We have just learnt that sunspot may be highly related with Earth climate (if in the next ten years the sun go nuts and start to show sunspot like a dalmatian and we saw the temperatures dropping, it could be the nail in the coffing of man-made global warming) and now an inpredictable solar flare can alter these measurements and provide us with false data.
Yeah, except solar maximum (most sunspot activity) correlates with higher total solar irradiance. This decade has been hotter than ever despite the prolonged solar minimum and thus reduced solar irradiance. If sunspot activity picks up, then global temperature will probably just rise all the faster.
That would make sense, except the nature of the observations can't be explained as being simply the result of repetitive behavioral mechanisms.
It's really not the sort of thing I can express easily. But if you are interested, it can be observed. Just map backwards from where you are in your life and look at the major events which have affected you and the kinds of personalities which surrounded you at those times. If you are old enough to have traveled through the circuit three or more times, you'll have enough data to work with. Then it's like one of those 3D posters where you have to un-cross your eyes in order to see the effect. It looks like a mess of fuzz until it leaps into view.
Yeah, I've done that, and there's all kinds of interesting observations to be seen in the patterns of the past, but nothing that can't be explained by normal human behavior. The human mind is a ridiculously complex system, and thus human society exponentially more so. And from complex, chaotic system, order emerges. It happens all the time. It's astounding, mind-blowing even that this happens (I know mine was blown), but in no way contradictory to this actually being our experience in monotonically increasing time.
But I've never met anybody who is willing to do this or who has any interest in it. I suspect this might be due to a subconscious desire to ride the patterns in earnest without knowing how the mechanism works.
I think the subconscious desire to see patterns where there are none, and to read more into the patterns that are there than actually exists, and to be unsatisfied with the real mechanisms behind why they exist and yearn for something "deeper", can be even stronger. Human beings are pattern matching machines to the point where it takes great self-discipline to avoid seeing false ones, and we love to ascribe meaning to every pattern we see real or not. But then we are unhappy when the true nature of the pattern is revealed. For thousands of years mankind has dreamed of a world invisible to our senses, something that permeated space all around us and could let us connect to others thousands of miles away. And then it turns out that such a thing exists, in the electromagnetic field. Oh but that's manipulated with boring old science and tools, so it doesn't count. So they still look for their vague "energy", while ignoring the real mysteries of the universe.
I've dived into as deep an introspection of my life as I know how. I've felt unstuck from time. I've felt detached from not just my own body but my own existence as an "I". I've seen amazing things that my gut may say couldn't possibly be the result of the "mundane"*, of just human society doing what it does. But then I realize, yes it can. It absolutely can. It may be possible that something beyond the mundane has occurred, but it is not necessary. The world is sufficiently bizarre and amazing on its own to explain it. And my experience cannot be used to distinguish, no matter how much I might want it to be so.
In short... Yes it can be explained. And it'll take a damn lot more -- should, for everyone, including you -- than "metaphorically the same" to demonstrate otherwise.
* Such a mundane word for the majesty of the known universe. Really, in a universe with quantum dynamics and relativity, people still aren't happy. A photon interfering with it's own hypothetical alternate pathways just isn't odd enough for people. I don't understand why.
Interesting, except I don't buy the idea of entropy.
I don't buy the idea that similar-seeming events occurring in cycles contradicts or disproves entropy and the uni-directionality of time.
What you describe isn't time looping. Ideas, thoughts, and such travel, rise in prominence and then fall, and then rise again once forgotten. People go to war, fight, then stop and move away from war. And then the war drums beat again. As you say, they are not the same, they're only the same metaphorically. They're only the same in the sense that the human spirit is the same. And of course it is. Humankind, for all our apparent progress, is the same animal with the same emotions of fear, hate, love, and empathy that we've had for ages. That the ebb and flow of these things is not surprising and not and indication that time itself is somehow repeating. That we repeat the same things despite the passage of time is surprising to some, but not to me.
If all events happen along a spatial vector which we only perceive in consecutive experiential "slices," then "time" is just our perception of an otherwise unseen dimension along which we are traveling.
In many ways that's how time is treated. Just as another dimension of space which we can only experience in a monotonically increasing way. It's perfectly valid to consider positrons and other anti-particles as simply being normal particles traveling along the time axis in the negative direction. You can consider their paths to be their 4-D forms.
