I know what you mean, but I think the situation with spelling wasn't much better before the internet and texting, it's just that most communication between friends was verbal rather than written, so you wouldn't notice how bad someone's spelling and punctuation usage was. For example I saw an email from a ~50 year old director at our company, I saw where he mixed up lose/loose. I was thinking that was just a modern day internet problem, but apparently not. In fact when I see those words used correctly I still do a double take to make sure that they're the correct usages because I'm so used to seeing the wrong ones.. -_-
The sad thing is that poor spelling doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot, but I can't help but lower my opinion of someone when they mix up words like that. It smacks of laziness somehow.
Yeah in the days when I started using computers for school reports it was around 1990 (I was 7) so there wasn't such a thing as auto-correct (at least on Corel Studio or whatever the name of the office suit we had was). There was a spell checker, but it didn't even underline misspelled words though I don't think. Heh, firefox highlighted that I can't spell misspelled, fun times. Later on when I noticed Word correct words for me, I just turned off that feature.
I used to read a lot of books as a kid so my spelling has always been above average, but I think like you I have had problems with some words, like I didn't know I wasn't spelling repetitive incorrectly until I noticed it being underlined when typing online. So in that respects I actually think that computers are improving my spelling rather than the other way around.
Ah, I haven't had to deal with that for years:) But still, unless someone has a fairly flimsy grasp of spelling in the first place (to the point where they doubt how to spell common words and where to put apostrophes), I don't think that would cause problems.
An erudite individual will have a better grasp of language.
And pretty soon nobody else will know what he's saying:p
I usually use google's define: function when I want to check the meaning or spelling of a word.
As for the article, I don't see why typing would ruin the ability to spell. It means that when it comes to writing for the first time in a while it feels pretty weird, and easy to cramp up if you're going to do a lot of writing.. but why would it stop your ability to spell?
Yeah I have been eating a lot of protein without many carbs the last month or two, but I'm getting to the stage where I probably need some more energy to maintain the muscle I've been putting on. I've got maybe 12% body fat at the moment, don't mind losing a little more fat but I'm worried if I don't eat enough I'm going to be losing muscle too, which means in turn my body will burn less energy etc.
I didn't know what the Atkin's diet was until recently, it's kind of like you say fat without carbs. My friend's dad did it for a while and it apparently works well, but apparently makes you gassy in a nasty way and leaves you just "looking unhealthy" were the words my friend used, pallid skin etc.
I've been eating fairly healthy/low fat food for a while, I definitely feel crappy after having certain kinds of food, like the last time I had fish and chips (deep fried fish and very thick cut fries, likewise deep fat fried).. incredibly greasy - I felt like shit for the rest of the evening. Likewise anything with lots of cheese like pizza just makes me feel kind of lethargic. Sure it's enjoyable at the time (though often with fatty foods I just don't find them as attractive as I used to), but a couple of hours later..
Who said fun != difficult? I'd say it was the other way around. Besides, if you're playing on easy/normal it's never going to get difficult no matter what song you're playing, unless you have no rhythm at all and just try to hit the notes as they pass the bottom of the screen as if you're playing some kind of space invaders game..
Obviously there is a point where making it overly difficult just gets stupid though and detracts from the fun. There's a particular pattern of finger movements in Dream Theater's Constant Motion on Rock Band, I'm sure I could play the song much easier on a real guitar than Rock Band, though I haven't tried, but certainly there are a few songs in these games that I can play on a real guitar and often the game version is more awkward.
Yes, we have eyes. And there have been studies on the way the brain develops its interpretation of the world in humans and animals, getting babies to crawl along glass surfaces with large drops below the glass, and cats that were exposed to only vertical stripes all their life and could then not distinguish horizontal objects (something like that anyway).
human sensory abilities.. are dependent on genetic information.
What, so you prefer women with big bumpy noses? I suppose women all shave their legs to look like little girls too, and men shave to look like little boys? Oh noes, we're ALL pedophiles!!
