I disagree. If lots of brains are also in a vat then you couldn't find that out. You are still down the solipist ideas. You couldn't ever tell if anyone else is real and so on and couldn't tell if everything else is an illusion or not.
If you take the solipist idea and say "well I believe there's just me and my partner. everything else is an illusion" that would still count as solipist IMHO since all the core ideas are there, even if not followed exactly to the letter.
Ah thanks. It just seemed to me that humans seemed to emphasise that we shouldn't be like doubting thomas and so we shouldn't question anything the bible says. (I can't specifically remember the words of any hymns about it, but I do remember singing some hymns about it)
This idea was first invented (as far as we know) nearly 2500 years ago and is called Solipsism. And the short answer is that path leads to madness. Don't go there:)
Wasn't Thomas told off by Jesus for wanting proof? That would seem to count..
Out of everything in the bible, I hate that story the most. Hearing that your friend came back to life seems to me an extraordinary claim which thus requires extraordinary proof. And yet Jesus told him off for questioning.
An artist once said a similar thing to Richard Feynman, I'll just quote him exactly, since he says it far better than I ever can:
'' I have a friend who's an artist, and he somtimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree.But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he is kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people - and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time, I see much more that he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There's beauty not just at the dimention of one centimeter; there's also beauty at a smaller dimention.
There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other processes. The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see colors. That adds a question: does this aethetic sense we have have also exist in lower forms of life? There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't know how it subtracts.''
-- Richard Feynman, Physicist.
They have never jumped off a cliff either. I strongly suggest you teach your kids to doubt that it will hurt them. And there is no proof at all that if your kids jump in front of a moving bus that it will kill them. Tell your kids to do that please.
"Daddy, where do kids come from?" "Well, you probably came from your mum, at least I can infer that from seeing her grow fat, and then going to hospital. And from what I've read all the other kids came from their parents. But I can't prove it, so you should doubt it. It could just all be a cover up."
Then it should be done universally, with everything to the same level. They should doubt the theories of gravity at the same level as the theories of evolution. Increasing your doubt about one particular point for no reason other than spiritual or religious reasons is just wrong.
I'm a PhD student, and work for a company that has another office in eastern europe. I find that I have to fly back and forth quite often. I'm starting to dislike it, despite the perks of a company paid trip, just because I miss my gf after a months at a time.
Actually as others have pointed, it's the professors fault, and (afaics) we should be feeling sorry for the student who wrote the paper.
"Darwinism's presence in science is so overwhelming," Schwartz said. "For the longest time, there was no room for alternative thinking among the scientific community."
-- the prof who published the paper
And I know lots of people who still think that momentum = mass * velocity. Maybe we should write an article saying that I've proved physics wrong because schools teach it incorrectly. Or maybe we should realise that people learn things in stages - simplistic explanation first.
You should be very careful about making judgements on such things. You can't trust the human memory like that, and I can come up with a bunch of reasons to explain it (for one, as a kid your surface area to body mass ratio is much higher than that of an adult, so you'll lose more heat relatively).
When did global warming become an extreme left position? Although looking at your posting history you are pro-bush, strongly believe the iraq war wasn't at all about oil, and frankly from your other posts you don't appear to be all that logical. You appear to resort to insults and lose every argument you get drawn into.
Wow, it's almost as if you are commenting on a case that you haven't read anything about.
RIM could have saved tons of money by just paying of NTP in the first place, but it was RIM that refused to be bullied by NTP, and have vowed to fight it to the end, no matter the cost. NTP are bullies here, and RIM will refuse to bow to them.
Oh come on. Please name a single policy/event which affects a large number of people and where everybody has been happy. I can't think of a single thing. It's rather unfair to make it out that open source people are any different. Humans and humans.
Royal mail have done a lot of crap, such as introducing 'teams' where a group is responsible for mail. Then if one team member goes ill etc, the rest of the team have to do his work, for free, with no overtime.
You really believe that christians would go on rampage, burn down buildings, call for the artists to be killed, and call on all christians to go on a jihad?? And worse things have been done then a cartoon to annoy christians. Take the "piss christ" (google for it if you've been living under a rock). Not to mention lots of tv shows (Southpark comes to mind) with a murderous Jesus, and so on.
There's no hypocrisy at all. And I'm not even christian.