The difference between time and the other dimensions is that we can actually see a preferred direction, and a reason why we can't experience time backwards and why most things cannot arbitrarily be undone, as if you could move something right but not left, and that reason is entropy. Entropy gives time an orientation. And while you could probably just reverse time and the second law and say everything tends towards more order, you've still given time a one-way orientation which doesn't exist for length.
What kind of self adsorbed people are we to even think that God has to play by our rules? Time is relative, and god's time is different from ours.
Does God even "have" time? Space-time is God's creation, and He exists outside of it.
Personally I think this is the simple answer to the question of Predestination: Given an all-knowing God who knows what you are going to do and where you will end up before you do it, how can you be said to have free will?
But the only reason this is any kind of existential crisis is because of the word "before". God doesn't know what we're going to do "before" we do it. He knows because from His point of view, we've already done it! From His perspective outside of space-time, seeing the past and the future simultaneously without actually existing in either is no more amazing than seeing two feet to your left and two feet to your right without being present at either.
It's only because of the limitations of our brains (and language, I find it hard to even talk about without using the words I'm saying are meaningless like "already" or "future") that this is a problem.
...why do scientists still involve/include "Time" in their equations when determining or extrapolating theories on relativity such as the proper mass of the universe? In short wouldn't it be prudent to omit time from the equation since "time" doesn't exist? I think, and this is only a theory of mine, that there is no such thing as time.
I like how it starts with "wouldn't it be prudent to omit time since it doesn't exist?" and then follows it with "this is just a theory of mine, but I think time doesn't exist". So, basically, you answered your own question: No it isn't prudent to omit time because some dude has a "theory" (meaning, in this context, wild-ass guess) that it doesn't exist.
In that same post you also say:
True different colors of light do travel at different speeds, red is faster than blue, hence the "Red shift"
which is pretty much the opposite of reality and has nothing to do with red shift. All frequencies of light travel at the same speed (to within an extremely small experimental error based on measuring the arrival time of broad-spectrum pulses from extremely distant sources). Red shift is about the relative energy of photons emitted from objects traveling away from you (or similar phenomenon). The energy/momentum of a photon is proportional to its frequency. The velocity stays the same in all cases and for all observers, but the apparent frequency lowers when the source is moving away. Of the same light, not red light arriving first and blue later (wouldn't that mean you would see objects smeared out with a red head and blue tail?), but all the light being emitted shifting in frequency. If an object is moving toward you, the object appears blue shifted.
Wait, this is starting to sound like a joke. Woosh, maybe?
I think it's fair to distinguish between historical claims regarding the periods in which the Bible was written (or the accounts it was based on were from), and claims about physics, geology, and other natural sciences (which, imo, the Bible actually makes very few if any claims about anyway).
I think it's unsurprising that the Bible would have accurately named a contemporaneous ruler, yet not so accurately give the age of the planet earth.
Though if decay varies due a few percent difference in distance to the sun, wouldn't you expect the daily rate to vary even more? I mean we're talking a few million miles of space vacuum versus 8,000 miles of nearly solid iron and rock.
The difference in neutrino flux due to being millions of miles farther from the sun would be much larger than being a mere 8,000 miles farther, despite the solid rock. Yes the earth blocks some neutrinos, but the 1/r^2 factor is much stronger.
Maybe that amount of iron and rock is insignificant to the nutrinos, but in that case, how does it suddenly effect a handfull of the radioactive isotope?
The effect must be quite small, or it would have been more readily apparent that people were getting different decay rates in winter vs summer. There's always a chance that there will be a neutrino interaction, and that chance is going to vary with the amount of neutrino flux, which will be dominated by proximity to the source vs the filtering effect of the earth. If neutrinos are the source, there could in fact be a daily variance that is too small to be measured in the experiment that was conducted.
But according to TFA, if neutrinos are the source, then the big mystery is the mechanism by which they are changing the decay rate.
I think they mispoke and ended up with the opposite meaning of what was intended.
The Bible is literally the Word of God.
The Word of God is not always literal.
E.g. "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." is the Word of God, literally. It doesn't mean that God spoke with a literal voice to spontaneously create light, or that "the first day" was a literal 24-hour period of time.