That's fair enough, but I don't like answers which basically say "we can't know this" because it encourages laziness (in myself anyway, and probably others). It does seem that "something" will have always had to existed, but claiming that whatever it was that existed was a fully formed intelligence seems to me much less likely than inanimate matter eventually spawning life and intelligence. Of course maybe that already happened in the "god's" reality, and he then accelerated the process in this one, or it has happened multiple times, or there really are infinite universes and we just happen to be living in the one where all the right conditions and mutations occurred for human level intelligence to occur (though maybe we just don't know all the mechanisms involved yet). From one point of view, we wouldn't actually be here to ask if it didn't happen, so even if it is a 1 in a zillion zillion kabillion majillion stupadillion chance for us to evolve, we wouldn't be around in all the other universes (or our own universe after a collapse and expansion) to be sceptical. Using an argument like that involves just as much faith as believing in a god though, but at least it isn't a desperate grasp for meaning in an existence that probably doesn't actually have one.. and even if there is a god, that doesn't mean that his existence would be any more meaningful than ours. May as well search for our own meaning in our own existence..
I wonder, when you started questioning the integrity of your belief, did you keep going that route or did you try to make your faith prove itself?
What do you think? I have always questioned my beliefs and had answers from others, or answers that I thought up myself (based on the bible, which I have read in its entirety, twice, and the new testament lots more times..). It would be a lot less objective of me to always consider things from the point of view that "the Christian god is real, now how can I twist everything else to fit into that worldview?", which is what I and most of my friends and family have been doing their whole lives. They never truly consider the idea that god might not be real, and that just creates a very biased mindset. Having seen it and argued it from both sides now, I like to think I am being more objective.
Note that I didn't consider myself a Christian from zero, I took the whole issue very seriously and wanted to make sure I was genuine without too many doubts before becoming a Christian when I was 13/14. Since then I have had multiple times in which I questioned things, and as you say most things made my faith stronger and made me think wow the bible explains the world so well! But now I have come across things which the bible simply gets wrong or doesn't account for, and see that it would be quite easy to make a religious book that fits to the known world, but later on starts failing, which I think is happening now in educated countries.
I've never particularly looked deeply into other faiths, there are usually basic things about their beliefs which I feel make it obvious that they aren't true. Same as I now feel with Christianity. It's obvious that most religion is simply man-made pap, and it's seems quite likely to me now that it all is.
God created them and put them in a perfect situation. Is that the sign of someone with bad intentions?
Yes, considering those who do sin are supposedly punished eternally in Hell. If an omniscient and all powerful god created us, he would have basically been able to set a slider saying how many people are going to heaven, and how many are going to hell. If sinners were simply wiped out then I'd find that easier to accept as a "loving" act, but overall I just find the whole situation rather farcical these days. To try to equate the whole thing with love, when the majority are meant to end up in pain, seems foolish. It would be more loving to not create anything at all rather than start such a silly game just so he can feel more "loved" (which isn't he meant to feel perfect love and communion in the trinity anyway? I just think it is all such a load of nonsense now, it makes much more sense as a story created by humans, because it just doesn't tie up very well IMO).
I accept that I do wrong things, and I was self-convicted of my sin most of my life. I get it. But now that I have experienced things from the other side I don't think that all atheists are simply pretending god isn't there because they hate him, or that all people are just ignoring their consciences etc. Christianity really exaggerates a person's conscience by making them feel guilty for perfectly natural things (yes you could say they're only natural because sin entered the world, whatever - combined with everything else, it doesn't seem to be that way).
No, I was talking about small children. We aren't like adults when compared to some all powerful God. And even if we now are with our levels of knowledge, any Adam and Eve wouldn't have been. To then punish the children of those people before they have done anything wrong themselves is also dumb.
You can keep preaching at me all you want, but I sat through 24 years of it, and I can usually see flaws in the argument that aren't being addressed. It's amazing how you just 'discard' a lot of sensible arguments as a Christian because you assume that people are only saying them because they "don't get it" or are just
I don't think you should think of evolution as a search space exactly.. there is no 'answer' that is being sought, it's a process with many valid intermediate stages and a number of possible outcomes from any single stage. Imagine a game of chess. The search space is vast, and say you chose one specific endgame scenario then let two players have at it. It is very unlikely that the two players will reach the scenario that you had chosen, but they will reach a valid end game state through a path of many intermediate valid game states. See what I'm saying? I don't mean to make it sound like evolving organisms of our complexity is a simple task, yet IMO it really isn't as big of a problem as you're making it out to be - there isn't actually any 'goal', and all the intermediate stages are valid lifeforms.
