The big difference you're missing is that spontaneous generation was falsifiable. In other words, an experiment can be constructed to provide evidence for or against the hypothesis (in this case, against).
With ID/creationism, there is no experiment one can construct to obtain evidence one way or the other. How exactly does one prove or disprove "God did it"? So even mentioning it as an old "theory" is incorrect, because it doesn't even merit the title of "hypothesis".
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the third-party candidates aren't any better. I considered libertarian. But Bob Barr? Really? How can anyone call him a libertarian?
Bullshit. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy alone contain countless decrees for death and destruction to fall upon anyone that doesn't not follow their god. And they contain countless more cruel punishments for those who violate any of gods rules.
You really need to read the bible. And not just the parts that make you feel warm and fuzzy.
You have apparently never read the bible. There are all sorts of atrocities either committed by god or by he/she/its commands to followers. Among them are encouraging mass rape, incest, infanticide, and genocide.
At tax time, we should get a sheet with checkboxes next to all the items our taxes can go towards. We then can select where want our taxes spent (and th amount). There would be a default option of course for "whatever".
That would help give us a say as to how our money should be spent.
That analogy does not account for the fact that the wealthy generate most of their income from investments which are taxed at significantly lower rates than income. Hence, Warren Buffet's claim that his secretary gets taxed at a higher rate than he does.
Bush's cuts gave an enormous amount of cash back to the rich through the reduction of capital gains. The tax cuts for general income was bone to throw the rest of the populace to keep them happy.
So, in your analogy rich guy actually starts out with a discount of 20%.
You are correct. The problem wasn't sub-prime mortgages. It was how they were used.
Instituions like Bear-Stearns and Lehmans would get all these mortgages and package them into various debt instruments and derivatives. The problem is, these institutions usually used leverage to buy such products on their private little market.
It's the leverage that ended up being the problem. A subprime default rate of 10% can be absorbed with a fair amount of losses, but what happens when you're leveraged 10:1, 20:1, 30:1? Leverage limits were raised during the boom an people trading in these markets took full advantage of it in order to bost their profits.
No why would someone gamble like that? Easy answer: skyrocketing real-estate. People buying these mortgages viewed them as win-win situations. If the people could pay, great. If the couldn't, the owner of the mortgage would get the house and resell it at a profit. This was also the reason why they were letting anyone with a heartbeat get into a house since they couldn't lose.
However, defaults skyrocketed and prices of homes plummeted. That's when everyone started asking how much the debt instruments they were holding were really worth. No one really had answers since the securities were very opaque. That's hen panic set in and everyone tried to sell. No one would buy them. So they stayed on their books and as more mortgages defaulted the people owning the debt instruments backed by those mortgages took on larger and larger losses.
Add in the idiotic leverage that many were using and it's very easy to see how a few percentage points higher defaults could result in billions of dollars in losses.
This little black market that the institutions were running was leveraged up to $64 trillion, which is 3-4 times the GDP of the planet. What we are seeing is the unwinding process. No one is sure who is holding what. Banks are refusing to lend in fear of not being paid back. This is as much a financial crisis as it is a trust and confidence crisis.
Another alternative is the super-dimensional objects from outside the universe have effects that we can observe within our universe.
We know the rules that govern our space-time. We don't know the rules governing objects that are outside it (or perhaps out of phase with it).
For example, maybe our space-time is little more than a hiccup in a larger, say 5-D universe. We may be the result of a singularity in that universe which collapses one of it's dimensions. A large enough object passing near to that singularity (us) may exert some influence that we see in our universe, but would be incapable of actually detecting directly.
All we can say with any certainty is how things work in our space-time. Anything outside of that is up for grabs.:)
Fear is a good thing when facing a threat, and devastating when you're not.
Being over-reactionary and paranoid works when you're at the bottom of the food chain and surrounded by predators. We are not at the bottom of the food chain. We are not surrounded by predators. And the only real threat to this country are the people who are using fear as a club to beat the rest of the people senseless.
Fear is healthy when natural. But being in a constant state of fear is unhealthy and allows one to become highly manipulated. Fear has been used in the past to manipulate populations into doing some pretty deplorable acts.