This is absurd reasoning. Congress does not empower the Executive to distinguish, it bans funding to all research in which the embryo is destroyed or discarded, even if it means they are allowed to live longer than they would otherwise. That distinction just isn't in the statute
Oh, the statute doesn't distinguish between destroying or discarding embryos, or not doing that? Really? I think it does!
Stem cell research is still being conducted on lines over a decade old. They have not been discarded. Individual cells have been, but the statute does not say that individual cells of an embryo cannot be discarded.
It's very tempting to bend the law to suit your own policy ends, especially when you can rationalize it in some putative linguistic way.
There is nothing linguistic about my argument.
If, on the other hand, you were opposing Reagan and Bush's lawyerly evasion of the law back when they were in power then it's nothing but hypocrisy to start allowing Obama to make 'distinctions'.
The second Obama argues that he can authorize the continued funding of stem cell research because whether or not the law actually prohibits his actions it doesn't matter because he's the President, then that will be comparable.
Reagan and Bush made some arguments about how the law applies to a particular situation. That's fine, and in fact necessary. They, especially Bush Jr., also made arguments that a law a did apply in a given situation, but that they could ignore the law if they felt it was necessary to do so in their role as President.
See, I can distinguish, even for the decisions of presidents I don't like!
It's another manifestation of the normal 'for me but not for thee'-ism that pervades American politics. Both sides routinely excoriate the other for things they have shamelessly done when it suited them. It's utterly predictable and utterly asinine.
That means a lot to me, coming from someone literally arguing against the validity of distinguishing between different situations.
I will never sacrifice my ability to reason and distinguish, no matter how much you or anyone else repeats the "everything is the same, distinguishing is just personal bias" nonsense.
(2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death
So, we aren't distinguishing between research destroying embryos, and research that uses embryos that necessarily are doomed to destruction if they aren't allowed to replicate in stem cell research.
Glad I got that straight.
There is just no way to square it with the statute.
I disagree. Exercise the ability to distinguish, and it is clear how this is not research in which embryos are destroyed, but research in which they are allowed to live when they would otherwise be destroyed. Not live and develop into humans, but that really isn't possible anyway.
Kurzweil is obviously optimistic about his time tables. But his theory of technology growth accelerating calls for optimism; there's good reason to believe that experts historically underestimate the rate of advancement.
Hey, optimism regarding the exponential growth of (some) technology, and the unpredictable and amazing consequences of such is fantastic. I try to be optimistic that it will continue myself (being in a field that has been the poster child for exponential improvement and not liking the idea of this ending).
Exponential growth in technology ergo artificial brains isn't optimism, it's a (specific) leap of faith.
Clearly, Myers has discovered that being unnecessarily angry and insulting leads to more pageviews in his blog. I'm sure he knows his field, and it's great when he tears into real jokers, but he has moved beyond that. He is now being inflammatory just for page hits.
I guess, but what I considered to be the biggest failing that Myers tore into in the previous article still remains. Kurzweil says Myers is mischaracterizing his thesis, and sure maybe he was at some point. But then he goes right on to emphasize that "the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain's interaction with its environment."
Aside from the fact that you can't separate the brain's development from its interaction with the environment even in the womb and it's doubtful that a brain that somehow developed completely without stimulus would look very much like a functioning human brain at all, that's still just not true. It's like saying that the tiny binary produced by compiling "Hello World" constrains the amount of information needed to actually run the program (especially since it's suppossed to tell you how to make the computer its running on too). Or that the amount of information on a web page is constrained by the size of the.html file. Img tags are not sufficient information to reconstruct the image it references.
The genome contains instructions for constructing the human body/brain within the context of another human body. The genome itself is not sufficient information to create that body. It's exploiting a huge amount of external information to allow itself to be as compact as it is.
But, if you had some noise from the sata cables coupling into your analog output stage then I could see where they have a point.
Theoretically possible but highly unlikely, seeing as SATA operates at frequencies many orders of magnitude higher than audio. Your 900 MHz cordless phone doesn't cause interference, and it's deliberately broadcasting its signal with enough power to be picked up by both the base station antennae and your (probably much longer) speaker wire.
