooth surface. Are there any boundaries - any "rough edges" or discontinuities at the north pole, like you would worry about with a flat earth? No! It's all a nice, self-contained package, with no beginnings or endings to worry about.
Now let's keep this analogy in mind as we talk about the nature of time. Until very recently, time was a very straightforward concept to us - it just plods on at a normal pace. If it's 12:00 Mountain Time for me and you're in New York, it's 12:00 Mountain Time for you, too (and 2:00 Eastern). If we stand far apart and fire two guns, we can make them fire at the same time, right? Well, no. I'll hear mine first, and you'll hear yours first. Well then we just put the judge halfway in the middle right? Well, no. We have to take into account relative speeds (such as the linear and angular motion of the planet we are standing on). The point is that, when you really examine it, the concept of two events occuring simultaneously is an imaginary, invented concept.
Our concept of time has been shown to be a distortion of reality which is built into our perceptions of the universe. Common sense tells us there is a universal clock, by which it is the same time no matter where you are. This is the foundation upon which Newtonian physics is based, and works well when you are not dealing with very large speeds.
The theory of relativity discarded this, and that theory has huge implications for the nature of time - namely, that it is inextricably tied to space, as a four-dimensional space-time. The Newtonian laws still work of course, but they are a special case of a much more general set of laws, and work when the speeds involved are insignificant relative to that of light. It is very hard to think in these terms, since our minds are wired to think in three dimensions with a constant forward-moving time.
However, when you make time into another axis along which events are plotted, the Big Bang is no longer an "explosion" but a description of the shape of our four-dimensional universe. As the time component increases, the space component expands. If you consider that time can be curved, just as space is curved by a massive object, the entire four-dimensional space-time can, in fact, be continuous.
In other words, the Big Bang is not necessarily a boundary with a void on the other side that you would "fall into" if you traveled back far enough. It could be more like the north pole - you can go north for a while until you reach the north pole, and then you can't go north anymore. But you're just at another spot on a continuous, curved two-dimensional surface.
The Big Bang could be just another spot on a continuous, curved four-dimensional surface.
This is known as the "no boundary" proposal. It is, of course, a theory - just like everything else in science, and hasn't been proven. It is a very valid theory though, and has been worked on a great deal by such physicists as Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Julian Luttrel, and Jonathan Halliwell.
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As it turns out, they split them. Gore supporters include Apple Computer's Steve Jobs, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, and John Doerr, the venture capitalist who has backed many Internet companies. Bush's include Cisco's John Chambers, former Netscape president and CEO Jim Barksdale, and Michael Dell of Dell Computer Corporation.
Is it just me or does bush have the PHBs, and Gore have the "visionaries"?
Granted, they're all suits, but I like Gore's suits much better than Bush's suits. Andreessen or Barksdale? I'd go with Andreessen any day of the week.
Of course, I'd be more interested in Jamie Zawinski's vote...
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Read more about this non open-source OS in a ZDNet story here."
:-/
Ever read that Onion story about they gay man that saved a girl's life when her house caught fire? They went on and on about the hero (who likes to hug and kiss other men) that selflessly put her life ahead of his own.
don't know why that came to mind just now
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Because it hasn't been doing anything.
That's like using one of those cryogenic freeze/life support chambers from science fiction (like 2001 and 2010) and leaving a group of people in it for a billion years, and then taking them out and wondering why they haven't evolved. HELLO! They were FROZEN
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Ok, I really mangled that formatting so here it is again.
Doesn't this contradict both religions?
Contrary to popular fundie belief, evolution is not a religion. It is completely independant from any and all religious beliefs.
When reading scientific articles, I always expect them to have something saying "25 billion years," et cetera.
This can be easily explained - you are stupid (or at least ignorant, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). The Earth is only 4.6 billion years old. The universe is much older, but I think current estimates put it at about 14 billion years, though I could be wrong.
But, this article doesn't. It says that it was from before the dinosaurs but, according to evolutionists, dinosaurs live way back when 100+ billion years ago.
Again you are stupid. Are you a troll? Congrats, you got a response from me.
It says 250 Million which is considerably shorter. It dosn't follow evolutionary beliefs, nor does it follow christian beliefs. Christians (for the most part) believe that the world isn't very old, say 5,000 years ('round-about).
Actually, they say 6,000. You don't even know what your own beliefs are.
250 Million is considerable longer than 5,000 years.
No shit.
Those are just my ponderings...
They say a mind that has been stretched will never return to its original shape. What you need is a full-body wedgie.
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Doesn't this contradict both religions? Contrary to popular fundie belief, evolution is not a religion. It is completely independant from any and all religious beliefs. When reading scientific articles, I always expect them to have something saying "25 billion years," et cetera. This can be easily explained - you are stupid (or at least ignorant, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). The Earth is only 4.6 billion years old. The universe is much older, but I think current estimates put it at about 14 billion years, though I could be wrong. But, this article doesn't. It says that it was from before the dinosaurs but, according to evolutionists, dinosaurs live way back when 100+ billion years ago. Again you are stupid. Are you a troll? Congrats, you got a response from me. It says 250 Million which is considerably shorter. It dosn't follow evolutionary beliefs, nor does it follow christian beliefs. Christians (for the most part) believe that the world isn't very old, say 5,000 years ('round-about). Actually, they say 6,000. You don't even know what your own beliefs are. 250 Million is considerable longer than 5,000 years. No shit. Those are just my ponderings... They say a mind that has been stretched will never return to its original shape. What you need is a full-body wedgie.
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yeah, that's why napster isn't true "peer-to-peer"
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Ordinarily, yes. In fact, that is exactly how it used to read. However, you'd be surprised at how much people will notice when you switch it around.
:-)
My official explanation is that the mouth is not an active storage class (like a stack or queue) but one of a fixed number of places the foot can go. Or, if you like, a number of states it may occupy. It is actually longhand for the number 0, as it is an enumerated type. This is easy to remember while coding, as the 0 looks like a gaping mouth.
This makes sense because in the act of inserting the foot into the mouth, the foot is playing the active role and doing the inserting- the mouth is not seeking out the foot and wrapping itself around it.
Also, since the foot goes into the mouth quite often, the default value for the location argument is mouth (at least with object 'me', meaning me, it is) so I could have left the 'mouth' out but I kept it in the interest of readability.
Plus, if I ever decide to do a 'rewrite', well, the apology is already there in my sig...
Thanks for asking
Obviously, I don't.
But there are a bunch of other candidates.