There's a big difference between being afraid and being conned into being afraid.
The answer, Mr Senator, is quite simple: BECAUSE WE CAN!
Keep up his line of questioning and you may find your re-election campaign underfunded. And by pure coincidence, everyone in your voting district may receive text messages encouraging them to vote for your opponent.
Yes Mr. Senator, we live by mutually agreeable terms. You have a nice seat in the senate, and it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
Yep. Just like cancer researchers, AIDS researchers, etc. who depend on government funding and, you would think, have a vested interest in making sure a cure for such diseases are never found as it would put them out of a job.
Of course, nobody seems to have a problem listening to them.
Come up with a real argument. Preferably on that is falsifiable and backed by enough research and data as to disprove the current scientific consensus.
I find it more worrying that people use their backyard thermometer a proof that global warming is or isn't happening. That's meteorology, not climatology.
Climatological has been showing a pronounced warming trend. Just because it is cold in your backyard doesn't mean the rest of the planet is not warming up. On top of that, a warming planet doesn't mean it's going to warm up everywhere (it's not).
If you have a choice between believing the world scientists or your own opinion in regards to climate change, I would suggest listening to the scientists. They know ALOT more about it than you do.
The arctic ice didn't refuse to melt. It's already the second lowest since satellite measurements started taking place and there is still about a month left to the melting season.
I won't comment on the alarmist articles. There as bad as people claiming we're having no impact on the environment.
Hmm...let's see. Yet another person who knows squat about climatology posting yet again that somehow martian climates somehow indicate a solar system wide warming pattern.
We amass terabytes of data on our planet's climate from thousands of sensors. We KNOW the global temeperature is increasing. IT"S NOT THE FUCKING SUN. People who have spent decades researching climatology are fucking smart enough to take into account any variations of the GIANT FUCKING BALL OF FUSION IN THE SKY.
How many climatology sources of information do we have on the other planets? Practically none. Most observations are done from a distance at extremely course resolution or the data has be inferred from other measurements. Planets like Saturn and Jupiter generate their own heat. Pluto happens to be approaching it's closest point to the sun in it's orbit. All of this information is available one the web, in science journals, and other legitimate data sources.
If you don't think global climate change is happening, fine. It's going to happen whether you think so or not. But unless you have Ph.d in climate science with some earth-shattering discovery with copious data and models to back up you're claims and fully explains why all the current models and data point towards climate change, then shut up.
You want to see the data, the models, and the research, there right there on the web. Download the code and the data and run it yourself. There's no global conspiracy at work. If you had the brain power it takes to even understand one module in any of the climate modles, you probably wouldn't be posting such ignorant drivel.
This is what the research currently says. Climate change is happening, it will continue to happen, and there is a high probability that humans are having a significant impact.
Now unless you have a scientifically vetted, reproducible, set of experiments that can show otherwise AND explain all of our current observations and data, then you're no better than the ignorant talking heads on TV. You're just noise, and idiotic noise at that.
Oh yes...nothing...except for compounds which are detrimental to human health in quantities of parts-per-million or parts-per-billion.
And the fact that this pollution is being added to year over year, with increasing amounts.
And the fact that some of those compounds have no natural mechanism of breaking down in the environment, so they accumulate into ground water, plants, and animals over the years.
Once one receives the Suffer-Ring, they must quickly use the Dividing Force (or Div-Force for short) least they also receive the Child-Bear-Ring. At that point, all hope is lost for the afflicted as even the Div-Force will be unable to remove the parasites.
"You can exclaim "fucking retards" but without thermite, there is nothing on the plane or in an office building that can burn hot enough to cause steel to melt."
Bullshit. You can melt steel in your backyard with some charcoal, piping, and a reversible vacuum cleaner. You also don't need to melt the steel, you just need to heat it to the point of weakening, which is a lot lower than melting.
Have you ever seen a bellows in operation? It's pretty simple. Take some fuel, set it on fire, then force a bunch of air through it. This creates far more heat than could normally be obtained and amateur metallurgists have been doing this in their backyards for years to melt all sorts of materials from aluminum to silver to steel.