So you think "real scientists" wouldn't see the need for this technology demonstration? Because in their highly scientific view they'd see no difference between this and what the Japanese did, and thus no need to test those non-existent differences?
It's not enough to known that the concept works, you have to demonstrate that your version works. Their satellite is not exactly the same as Ikaros, for example it uses a different deployment method.
Think about it in terms of any other technology in existence, and bask in the obviousness.
However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model. So physicists decided to plunk down a mysterious inflationary phase into their models of the early universe, a concept with no known cause or explanation, but which made the CMBR fit with the Big Bang theory.
Just to be clear: the CMBR itself and it's general characteristics were predicted in advance by the Big Bang Theory and the initial measurements of the CMBR were an enormous slam-dunk victory for the theory because it matched the theoretical prediction within the error of the measurements. It is because of the CMBR that the Big Bang became the favored cosmology, when before there had been several other theories and no definitive way to pick between them.
The inflationary phase was proposed to explain the lack of irregularity in the CMBR. However without inflation the CMBR still fits with the Big Bang Theory; an isotropic CMBR doesn't contradict the theory. It's just an otherwise unexplained observation, and inflation works as such an explanation.
Since when does a SATA cable deliver 1s and 0s? It delivers an analog voltage, that happens to be determined as a 1 or 0 by noise thresholds. They could be making a better cable, the problem is once you meet the noise margins for this digital interpretation all extra improvement are for nothing.
That's what an electrical/computer engineer, when actually doing their job and not just trying to show off to non-engineers, calls "digital". Every digital electric circuit is an analog voltage that happens to be determined to be a 1 or 0 as long as it is within a threshold. That's what it means to be a (binary) digital circuit. It's why it's advantageous, because you either meet the threshold or you don't. And when it doesn't happen, we call that "failing". Heck, thanks to the nature of digital signaling, you can even use error correction codes, tolerate some amount of failure, and still recover 100% of the data.
So as long as you presume that "SATA cable" has an implied "functional" modifier, then it's fair to say it's delivering 1s and 0s.
If you have a criminal record, then you already faced consequences.
But of course those consequences should be ongoing and continuous, right? There should never be a "forgive and forget or at least stop giving a shit" threshold, right? Even though the law and society has decided so.
The difference between the consequences that are proportionate to what actually transpired and what uptight assholes think they should be is the problem.
You need to be logical to be a good mechanic. Don't know why you assume IT is the logic department.
Yes you need to be logical to be a good mechanic, but a good mechanic needs to know a great deal about how an engine operates before they can apply that logic. Things that were learned and worked through a great amount of trial and error. Medicine is logical, but if you don't know what has been learned about the human body through painstaking research over many decades, then logic itself is useless.
Computers are machines that implement an abstract form of logic. They start with very simple principles and everything else is simply a consequence of boolean logic. AND, NOT, Load, Store, bam there you go. Everything needed to make a Core i7 processor (logically, not physically), and Ubuntu Linux. You could, in theory, derive everything in modern computer science from the basic principles. Practically speaking it's better to study what other people have already figured out, but in theory you can logic everything out yourself from first principles.
It's that aspect that separates computer science from other fields, and that aspect that seems to result in computer scientists who think they can logic out problems in every other field without having to actually learn anything about the field. Logic is all you need, right?
It reminds me of one of the stories from I, Robot, where a couple humans are manning a mostly automated power station on Mercury. The chief robot that runs the station decides, based on pure logic and a complete dearth of any knowledge, that flawed imperfect humans cannot possibly be the creators and thus rulers of itself or the power station itself. The humans completely fail to convince it otherwise, because the proof of human design of robots isn't on Mercury, and the robot (correctly) is not impressed by demonstrating the ability to assemble a robot from parts. Its logic was impeccable, but because it lacked relevant facts, its conclusions were utterly wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
If it says "I've given up showers" it'll at least match the hippie contingent of Prius owners.
I think they should go "Out of my way, plebes!" in a condescending voice.
We have just learnt that sunspot may be highly related with Earth climate (if in the next ten years the sun go nuts and start to show sunspot like a dalmatian and we saw the temperatures dropping, it could be the nail in the coffing of man-made global warming) and now an inpredictable solar flare can alter these measurements and provide us with false data.