I understand the purpose of it, but disagree with your last statement. To make a small high resolution display suitable to create a diffraction pattern has traditionally not been possible. But that has changed since the introduction of LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon). I have three of them - one for each RGB. They have a diffraction efficiency of more 95% (compared to traditional transmissions LCDs of less 60%). This combined with high powered laser diodes of 10's of mW (compared to a normal laser pen of 1 or 2 mW) makes a simple projector. At the moment the LCOS's are too expensive - I paid $800 for each one - but they should drop in price fairly rapidly as they take off (I hope).
I switched to LCOS because the higher diffraction efficiency means that I can switch from a long cavity, difficult to build, pulsed laser, to a short cavity laser that is so simple that even I can make it.
The LCOS and laser are the difficult bits. Putting them together to make a projector is dead simple (although removing speckle, like they mention, is giving me a considerable headache. I've been reading books and books on it for a month now. Light is so damn annoying when it's coherent)
This is nothing special at all. I have made a projector like this, and use it all the time. After all, printing a hologram is just projecting an image. I use a pulsed laser, so it updates 30 times a second. The mathematics for this were calculated over 30 years ago by collier et al, before we even had lasers or a recognisable computer! There was even a book called something like computer generated holograms that theorised about using one of mainframes for this *grin*.
Good post. I'm as atheist as they get. Now that's said..
I was reading the economist today. It made that the point that all people grumble about the government, society.... well everything really. But you could tell the health of the nation by looking at how serious the issue was that they were grumbling about.
If we look at what people grumble about when it comes to Christians, the most we have is the various gay rights to get married, Intelligent Design debates, and so on. While these are important, it's rather telling that this is about the worst we can come up with.
Contrast to worries about muslims...
(Btw, I specifically didn't mention the iraq war because when I actually looked up the statistics there was hardly a statistically significant voting difference between christians and non-christians in America. Nowhere near what I had come to believe from listening to news/people.)
So while I get frustrated at Christians constantly, it could be a lot worse and for that I'm grateful:)
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I disagree. If lots of brains are also in a vat then you couldn't find that out. You are still down the solipist ideas. You couldn't ever tell if anyone else is real and so on and couldn't tell if everything else is an illusion or not.
If you take the solipist idea and say "well I believe there's just me and my partner. everything else is an illusion" that would still count as solipist IMHO since all the core ideas are there, even if not followed exactly to the letter.
Ah thanks. It just seemed to me that humans seemed to emphasise that we shouldn't be like doubting thomas and so we shouldn't question anything the bible says. (I can't specifically remember the words of any hymns about it, but I do remember singing some hymns about it)
This idea was first invented (as far as we know) nearly 2500 years ago and is called Solipsism. And the short answer is that path leads to madness. Don't go there :)
Wasn't Thomas told off by Jesus for wanting proof? That would seem to count..
Out of everything in the bible, I hate that story the most. Hearing that your friend came back to life seems to me an extraordinary claim which thus requires extraordinary proof. And yet Jesus told him off for questioning.
Wasn't there an evil snake in pre-corrupted version?
An artist once said a similar thing to Richard Feynman, I'll just quote him exactly, since he says it far better than I ever can:
'' I have a friend who's an artist, and he somtimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree.But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he is kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people - and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time, I see much more that he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There's beauty not just at the dimention of one centimeter; there's also beauty at a smaller dimention.
There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other processes. The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see colors. That adds a question: does this aethetic sense we have have also exist in lower forms of life? There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't know how it subtracts.''
-- Richard Feynman, Physicist.
You can determine if someone is depressed usually by chemical imbalances and brain activity.
They have never jumped off a cliff either. I strongly suggest you teach your kids to doubt that it will hurt them. And there is no proof at all that if your kids jump in front of a moving bus that it will kill them. Tell your kids to do that please.
It's gonna be hell explaining that to your kids.
:)
"Daddy, where do kids come from?" "Well, you probably came from your mum, at least I can infer that from seeing her grow fat, and then going to hospital. And from what I've read all the other kids came from their parents. But I can't prove it, so you should doubt it. It could just all be a cover up."
Yeah, let's give them every possible scenario
Then it should be done universally, with everything to the same level. They should doubt the theories of gravity at the same level as the theories of evolution. Increasing your doubt about one particular point for no reason other than spiritual or religious reasons is just wrong.
I'm a PhD student, and work for a company that has another office in eastern europe. I find that I have to fly back and forth quite often. I'm starting to dislike it, despite the perks of a company paid trip, just because I miss my gf after a months at a time.