It would be nice to be proven wrong and know that there is some great creator out there, as that presumably means more chance of our consciousnesses being given a chance to continue after death. But so far from what I've seen of the Universe, I don't think such a hypothesis is likely to be confirmed. Of course if you believe in an infinity of multiple universes then there could be one version of our universe where a god exists who will send us to hell for not believing in him, one where there is no god, one where god is a punk rock princess and so on. I'm still sceptical of the multiple universes thing.. it sounded plausible at first until I looked into quantum mechanics a bit more, then it made less sense, because the collapse of states upon measurement would presumably mean the collapse of the universes etc.. meh it's been a while since I looked into it, but a lot of the philosophical ideas people base off of quantum mechanics seem to be based on wishful thinking rather than anything with a scientific basis. For example a book I was reading which somehow suggested that unless our brain made significant use of quantum effects then we have to think of ourselves as automatons with no free will. Personally I don't think it makes a difference whether the brain is predictable or not, people still make their choices and need to take responsibility for them. And if the brain is unpredictable I don't see how that is any more 'free will' than if it is entirely predictable. You talk of rabbit holes, and in the end even if there is reality outside of our universe, I think the buck probably has to stop somewhere - that everything has a cause and effect, but that doesn't make our decisions any less meaningful in day to day life. Of course perhaps there is no end, no beginning, and there is some great consciousness that pervades all. But I don't think we need the excuse of a soul to explain the brain and its workings. Eh it's 12:17AM and I'm just rambling now as usual, better go to bed otherwise I'll probably be here til 2AM with my random musings.
I missed your second last paragraph because of your rambling and my need to start replying near the top. I spent most of my life giving God the benefit of the doubt, I took my beliefs very seriously and considered myself a Christian from the ages of 14-24. Yes the bible does have an explanation for the evil around us, but I believe now that that explanation has been fitted to the world rather than the other way round. Once you can accept that it is made upm then there are no longer any 'mysteries' (as most people would call them) in the bible about why god made the devil/sin, or why he blames us for acting in a way which he actually designed us to act (not to mention that statistically if there were any chance of people taking fruit at all in the garden of Eden that it would have to happen at one point, the whole thing is a 'set up' as one of my Christian friends has recently realised - IMO this sort of thing made me think that even if your god was real, I wouldn't worship him, because he's a jerk).
These things to me show that the bible is a bunch of crap, though when you already believe in God (most likely because you were brought up doing so, though some people are roped into it later, usually trying to get rid of some guilt in their life IMO because it's often the 'worst' people that are attracted an offer of salvation) you have to think up ludicrous excuses which place the blame for sin upon anything but God, even if he is all knowing and in control of everything, which would really make him responsible for everything that happens in his creation (especially considering in the bible Adam and Eve are not meant to have any concept of good/evil before they eat the fruit from the tree). It is a parent's responsibility to supervise a small child, the child can't be legally held responsible for anything it does before it knows the difference between right/wrong in certain situations.
Humans have way less chromosomes than a fern for example, but are much more complicated organisms. There is plenty of space in the genetic code to record information. No, I never studied biology or genetics so perhaps I'm getting my terminology wrong or whatever, but I do know that it's pretty difficult to tell how complex an organism is just by looking vaguely at how much 'genetic information' it has. It's another pseudo-scientific nonsense that appeals to 'intuition' rather than science, and it of course would work on most people that don't know anything about genetics..
As for recombining information, aren't there only 4 'characters' in genetic sequences? Yet millions/billions of life forms can result. And in fact we share There are only 2 states in binary, yet given enough bits you can store basically any data you want. A 256 bit value doesn't have anywhere near as many values as a 512 bit one, but it can still store a lot of values. And we aren't just recombining info we already have, there are weird mutations happening all the time when new life is created - some are visible, and some not-so-visible.