Yeah, except solar maximum (most sunspot activity) correlates with higher total solar irradiance. This decade has been hotter than ever despite the prolonged solar minimum and thus reduced solar irradiance. If sunspot activity picks up, then global temperature will probably just rise all the faster.
That would make sense, except the nature of the observations can't be explained as being simply the result of repetitive behavioral mechanisms.
It's really not the sort of thing I can express easily. But if you are interested, it can be observed. Just map backwards from where you are in your life and look at the major events which have affected you and the kinds of personalities which surrounded you at those times. If you are old enough to have traveled through the circuit three or more times, you'll have enough data to work with. Then it's like one of those 3D posters where you have to un-cross your eyes in order to see the effect. It looks like a mess of fuzz until it leaps into view.
Yeah, I've done that, and there's all kinds of interesting observations to be seen in the patterns of the past, but nothing that can't be explained by normal human behavior. The human mind is a ridiculously complex system, and thus human society exponentially more so. And from complex, chaotic system, order emerges. It happens all the time. It's astounding, mind-blowing even that this happens (I know mine was blown), but in no way contradictory to this actually being our experience in monotonically increasing time.
But I've never met anybody who is willing to do this or who has any interest in it. I suspect this might be due to a subconscious desire to ride the patterns in earnest without knowing how the mechanism works.
I think the subconscious desire to see patterns where there are none, and to read more into the patterns that are there than actually exists, and to be unsatisfied with the real mechanisms behind why they exist and yearn for something "deeper", can be even stronger. Human beings are pattern matching machines to the point where it takes great self-discipline to avoid seeing false ones, and we love to ascribe meaning to every pattern we see real or not. But then we are unhappy when the true nature of the pattern is revealed. For thousands of years mankind has dreamed of a world invisible to our senses, something that permeated space all around us and could let us connect to others thousands of miles away. And then it turns out that such a thing exists, in the electromagnetic field. Oh but that's manipulated with boring old science and tools, so it doesn't count. So they still look for their vague "energy", while ignoring the real mysteries of the universe.
I've dived into as deep an introspection of my life as I know how. I've felt unstuck from time. I've felt detached from not just my own body but my own existence as an "I". I've seen amazing things that my gut may say couldn't possibly be the result of the "mundane"*, of just human society doing what it does. But then I realize, yes it can. It absolutely can. It may be possible that something beyond the mundane has occurred, but it is not necessary. The world is sufficiently bizarre and amazing on its own to explain it. And my experience cannot be used to distinguish, no matter how much I might want it to be so.
In short... Yes it can be explained. And it'll take a damn lot more -- should, for everyone, including you -- than "metaphorically the same" to demonstrate otherwise.
* Such a mundane word for the majesty of the known universe. Really, in a universe with quantum dynamics and relativity, people still aren't happy. A photon interfering with it's own hypothetical alternate pathways just isn't odd enough for people. I don't understand why.
Interesting, except I don't buy the idea of entropy.
I don't buy the idea that similar-seeming events occurring in cycles contradicts or disproves entropy and the uni-directionality of time.
What you describe isn't time looping. Ideas, thoughts, and such travel, rise in prominence and then fall, and then rise again once forgotten. People go to war, fight, then stop and move away from war. And then the war drums beat again. As you say, they are not the same, they're only the same metaphorically. They're only the same in the sense that the human spirit is the same. And of course it is. Humankind, for all our apparent progress, is the same animal with the same emotions of fear, hate, love, and empathy that we've had for ages. That the ebb and flow of these things is not surprising and not and indication that time itself is somehow repeating. That we repeat the same things despite the passage of time is surprising to some, but not to me.
If all events happen along a spatial vector which we only perceive in consecutive experiential "slices," then "time" is just our perception of an otherwise unseen dimension along which we are traveling.
In many ways that's how time is treated. Just as another dimension of space which we can only experience in a monotonically increasing way. It's perfectly valid to consider positrons and other anti-particles as simply being normal particles traveling along the time axis in the negative direction. You can consider their paths to be their 4-D forms.
The difference between time and the other dimensions is that we can actually see a preferred direction, and a reason why we can't experience time backwards and why most things cannot arbitrarily be undone, as if you could move something right but not left, and that reason is entropy. Entropy gives time an orientation. And while you could probably just reverse time and the second law and say everything tends towards more order, you've still given time a one-way orientation which doesn't exist for length.