When the jets crashed into the buildings, it created a natural bellows (restricted opening, lots of burning fuel, natural vacuum effect due to rising air). The fact that under those conditions the buildings lasted as long as they did is no small feat. The fire raged internally, weakened/melted the steel supports, and the top levels collapsed inward and downward.
There's really no mystery here. You can search online as to how you can melt all sorts of metals with a few household implements. It's not hard.
So the central limit theorem can't be applied to aggregate behavior. Instead of getting a nice well behaved normal distribution, you'll end up with a distribution that's messy, unpredictable, and confusing, which is fitting, since that's what we humans are.
That makes little sense. If you have true free will, then your actions have unknown consequences until you make a choice, thus changing the outcome of the deterministic universe.
Or are you implying that our choices can be free as long as the final outcome doesn't change? That would be "limited" free will. You are free to chose between a set of choices but you can not choose beyond those choices. And that set of choices varies depending on what state the universe is in at any given time.
This seems to fit with what we observe in quantum mechanics. A quantum pair is in an undetermined state UNTIL an action limits it's "decision", say by measuring one member of the pair. Once that "decision" takes place, the choices of the other member of the pair drops from many to one.
But you can't have true non-deterministic agents in a deterministic universe (that would create a non-deterministic system). However, you can have deterministic universe with non-deterministic agents on the condition that overall the decisions of the agents do not alter the final "outcome". That would effectively create the illusion of free will, though it wouldn't really be free will. Like a choose your own adventure book, you're free to choose any option on the page but you can't choose something that isn't there.
On the bright side though, you won't even notice the choice isn't there.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never tried salmiak, but I'd be willing to try Salma Hayek. :)
~X~
How long it be until Obama gets a blow job from a chubby intern?
~X~
The big difference you're missing is that spontaneous generation was falsifiable. In other words, an experiment can be constructed to provide evidence for or against the hypothesis (in this case, against).
With ID/creationism, there is no experiment one can construct to obtain evidence one way or the other. How exactly does one prove or disprove "God did it"? So even mentioning it as an old "theory" is incorrect, because it doesn't even merit the title of "hypothesis".
~X~
Of course they do. They want ratings and nothing gets better ratings than introducing nut jobs into a discussion.
Seems to work here at any rate.
~X~
So your voting for yourself?
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the third-party candidates aren't any better. I considered libertarian. But Bob Barr? Really? How can anyone call him a libertarian?
~X~
Or DIP for short.
~X~
Bullshit. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy alone contain countless decrees for death and destruction to fall upon anyone that doesn't not follow their god. And they contain countless more cruel punishments for those who violate any of gods rules.
You really need to read the bible. And not just the parts that make you feel warm and fuzzy.
~X~
You have apparently never read the bible. There are all sorts of atrocities either committed by god or by he/she/its commands to followers. Among them are encouraging mass rape, incest, infanticide, and genocide.
Try here for a start: http://www.evilbible.com/
~X~
At tax time, we should get a sheet with checkboxes next to all the items our taxes can go towards. We then can select where want our taxes spent (and th amount). There would be a default option of course for "whatever".
That would help give us a say as to how our money should be spent.
~X~
That analogy does not account for the fact that the wealthy generate most of their income from investments which are taxed at significantly lower rates than income. Hence, Warren Buffet's claim that his secretary gets taxed at a higher rate than he does.
Bush's cuts gave an enormous amount of cash back to the rich through the reduction of capital gains. The tax cuts for general income was bone to throw the rest of the populace to keep them happy.
So, in your analogy rich guy actually starts out with a discount of 20%.
~X~
You are correct. The problem wasn't sub-prime mortgages. It was how they were used.
Instituions like Bear-Stearns and Lehmans would get all these mortgages and package them into various debt instruments and derivatives. The problem is, these institutions usually used leverage to buy such products on their private little market.
It's the leverage that ended up being the problem. A subprime default rate of 10% can be absorbed with a fair amount of losses, but what happens when you're leveraged 10:1, 20:1, 30:1? Leverage limits were raised during the boom an people trading in these markets took full advantage of it in order to bost their profits.