Believing in God doesn't entail a tireless pursuit of truth - if anything I've become a lot more interested in the world and 'truth' now that I don't believe I have all the answers laid out on a plate for me. It's just as valid to ask "where did God come from?" as "where did we come from?", but if you do a lot of Christians will look at you as if you're a blasphemer/idiot. They like to just pretend the buck has to stop somewhere, despite talk of eternity and no beginning/end, they can only apply that concept to god rather than the rest of existence. I believe that people grasp hold of that because feeling there is some overarching meaning or purpose to everything is comforting. It certainly was to me, and it's still a disappointing idea in some ways that the universe may have no 'purpose', but I'd rather look at things with my eyes open than try to explain away everything that we are discovering about the universe we live in, in an attempt to keep a desperate grasp of beliefs that we just made up a few thousand years ago (I'm going to get flamed so much for this, heh).
to see what their view of the zoological world is would be very interesting.
Answer: God made it.
It's not all that interesting a viewpoint. My grandpa sent me a few books recently on evolution (after I stopped attending church last year), and the ways in which creationists try to use science to prove their points would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing. In a couple of the books people who clearly don't understand the difference between open/closed systems try to use the laws of thermodynamics to disprove evolution. It's pathetic. Life exists and evolves in a kind of battle against entropy sure, but it doesn't defy the laws of thermodynamics because the earth is getting new energy from Sol all the time. They also claim that evolution via random mutation is simply impossible, even though a scientist last year demonstrated that bacteria can evolve new traits from a series of presumably random mutations. I hope more people do as I have done and learn to just accept the truth (even if it means admitting a lot of their life thus far was based on a lie) rather than fighting a worthless battle against it.
Unless you're into PC gaming, then a netbook surely covers everything that you need to do on a "main computer". In fact I've been using one even for most of my work for the last few months (while connected to an external monitor), and it is the only computer I use now when I'm at home.
I've got my MBP for when I need to do Windows development at work, but I'm happy to just use my netbook 95% of the time. The only difference in use between my MBP and the netbook is that I don't get all the fancy Comppiz effects, and occasionally while using a lot of tabs the netbook will have to 'think' for a bit (not sure why - it hasn't ever been close to using swap).
keeps you fit while still being much easier than walking
Kind of depends on your style of cycling and the terrain. In the summer when I cycled to work I worked up to going uphill for 25-35 minutes in 15th gear all the way, tends to make you pretty sweaty which isn't fun while sitting in the office for the rest of the day. I don't mind getting sweaty on the way home at all. Walking is decent because once you get reasonably fit you don't sweat much even up hills. And it's free.
We're talking about electric devices because they're fun gadgets, and in some cases (like with electrically assisted bicycles) more practical. Not trying to pretend that they're perfect for all situations..
PS what the hell is a "jogger" (I live in the UK, never heard of a vehicle called a jogger), assuming you don't mean the people running around with headbands on.
Hmm yeah you could include a segway style balance device to make the thing a bit easier to balance.. have never tried a unicycle though, so I've no idea how awkward they would be to begin with. I think a crash helmet would definitely be in order for what would in essence be a 15mph bar-stool!
I bought an electric scooter to use on the journey to work, and then after using it a couple of times, realised I'd be a lot better off just walking so as to get some exercise (and it's the best decision I've made for a long time - even since I started driving to work again I have kept up with doing a bit of walking in the evenings and weekends).
Sure a scooter is pretty fast on flat terrain with, but seriously I don't see the use in such a cumbersome device for a cop or mall-cop. If they are chasing someone they are bound to have to get off the thing at some point, and then will be so unhealthy for having not walked anywhere for a year (exaggeration of course) that they won't be able to catch up..
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you mean, but I think the situation with spelling wasn't much better before the internet and texting, it's just that most communication between friends was verbal rather than written, so you wouldn't notice how bad someone's spelling and punctuation usage was. For example I saw an email from a ~50 year old director at our company, I saw where he mixed up lose/loose. I was thinking that was just a modern day internet problem, but apparently not. In fact when I see those words used correctly I still do a double take to make sure that they're the correct usages because I'm so used to seeing the wrong ones.. -_-
The sad thing is that poor spelling doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot, but I can't help but lower my opinion of someone when they mix up words like that. It smacks of laziness somehow.