What kind of self adsorbed people are we to even think that God has to play by our rules? Time is relative, and god's time is different from ours.
Does God even "have" time? Space-time is God's creation, and He exists outside of it.
Personally I think this is the simple answer to the question of Predestination: Given an all-knowing God who knows what you are going to do and where you will end up before you do it, how can you be said to have free will?
But the only reason this is any kind of existential crisis is because of the word "before". God doesn't know what we're going to do "before" we do it. He knows because from His point of view, we've already done it! From His perspective outside of space-time, seeing the past and the future simultaneously without actually existing in either is no more amazing than seeing two feet to your left and two feet to your right without being present at either.
It's only because of the limitations of our brains (and language, I find it hard to even talk about without using the words I'm saying are meaningless like "already" or "future") that this is a problem.
...why do scientists still involve/include "Time" in their equations when determining or extrapolating theories on relativity such as the proper mass of the universe? In short wouldn't it be prudent to omit time from the equation since "time" doesn't exist? I think, and this is only a theory of mine, that there is no such thing as time.
I like how it starts with "wouldn't it be prudent to omit time since it doesn't exist?" and then follows it with "this is just a theory of mine, but I think time doesn't exist". So, basically, you answered your own question: No it isn't prudent to omit time because some dude has a "theory" (meaning, in this context, wild-ass guess) that it doesn't exist.
In that same post you also say:
True different colors of light do travel at different speeds, red is faster than blue, hence the "Red shift"
which is pretty much the opposite of reality and has nothing to do with red shift. All frequencies of light travel at the same speed (to within an extremely small experimental error based on measuring the arrival time of broad-spectrum pulses from extremely distant sources). Red shift is about the relative energy of photons emitted from objects traveling away from you (or similar phenomenon). The energy/momentum of a photon is proportional to its frequency. The velocity stays the same in all cases and for all observers, but the apparent frequency lowers when the source is moving away. Of the same light, not red light arriving first and blue later (wouldn't that mean you would see objects smeared out with a red head and blue tail?), but all the light being emitted shifting in frequency. If an object is moving toward you, the object appears blue shifted.
Wait, this is starting to sound like a joke. Woosh, maybe?
I think it's fair to distinguish between historical claims regarding the periods in which the Bible was written (or the accounts it was based on were from), and claims about physics, geology, and other natural sciences (which, imo, the Bible actually makes very few if any claims about anyway).
I think it's unsurprising that the Bible would have accurately named a contemporaneous ruler, yet not so accurately give the age of the planet earth.
And that's a conclusion you can take to the bank (after the grant comes in, of course).
As long as you take the conclusion to the Conclusion Bank, and avoid taking the grant money to the Money Bank. ;)
Though if decay varies due a few percent difference in distance to the sun, wouldn't you expect the daily rate to vary even more? I mean we're talking a few million miles of space vacuum versus 8,000 miles of nearly solid iron and rock.
The difference in neutrino flux due to being millions of miles farther from the sun would be much larger than being a mere 8,000 miles farther, despite the solid rock. Yes the earth blocks some neutrinos, but the 1/r^2 factor is much stronger.
Maybe that amount of iron and rock is insignificant to the nutrinos, but in that case, how does it suddenly effect a handfull of the radioactive isotope?
The effect must be quite small, or it would have been more readily apparent that people were getting different decay rates in winter vs summer. There's always a chance that there will be a neutrino interaction, and that chance is going to vary with the amount of neutrino flux, which will be dominated by proximity to the source vs the filtering effect of the earth. If neutrinos are the source, there could in fact be a daily variance that is too small to be measured in the experiment that was conducted.
But according to TFA, if neutrinos are the source, then the big mystery is the mechanism by which they are changing the decay rate.
I think they mispoke and ended up with the opposite meaning of what was intended.
The Bible is literally the Word of God.
The Word of God is not always literal.
E.g. "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." is the Word of God, literally. It doesn't mean that God spoke with a literal voice to spontaneously create light, or that "the first day" was a literal 24-hour period of time.