No why would someone gamble like that? Easy answer: skyrocketing real-estate. People buying these mortgages viewed them as win-win situations. If the people could pay, great. If the couldn't, the owner of the mortgage would get the house and resell it at a profit. This was also the reason why they were letting anyone with a heartbeat get into a house since they couldn't lose.
However, defaults skyrocketed and prices of homes plummeted. That's when everyone started asking how much the debt instruments they were holding were really worth. No one really had answers since the securities were very opaque. That's hen panic set in and everyone tried to sell. No one would buy them. So they stayed on their books and as more mortgages defaulted the people owning the debt instruments backed by those mortgages took on larger and larger losses.
Add in the idiotic leverage that many were using and it's very easy to see how a few percentage points higher defaults could result in billions of dollars in losses.
This little black market that the institutions were running was leveraged up to $64 trillion, which is 3-4 times the GDP of the planet. What we are seeing is the unwinding process. No one is sure who is holding what. Banks are refusing to lend in fear of not being paid back. This is as much a financial crisis as it is a trust and confidence crisis.
It's likely to get worse before it gets better.
~X~
Another alternative is the super-dimensional objects from outside the universe have effects that we can observe within our universe.
We know the rules that govern our space-time. We don't know the rules governing objects that are outside it (or perhaps out of phase with it).
For example, maybe our space-time is little more than a hiccup in a larger, say 5-D universe. We may be the result of a singularity in that universe which collapses one of it's dimensions. A large enough object passing near to that singularity (us) may exert some influence that we see in our universe, but would be incapable of actually detecting directly.
All we can say with any certainty is how things work in our space-time. Anything outside of that is up for grabs. :)
~X~
Fear is a good thing when facing a threat, and devastating when you're not.
Being over-reactionary and paranoid works when you're at the bottom of the food chain and surrounded by predators. We are not at the bottom of the food chain. We are not surrounded by predators. And the only real threat to this country are the people who are using fear as a club to beat the rest of the people senseless.
Fear is healthy when natural. But being in a constant state of fear is unhealthy and allows one to become highly manipulated. Fear has been used in the past to manipulate populations into doing some pretty deplorable acts.
There's a big difference between being afraid and being conned into being afraid.
~X~
My take on this has been: " A liberal makes you feel like an asshole. A conservative really is an asshole."
~X~
Mila Jovovich is now naked and covered in hot corn nuts.
~X~
The answer, Mr Senator, is quite simple: BECAUSE WE CAN!
Keep up his line of questioning and you may find your re-election campaign underfunded. And by pure coincidence, everyone in your voting district may receive text messages encouraging them to vote for your opponent.
Yes Mr. Senator, we live by mutually agreeable terms. You have a nice seat in the senate, and it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
Sincerely,
Big Teleco
Yep. Just like cancer researchers, AIDS researchers, etc. who depend on government funding and, you would think, have a vested interest in making sure a cure for such diseases are never found as it would put them out of a job.
Of course, nobody seems to have a problem listening to them.
Come up with a real argument. Preferably on that is falsifiable and backed by enough research and data as to disprove the current scientific consensus.
ALOT was a typo.
~X~
I find it more worrying that people use their backyard thermometer a proof that global warming is or isn't happening. That's meteorology, not climatology.
Climatological has been showing a pronounced warming trend. Just because it is cold in your backyard doesn't mean the rest of the planet is not warming up. On top of that, a warming planet doesn't mean it's going to warm up everywhere (it's not).
If you have a choice between believing the world scientists or your own opinion in regards to climate change, I would suggest listening to the scientists. They know ALOT more about it than you do.
~X~
The arctic ice didn't refuse to melt. It's already the second lowest since satellite measurements started taking place and there is still about a month left to the melting season.
I won't comment on the alarmist articles. There as bad as people claiming we're having no impact on the environment.
~X~
Hmm...let's see. Yet another person who knows squat about climatology posting yet again that somehow martian climates somehow indicate a solar system wide warming pattern.
We amass terabytes of data on our planet's climate from thousands of sensors. We KNOW the global temeperature is increasing. IT"S NOT THE FUCKING SUN. People who have spent decades researching climatology are fucking smart enough to take into account any variations of the GIANT FUCKING BALL OF FUSION IN THE SKY.