Yeah in the days when I started using computers for school reports it was around 1990 (I was 7) so there wasn't such a thing as auto-correct (at least on Corel Studio or whatever the name of the office suit we had was). There was a spell checker, but it didn't even underline misspelled words though I don't think. Heh, firefox highlighted that I can't spell misspelled, fun times. Later on when I noticed Word correct words for me, I just turned off that feature.
I used to read a lot of books as a kid so my spelling has always been above average, but I think like you I have had problems with some words, like I didn't know I wasn't spelling repetitive incorrectly until I noticed it being underlined when typing online. So in that respects I actually think that computers are improving my spelling rather than the other way around.
Ah, I haven't had to deal with that for years :) But still, unless someone has a fairly flimsy grasp of spelling in the first place (to the point where they doubt how to spell common words and where to put apostrophes), I don't think that would cause problems.
An erudite individual will have a better grasp of language.
And pretty soon nobody else will know what he's saying :p
I usually use google's define: function when I want to check the meaning or spelling of a word.
As for the article, I don't see why typing would ruin the ability to spell. It means that when it comes to writing for the first time in a while it feels pretty weird, and easy to cramp up if you're going to do a lot of writing.. but why would it stop your ability to spell?
Yeah I have been eating a lot of protein without many carbs the last month or two, but I'm getting to the stage where I probably need some more energy to maintain the muscle I've been putting on. I've got maybe 12% body fat at the moment, don't mind losing a little more fat but I'm worried if I don't eat enough I'm going to be losing muscle too, which means in turn my body will burn less energy etc.
I didn't know what the Atkin's diet was until recently, it's kind of like you say fat without carbs. My friend's dad did it for a while and it apparently works well, but apparently makes you gassy in a nasty way and leaves you just "looking unhealthy" were the words my friend used, pallid skin etc.
I've been eating fairly healthy/low fat food for a while, I definitely feel crappy after having certain kinds of food, like the last time I had fish and chips (deep fried fish and very thick cut fries, likewise deep fat fried).. incredibly greasy - I felt like shit for the rest of the evening. Likewise anything with lots of cheese like pizza just makes me feel kind of lethargic. Sure it's enjoyable at the time (though often with fatty foods I just don't find them as attractive as I used to), but a couple of hours later..
Who said fun != difficult? I'd say it was the other way around. Besides, if you're playing on easy/normal it's never going to get difficult no matter what song you're playing, unless you have no rhythm at all and just try to hit the notes as they pass the bottom of the screen as if you're playing some kind of space invaders game..
Obviously there is a point where making it overly difficult just gets stupid though and detracts from the fun. There's a particular pattern of finger movements in Dream Theater's Constant Motion on Rock Band, I'm sure I could play the song much easier on a real guitar than Rock Band, though I haven't tried, but certainly there are a few songs in these games that I can play on a real guitar and often the game version is more awkward.
two groups that are part of the RNLI (go check out their website)
Fine for those on the boats, but there are lifeguards in the RNLI despite lifeboat being in the name.
From the index page of the RNLI website:
Saving lives at sea
The RNLI is the charity that provides a 24-hour lifesaving service around the UK and Republic of Ireland.
We'd love to hear from you if you've been helped by RNLI lifeboat crews or lifeguards.
What would you rather call them - "lifeboat people" perhaps?
Perhaps we are also hard-wired to see.
Yes, we have eyes. And there have been studies on the way the brain develops its interpretation of the world in humans and animals, getting babies to crawl along glass surfaces with large drops below the glass, and cats that were exposed to only vertical stripes all their life and could then not distinguish horizontal objects (something like that anyway).
human sensory abilities .. are dependent on genetic information.
Yes. Culture.. well the sexual parts, yes.
What, so you prefer women with big bumpy noses? I suppose women all shave their legs to look like little girls too, and men shave to look like little boys? Oh noes, we're ALL pedophiles!!