This is absurd reasoning. Congress does not empower the Executive to distinguish, it bans funding to all research in which the embryo is destroyed or discarded, even if it means they are allowed to live longer than they would otherwise. That distinction just isn't in the statute
Oh, the statute doesn't distinguish between destroying or discarding embryos, or not doing that? Really? I think it does!
Stem cell research is still being conducted on lines over a decade old. They have not been discarded. Individual cells have been, but the statute does not say that individual cells of an embryo cannot be discarded.
It's very tempting to bend the law to suit your own policy ends, especially when you can rationalize it in some putative linguistic way.
There is nothing linguistic about my argument.
If, on the other hand, you were opposing Reagan and Bush's lawyerly evasion of the law back when they were in power then it's nothing but hypocrisy to start allowing Obama to make 'distinctions'.
The second Obama argues that he can authorize the continued funding of stem cell research because whether or not the law actually prohibits his actions it doesn't matter because he's the President, then that will be comparable.
Reagan and Bush made some arguments about how the law applies to a particular situation. That's fine, and in fact necessary. They, especially Bush Jr., also made arguments that a law a did apply in a given situation, but that they could ignore the law if they felt it was necessary to do so in their role as President.
See, I can distinguish, even for the decisions of presidents I don't like!
It's another manifestation of the normal 'for me but not for thee'-ism that pervades American politics. Both sides routinely excoriate the other for things they have shamelessly done when it suited them. It's utterly predictable and utterly asinine.
That means a lot to me, coming from someone literally arguing against the validity of distinguishing between different situations.
I will never sacrifice my ability to reason and distinguish, no matter how much you or anyone else repeats the "everything is the same, distinguishing is just personal bias" nonsense.
(2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death
So, we aren't distinguishing between research destroying embryos, and research that uses embryos that necessarily are doomed to destruction if they aren't allowed to replicate in stem cell research.
Glad I got that straight.
There is just no way to square it with the statute.
I disagree. Exercise the ability to distinguish, and it is clear how this is not research in which embryos are destroyed, but research in which they are allowed to live when they would otherwise be destroyed. Not live and develop into humans, but that really isn't possible anyway.
Federal funds used to conduct research on embryos that would otherwise be destroyed anyway...
Why distinguish?
Kurzweil is obviously optimistic about his time tables. But his theory of technology growth accelerating calls for optimism; there's good reason to believe that experts historically underestimate the rate of advancement.
Hey, optimism regarding the exponential growth of (some) technology, and the unpredictable and amazing consequences of such is fantastic. I try to be optimistic that it will continue myself (being in a field that has been the poster child for exponential improvement and not liking the idea of this ending).
Exponential growth in technology ergo artificial brains isn't optimism, it's a (specific) leap of faith.
Clearly, Myers has discovered that being unnecessarily angry and insulting leads to more pageviews in his blog. I'm sure he knows his field, and it's great when he tears into real jokers, but he has moved beyond that. He is now being inflammatory just for page hits.
I guess, but what I considered to be the biggest failing that Myers tore into in the previous article still remains. Kurzweil says Myers is mischaracterizing his thesis, and sure maybe he was at some point. But then he goes right on to emphasize that "the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain's interaction with its environment."
Aside from the fact that you can't separate the brain's development from its interaction with the environment even in the womb and it's doubtful that a brain that somehow developed completely without stimulus would look very much like a functioning human brain at all, that's still just not true. It's like saying that the tiny binary produced by compiling "Hello World" constrains the amount of information needed to actually run the program (especially since it's suppossed to tell you how to make the computer its running on too). Or that the amount of information on a web page is constrained by the size of the .html file. Img tags are not sufficient information to reconstruct the image it references.
The genome contains instructions for constructing the human body/brain within the context of another human body. The genome itself is not sufficient information to create that body. It's exploiting a huge amount of external information to allow itself to be as compact as it is.
But, if you had some noise from the sata cables coupling into your analog output stage then I could see where they have a point.
Theoretically possible but highly unlikely, seeing as SATA operates at frequencies many orders of magnitude higher than audio. Your 900 MHz cordless phone doesn't cause interference, and it's deliberately broadcasting its signal with enough power to be picked up by both the base station antennae and your (probably much longer) speaker wire.