How many climatology sources of information do we have on the other planets? Practically none. Most observations are done from a distance at extremely course resolution or the data has be inferred from other measurements. Planets like Saturn and Jupiter generate their own heat. Pluto happens to be approaching it's closest point to the sun in it's orbit. All of this information is available one the web, in science journals, and other legitimate data sources.
If you don't think global climate change is happening, fine. It's going to happen whether you think so or not. But unless you have Ph.d in climate science with some earth-shattering discovery with copious data and models to back up you're claims and fully explains why all the current models and data point towards climate change, then shut up.
You want to see the data, the models, and the research, there right there on the web. Download the code and the data and run it yourself. There's no global conspiracy at work. If you had the brain power it takes to even understand one module in any of the climate modles, you probably wouldn't be posting such ignorant drivel.
This is what the research currently says. Climate change is happening, it will continue to happen, and there is a high probability that humans are having a significant impact.
Now unless you have a scientifically vetted, reproducible, set of experiments that can show otherwise AND explain all of our current observations and data, then you're no better than the ignorant talking heads on TV. You're just noise, and idiotic noise at that.
Put up, or STFU.
~X~
Oh yes...nothing...except for compounds which are detrimental to human health in quantities of parts-per-million or parts-per-billion.
And the fact that this pollution is being added to year over year, with increasing amounts.
And the fact that some of those compounds have no natural mechanism of breaking down in the environment, so they accumulate into ground water, plants, and animals over the years.
But yeah...it's nothing.
~X~
Once one receives the Suffer-Ring, they must quickly use the Dividing Force (or Div-Force for short) least they also receive the Child-Bear-Ring. At that point, all hope is lost for the afflicted as even the Div-Force will be unable to remove the parasites.
~X~
"You can exclaim "fucking retards" but without thermite, there is nothing on the plane or in an office building that can burn hot enough to cause steel to melt."
Bullshit. You can melt steel in your backyard with some charcoal, piping, and a reversible vacuum cleaner. You also don't need to melt the steel, you just need to heat it to the point of weakening, which is a lot lower than melting.
Have you ever seen a bellows in operation? It's pretty simple. Take some fuel, set it on fire, then force a bunch of air through it. This creates far more heat than could normally be obtained and amateur metallurgists have been doing this in their backyards for years to melt all sorts of materials from aluminum to silver to steel.
When the jets crashed into the buildings, it created a natural bellows (restricted opening, lots of burning fuel, natural vacuum effect due to rising air). The fact that under those conditions the buildings lasted as long as they did is no small feat. The fire raged internally, weakened/melted the steel supports, and the top levels collapsed inward and downward.
There's really no mystery here. You can search online as to how you can melt all sorts of metals with a few household implements. It's not hard.
~X~
So the central limit theorem can't be applied to aggregate behavior. Instead of getting a nice well behaved normal distribution, you'll end up with a distribution that's messy, unpredictable, and confusing, which is fitting, since that's what we humans are.
For an example of this, see the stock market.
~X~
That makes little sense. If you have true free will, then your actions have unknown consequences until you make a choice, thus changing the outcome of the deterministic universe.
Or are you implying that our choices can be free as long as the final outcome doesn't change? That would be "limited" free will. You are free to chose between a set of choices but you can not choose beyond those choices. And that set of choices varies depending on what state the universe is in at any given time.
This seems to fit with what we observe in quantum mechanics. A quantum pair is in an undetermined state UNTIL an action limits it's "decision", say by measuring one member of the pair. Once that "decision" takes place, the choices of the other member of the pair drops from many to one.
But you can't have true non-deterministic agents in a deterministic universe (that would create a non-deterministic system). However, you can have deterministic universe with non-deterministic agents on the condition that overall the decisions of the agents do not alter the final "outcome". That would effectively create the illusion of free will, though it wouldn't really be free will. Like a choose your own adventure book, you're free to choose any option on the page but you can't choose something that isn't there.
On the bright side though, you won't even notice the choice isn't there.
~X~