That's fair enough, but I don't like answers which basically say "we can't know this" because it encourages laziness (in myself anyway, and probably others). It does seem that "something" will have always had to existed, but claiming that whatever it was that existed was a fully formed intelligence seems to me much less likely than inanimate matter eventually spawning life and intelligence. Of course maybe that already happened in the "god's" reality, and he then accelerated the process in this one, or it has happened multiple times, or there really are infinite universes and we just happen to be living in the one where all the right conditions and mutations occurred for human level intelligence to occur (though maybe we just don't know all the mechanisms involved yet). From one point of view, we wouldn't actually be here to ask if it didn't happen, so even if it is a 1 in a zillion zillion kabillion majillion stupadillion chance for us to evolve, we wouldn't be around in all the other universes (or our own universe after a collapse and expansion) to be sceptical. Using an argument like that involves just as much faith as believing in a god though, but at least it isn't a desperate grasp for meaning in an existence that probably doesn't actually have one.. and even if there is a god, that doesn't mean that his existence would be any more meaningful than ours. May as well search for our own meaning in our own existence..
I wonder, when you started questioning the integrity of your belief, did you keep going that route or did you try to make your faith prove itself?
What do you think? I have always questioned my beliefs and had answers from others, or answers that I thought up myself (based on the bible, which I have read in its entirety, twice, and the new testament lots more times..). It would be a lot less objective of me to always consider things from the point of view that "the Christian god is real, now how can I twist everything else to fit into that worldview?", which is what I and most of my friends and family have been doing their whole lives. They never truly consider the idea that god might not be real, and that just creates a very biased mindset. Having seen it and argued it from both sides now, I like to think I am being more objective.
Note that I didn't consider myself a Christian from zero, I took the whole issue very seriously and wanted to make sure I was genuine without too many doubts before becoming a Christian when I was 13/14. Since then I have had multiple times in which I questioned things, and as you say most things made my faith stronger and made me think wow the bible explains the world so well! But now I have come across things which the bible simply gets wrong or doesn't account for, and see that it would be quite easy to make a religious book that fits to the known world, but later on starts failing, which I think is happening now in educated countries.
I've never particularly looked deeply into other faiths, there are usually basic things about their beliefs which I feel make it obvious that they aren't true. Same as I now feel with Christianity. It's obvious that most religion is simply man-made pap, and it's seems quite likely to me now that it all is.
God created them and put them in a perfect situation. Is that the sign of someone with bad intentions?
Yes, considering those who do sin are supposedly punished eternally in Hell. If an omniscient and all powerful god created us, he would have basically been able to set a slider saying how many people are going to heaven, and how many are going to hell. If sinners were simply wiped out then I'd find that easier to accept as a "loving" act, but overall I just find the whole situation rather farcical these days. To try to equate the whole thing with love, when the majority are meant to end up in pain, seems foolish. It would be more loving to not create anything at all rather than start such a silly game just so he can feel more "loved" (which isn't he meant to feel perfect love and communion in the trinity anyway? I just think it is all such a load of nonsense now, it makes much more sense as a story created by humans, because it just doesn't tie up very well IMO).
I accept that I do wrong things, and I was self-convicted of my sin most of my life. I get it. But now that I have experienced things from the other side I don't think that all atheists are simply pretending god isn't there because they hate him, or that all people are just ignoring their consciences etc. Christianity really exaggerates a person's conscience by making them feel guilty for perfectly natural things (yes you could say they're only natural because sin entered the world, whatever - combined with everything else, it doesn't seem to be that way).
No, I was talking about small children. We aren't like adults when compared to some all powerful God. And even if we now are with our levels of knowledge, any Adam and Eve wouldn't have been. To then punish the children of those people before they have done anything wrong themselves is also dumb.