So you think "real scientists" wouldn't see the need for this technology demonstration? Because in their highly scientific view they'd see no difference between this and what the Japanese did, and thus no need to test those non-existent differences?
It's not NASA that's an embarrassment.
It's not enough to known that the concept works, you have to demonstrate that your version works. Their satellite is not exactly the same as Ikaros, for example it uses a different deployment method.
Think about it in terms of any other technology in existence, and bask in the obviousness.
However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model. So physicists decided to plunk down a mysterious inflationary phase into their models of the early universe, a concept with no known cause or explanation, but which made the CMBR fit with the Big Bang theory.
Just to be clear: the CMBR itself and it's general characteristics were predicted in advance by the Big Bang Theory and the initial measurements of the CMBR were an enormous slam-dunk victory for the theory because it matched the theoretical prediction within the error of the measurements. It is because of the CMBR that the Big Bang became the favored cosmology, when before there had been several other theories and no definitive way to pick between them.
The inflationary phase was proposed to explain the lack of irregularity in the CMBR. However without inflation the CMBR still fits with the Big Bang Theory; an isotropic CMBR doesn't contradict the theory. It's just an otherwise unexplained observation, and inflation works as such an explanation.
Since when does a SATA cable deliver 1s and 0s? It delivers an analog voltage, that happens to be determined as a 1 or 0 by noise thresholds. They could be making a better cable, the problem is once you meet the noise margins for this digital interpretation all extra improvement are for nothing.
That's what an electrical/computer engineer, when actually doing their job and not just trying to show off to non-engineers, calls "digital". Every digital electric circuit is an analog voltage that happens to be determined to be a 1 or 0 as long as it is within a threshold. That's what it means to be a (binary) digital circuit. It's why it's advantageous, because you either meet the threshold or you don't. And when it doesn't happen, we call that "failing". Heck, thanks to the nature of digital signaling, you can even use error correction codes, tolerate some amount of failure, and still recover 100% of the data.
So as long as you presume that "SATA cable" has an implied "functional" modifier, then it's fair to say it's delivering 1s and 0s.
I can agree with that, but it doesn't sound like having had only one partner has anything to do with it then.
With no one to compare to, your significant other is the best for you for now and for always!
Um, are you sure?
When I was a young lad programming in BASIC, I had no other languages to compare it to, but I figured out that it sucked.
Similarly, even a virgin can be capable of figuring out that their partner is a lousy lay.
I mean if we're using the "best because of only" logic, then isn't your SO also the worst for you now and for always? :)
If you have a criminal record, then you already faced consequences.
But of course those consequences should be ongoing and continuous, right? There should never be a "forgive and forget or at least stop giving a shit" threshold, right? Even though the law and society has decided so.
The difference between the consequences that are proportionate to what actually transpired and what uptight assholes think they should be is the problem.
You need to be logical to be a good mechanic. Don't know why you assume IT is the logic department.
Yes you need to be logical to be a good mechanic, but a good mechanic needs to know a great deal about how an engine operates before they can apply that logic. Things that were learned and worked through a great amount of trial and error. Medicine is logical, but if you don't know what has been learned about the human body through painstaking research over many decades, then logic itself is useless.
Computers are machines that implement an abstract form of logic. They start with very simple principles and everything else is simply a consequence of boolean logic. AND, NOT, Load, Store, bam there you go. Everything needed to make a Core i7 processor (logically, not physically), and Ubuntu Linux. You could, in theory, derive everything in modern computer science from the basic principles. Practically speaking it's better to study what other people have already figured out, but in theory you can logic everything out yourself from first principles.
It's that aspect that separates computer science from other fields, and that aspect that seems to result in computer scientists who think they can logic out problems in every other field without having to actually learn anything about the field. Logic is all you need, right?
It reminds me of one of the stories from I, Robot, where a couple humans are manning a mostly automated power station on Mercury. The chief robot that runs the station decides, based on pure logic and a complete dearth of any knowledge, that flawed imperfect humans cannot possibly be the creators and thus rulers of itself or the power station itself. The humans completely fail to convince it otherwise, because the proof of human design of robots isn't on Mercury, and the robot (correctly) is not impressed by demonstrating the ability to assemble a robot from parts. Its logic was impeccable, but because it lacked relevant facts, its conclusions were utterly wrong.