Actually as others have pointed, it's the professors fault, and (afaics) we should be feeling sorry for the student who wrote the paper.
"Darwinism's presence in science is so overwhelming," Schwartz said. "For the longest time, there was no room for alternative thinking among the scientific community."
-- the prof who published the paper
You're not Japanese then I take it :-) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-01/0 7/content_510179.htm
And I know lots of people who still think that momentum = mass * velocity. Maybe we should write an article saying that I've proved physics wrong because schools teach it incorrectly. Or maybe we should realise that people learn things in stages - simplistic explanation first.
I'm equally fed up of these sensationalised headlines.
Please, everyone, email Zonk at games@slashdot.org and tell him to stop doing this. This is just too annoying.
You should be very careful about making judgements on such things. You can't trust the human memory like that, and I can come up with a bunch of reasons to explain it (for one, as a kid your surface area to body mass ratio is much higher than that of an adult, so you'll lose more heat relatively).
When did global warming become an extreme left position?
Although looking at your posting history you are pro-bush, strongly believe the iraq war wasn't at all about oil, and frankly from your other posts you don't appear to be all that logical. You appear to resort to insults and lose every argument you get drawn into.
why would you want protection on a plan/etc for something you won't implement?
Wow, it's almost as if you are commenting on a case that you haven't read anything about.
RIM could have saved tons of money by just paying of NTP in the first place, but it was RIM that refused to be bullied by NTP, and have vowed to fight it to the end, no matter the cost. NTP are bullies here, and RIM will refuse to bow to them.
Oh come on. Please name a single policy/event which affects a large number of people and where everybody has been happy. I can't think of a single thing. It's rather unfair to make it out that open source people are any different. Humans and humans.
Royal mail have done a lot of crap, such as introducing 'teams' where a group is responsible for mail. Then if one team member goes ill etc, the rest of the team have to do his work, for free, with no overtime.
You really believe that christians would go on rampage, burn down buildings, call for the artists to be killed, and call on all christians to go on a jihad??
And worse things have been done then a cartoon to annoy christians. Take the "piss christ" (google for it if you've been living under a rock).
Not to mention lots of tv shows (Southpark comes to mind) with a murderous Jesus, and so on.
There's no hypocrisy at all. And I'm not even christian.
I understand the purpose of it, but disagree with your last statement. To make a small high resolution display suitable to create a diffraction pattern has traditionally not been possible. But that has changed since the introduction of LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon). I have three of them - one for each RGB. They have a diffraction efficiency of more 95% (compared to traditional transmissions LCDs of less 60%). This combined with high powered laser diodes of 10's of mW (compared to a normal laser pen of 1 or 2 mW) makes a simple projector. At the moment the LCOS's are too expensive - I paid $800 for each one - but they should drop in price fairly rapidly as they take off (I hope).
I switched to LCOS because the higher diffraction efficiency means that I can switch from a long cavity, difficult to build, pulsed laser, to a short cavity laser that is so simple that even I can make it.
The LCOS and laser are the difficult bits. Putting them together to make a projector is dead simple (although removing speckle, like they mention, is giving me a considerable headache. I've been reading books and books on it for a month now. Light is so damn annoying when it's coherent)
This is nothing special at all. I have made a projector like this, and use it all the time. After all, printing a hologram is just projecting an image. I use a pulsed laser, so it updates 30 times a second. The mathematics for this were calculated over 30 years ago by collier et al, before we even had lasers or a recognisable computer! There was even a book called something like computer generated holograms that theorised about using one of mainframes for this *grin*.
Good post. I'm as atheist as they get. Now that's said..
:)
I was reading the economist today. It made that the point that all people grumble about the government, society.... well everything really. But you could tell the health of the nation by looking at how serious the issue was that they were grumbling about.
If we look at what people grumble about when it comes to Christians, the most we have is the various gay rights to get married, Intelligent Design debates, and so on. While these are important, it's rather telling that this is about the worst we can come up with.
Contrast to worries about muslims...
(Btw, I specifically didn't mention the iraq war because when I actually looked up the statistics there was hardly a statistically significant voting difference between christians and non-christians in America. Nowhere near what I had come to believe from listening to news/people.)
So while I get frustrated at Christians constantly, it could be a lot worse and for that I'm grateful