You can keep preaching at me all you want, but I sat through 24 years of it, and I can usually see flaws in the argument that aren't being addressed. It's amazing how you just 'discard' a lot of sensible arguments as a Christian because you assume that people are only saying them because they "don't get it" or are just
I don't think you should think of evolution as a search space exactly.. there is no 'answer' that is being sought, it's a process with many valid intermediate stages and a number of possible outcomes from any single stage. Imagine a game of chess. The search space is vast, and say you chose one specific endgame scenario then let two players have at it. It is very unlikely that the two players will reach the scenario that you had chosen, but they will reach a valid end game state through a path of many intermediate valid game states. See what I'm saying? I don't mean to make it sound like evolving organisms of our complexity is a simple task, yet IMO it really isn't as big of a problem as you're making it out to be - there isn't actually any 'goal', and all the intermediate stages are valid lifeforms.
It would be nice to be proven wrong and know that there is some great creator out there, as that presumably means more chance of our consciousnesses being given a chance to continue after death. But so far from what I've seen of the Universe, I don't think such a hypothesis is likely to be confirmed. Of course if you believe in an infinity of multiple universes then there could be one version of our universe where a god exists who will send us to hell for not believing in him, one where there is no god, one where god is a punk rock princess and so on. I'm still sceptical of the multiple universes thing.. it sounded plausible at first until I looked into quantum mechanics a bit more, then it made less sense, because the collapse of states upon measurement would presumably mean the collapse of the universes etc.. meh it's been a while since I looked into it, but a lot of the philosophical ideas people base off of quantum mechanics seem to be based on wishful thinking rather than anything with a scientific basis. For example a book I was reading which somehow suggested that unless our brain made significant use of quantum effects then we have to think of ourselves as automatons with no free will. Personally I don't think it makes a difference whether the brain is predictable or not, people still make their choices and need to take responsibility for them. And if the brain is unpredictable I don't see how that is any more 'free will' than if it is entirely predictable. You talk of rabbit holes, and in the end even if there is reality outside of our universe, I think the buck probably has to stop somewhere - that everything has a cause and effect, but that doesn't make our decisions any less meaningful in day to day life. Of course perhaps there is no end, no beginning, and there is some great consciousness that pervades all. But I don't think we need the excuse of a soul to explain the brain and its workings. Eh it's 12:17AM and I'm just rambling now as usual, better go to bed otherwise I'll probably be here til 2AM with my random musings.
I missed your second last paragraph because of your rambling and my need to start replying near the top. I spent most of my life giving God the benefit of the doubt, I took my beliefs very seriously and considered myself a Christian from the ages of 14-24. Yes the bible does have an explanation for the evil around us, but I believe now that that explanation has been fitted to the world rather than the other way round. Once you can accept that it is made upm then there are no longer any 'mysteries' (as most people would call them) in the bible about why god made the devil/sin, or why he blames us for acting in a way which he actually designed us to act (not to mention that statistically if there were any chance of people taking fruit at all in the garden of Eden that it would have to happen at one point, the whole thing is a 'set up' as one of my Christian friends has recently realised - IMO this sort of thing made me think that even if your god was real, I wouldn't worship him, because he's a jerk).
These things to me show that the bible is a bunch of crap, though when you already believe in God (most likely because you were brought up doing so, though some people are roped into it later, usually trying to get rid of some guilt in their life IMO because it's often the 'worst' people that are attracted an offer of salvation) you have to think up ludicrous excuses which place the blame for sin upon anything but God, even if he is all knowing and in control of everything, which would really make him responsible for everything that happens in his creation (especially considering in the bible Adam and Eve are not meant to have any concept of good/evil before they eat the fruit from the tree). It is a parent's responsibility to supervise a small child, the child can't be legally held responsible for anything it does before it knows the difference between right/wrong in certain situations.
Humans have way less chromosomes than a fern for example, but are much more complicated organisms. There is plenty of space in the genetic code to record information. No, I never studied biology or genetics so perhaps I'm getting my terminology wrong or whatever, but I do know that it's pretty difficult to tell how complex an organism is just by looking vaguely at how much 'genetic information' it has. It's another pseudo-scientific nonsense that appeals to 'intuition' rather than science, and it of course would work on most people that don't know anything about genetics..
As for recombining information, aren't there only 4 'characters' in genetic sequences? Yet millions/billions of life forms can result. And in fact we share There are only 2 states in binary, yet given enough bits you can store basically any data you want. A 256 bit value doesn't have anywhere near as many values as a 512 bit one, but it can still store a lot of values. And we aren't just recombining info we already have, there are weird mutations happening all the time when new life is created - some are visible, and some not-so-visible.
Believing in God doesn't entail a tireless pursuit of truth - if anything I've become a lot more interested in the world and 'truth' now that I don't believe I have all the answers laid out on a plate for me. It's just as valid to ask "where did God come from?" as "where did we come from?", but if you do a lot of Christians will look at you as if you're a blasphemer/idiot. They like to just pretend the buck has to stop somewhere, despite talk of eternity and no beginning/end, they can only apply that concept to god rather than the rest of existence. I believe that people grasp hold of that because feeling there is some overarching meaning or purpose to everything is comforting. It certainly was to me, and it's still a disappointing idea in some ways that the universe may have no 'purpose', but I'd rather look at things with my eyes open than try to explain away everything that we are discovering about the universe we live in, in an attempt to keep a desperate grasp of beliefs that we just made up a few thousand years ago (I'm going to get flamed so much for this, heh).
to see what their view of the zoological world is would be very interesting.
Answer: God made it.
It's not all that interesting a viewpoint. My grandpa sent me a few books recently on evolution (after I stopped attending church last year), and the ways in which creationists try to use science to prove their points would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing. In a couple of the books people who clearly don't understand the difference between open/closed systems try to use the laws of thermodynamics to disprove evolution. It's pathetic. Life exists and evolves in a kind of battle against entropy sure, but it doesn't defy the laws of thermodynamics because the earth is getting new energy from Sol all the time. They also claim that evolution via random mutation is simply impossible, even though a scientist last year demonstrated that bacteria can evolve new traits from a series of presumably random mutations. I hope more people do as I have done and learn to just accept the truth (even if it means admitting a lot of their life thus far was based on a lie) rather than fighting a worthless battle against it.
They even have a museum of people who used to go to museums. Make sure you're out before closing time.
thinking before speaking is like wiping your ass before you.. well, you get the idea
It sounds like whoever coined that idea really should have thought before they spoke. Unless they were being intentionally ironic.
Unless you're into PC gaming, then a netbook surely covers everything that you need to do on a "main computer". In fact I've been using one even for most of my work for the last few months (while connected to an external monitor), and it is the only computer I use now when I'm at home.
I've got my MBP for when I need to do Windows development at work, but I'm happy to just use my netbook 95% of the time. The only difference in use between my MBP and the netbook is that I don't get all the fancy Comppiz effects, and occasionally while using a lot of tabs the netbook will have to 'think' for a bit (not sure why - it hasn't ever been close to using swap).
keeps you fit while still being much easier than walking
Kind of depends on your style of cycling and the terrain. In the summer when I cycled to work I worked up to going uphill for 25-35 minutes in 15th gear all the way, tends to make you pretty sweaty which isn't fun while sitting in the office for the rest of the day. I don't mind getting sweaty on the way home at all. Walking is decent because once you get reasonably fit you don't sweat much even up hills. And it's free.
We're talking about electric devices because they're fun gadgets, and in some cases (like with electrically assisted bicycles) more practical. Not trying to pretend that they're perfect for all situations..
PS what the hell is a "jogger" (I live in the UK, never heard of a vehicle called a jogger), assuming you don't mean the people running around with headbands on.
Hmm yeah you could include a segway style balance device to make the thing a bit easier to balance.. have never tried a unicycle though, so I've no idea how awkward they would be to begin with. I think a crash helmet would definitely be in order for what would in essence be a 15mph bar-stool!
I bought an electric scooter to use on the journey to work, and then after using it a couple of times, realised I'd be a lot better off just walking so as to get some exercise (and it's the best decision I've made for a long time - even since I started driving to work again I have kept up with doing a bit of walking in the evenings and weekends).
Sure a scooter is pretty fast on flat terrain with, but seriously I don't see the use in such a cumbersome device for a cop or mall-cop. If they are chasing someone they are bound to have to get off the thing at some point, and then will be so unhealthy for having not walked anywhere for a year (exaggeration of course) that they won't be able to catch up..
Could bring a strange new meaning to "no route to host"..