whap2005

Good point and you are right! However However in their defence, it is possible to use mathmatics and observation to at least attempt to predict the probability that aliens exist. It's not so easy to do that with "god".

needimprovement, Please answer a question for me if you would be so kind. Why are you here? It is fairly obvious that you are a firm believer in your god and religion so why come to a science forum to discuss it?

Well as soon as humans figure out a way to use fusion as a power source, that universe eating organisim may be you and I.

This is really the whole point of my thread. There are 2 possibilities. Either the brain's functions reside completely in the realm of classical mechanics or they don’t. Most of us will probably agree that are brains do things that are hard to explain using classical physics as we understand them. I guess a better question would be, what are the best methods figuring out what is possible in the realm of classical physics when taking into account the physical dimensions and characteristics of our brains. Maybe this can be done mathematically somehow? I am just surprised I haven’t seen any real attempts to try to figure out what the computational capacity of the human brain is, and then compare that to what our brains actually do. This is a bit interesting: http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html "It seems reasonable to conclude that the human brain has a raw computational power between 10 to the 13th and 10 to the 16th operations per second." The calculation was done using the number of connections inthe brain, the distance between connections, and then factoring in the total energy the brain uses. So if this is a ball park estimate of our brain's power, do you feel it's accurate? If so, is it enough to explain or cover our abilities?

Of course he doesn't, and that's really the problem. There are many complex systems in nature that we don't fully understand but for most we at least have a basic understanding or theory on how it works. I'm surprised that there aren't any good scientific theories or models for how consciousness forms.

The string theory folks have pretty much proven the the existance of other dimensions mathmatically and may do so experimentally with the Hadron. Black holes have never been observed directly but we were able to prove their existance mathmatically long before we were able to observe their effects on matter in space.

I know there are already some fringe theories out there that try to tie the enormous computational powers of our brain to quantum mechanics, but is it possible that our consciousness actually exists at least partly in a higher dimension? It can be argued that we are interdimensional beings since we can physically enter the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd dimensions. Although it is impossible to physically represent a 4th dimensional object, our brains are still able to imagine or see a 4D object purely in thought, which seems to me should be impossible if our brains existed only in just 3 dimensions. We are fairly certain that our consciousness originates from inside our brains, but like an extra dimensional object it is impossible to physically see or represent it in 3 dimensions. If our brains or a portion of our brains does exist in a higher dimension how would we know? Since we are physically bound in 3 dimensions we would only be able to physically see and interact with the 3D portion of it.

We are right here..? It is possible humans have been engineered. Especially when you look at the Intellegence gap between humans and other animals on Earth.

The answer can be explained using quantum Theory which states that information about everything in the universe cannot be destroyed so it is still here. Humans time travel (or look into the past) all the time by simply reverse engineering a current event to see how it happened (forensic science). There is also a new theory (I forget what it is called) that states that nothing in the universe actually happens until it is actively observed that may also be able to answer your question, but my brain usually sets off the smoke detector in my house when I think about that one...

The thing that keeps space from colapsing on itself is of course time. So in a sense, "empty space" is actually made of time.

Hey guys, I'm currently building a terrain editor for a mmorpg. The program will allow me and my dev team to modify the height maps, textures, and splats in realtime. I'm having some trouble creating a perferct circle shape for the terrain "brush". Here is my code and a screenie of the shape I'm getting. Does anyone see anything obviously wrong with my furmula? This has been driving me nuts all day... Public Sub deformterrain(ByVal pointsize As Integer, ByVal pointheight As Single, ByVal mx As Single, ByVal my As Single, ByVal mz As Single, ByVal shape As Boolean) Dim ps As Integer ps = pointsize / 2 Pick = land(0).MousePick(mx, my) If Pick.IsCollision = True Then ImpactX = Pick.GetCollisionImpact.x ImpactZ = Pick.GetCollisionImpact.z ImpactY = land(0).GetHeight(ImpactX, ImpactZ) End If Dim fnlx As Integer Dim fnlz As Integer Dim theta As Single Dim dtheta As Single dtheta = 2 * Math.PI / pointsize theta = 0 For fnlz = -ps To ps theta = theta + dtheta For fnlx = ImpactX - pointsize To ImpactX + pointsize land(0).SetHeight(fnlx + pointsize * Math.Cos(theta), ImpactZ + pointsize * Math.Sin(theta), ImpactY + pointheight, True, True) Next Next land(0).FlushHeightChanges() End Sub

Hi all, I'm in the process of recruiting a development team for part time work on a MMORPG I'm creating called World Domination Online (WDO). Please visit my website http://www.dtmstech.com for more details about the game and the development. We are looking for people with the following skills: VB.net programming (C++, c# is helpful too) 3D modeling and animation 3D sound programming and sampling I've created a basic demo of the game engine in action along with the source code (in VB.net) for anyone to download. If you're interested in becoming part of the team you can e-mail me at dave@whapham.net or fill out the online applicaiton located on the WDO tab from the website.

What we are doing is making copies of living entities based on human observation of a creature that already exsisted. No one has been able to explain how or under what circumstanses live was originally created from random events.

To answer this question you first have to define intelligence. If you look at intelligence from an evolutionarily standpoint (which species has mastered the art of staying alive the longest), then tortoises, birds, and ants are far more intelligent then humans. If we were to nuke ourselves into extinction tomorrow, then in my opinion that would drop us a few zillion notches down the intelligence scale….

The statistics on that site are wrong. You have to remember that just having a browser installed on your PC other then IE, doesn't mean IE is never used. My 90% marketshare statistic is probably conservative. My nich is IT for large healthcare organizations which probably close to 95% IE, but I also do freelance programming and web development for other business sectors. I'm no fanboy for EI or Microsoft, but I do most of my programming for Intranets and internal use so I guess I have the luxury of not having to test for other brower types, I just mandate to the company what browser type they must use to run my appliations (and yes, IE7 is a fat buggy SOB.. found more bugs in it today) .

If you work in the business world as a programmer, or in almost any area of Information Technology, (I'm talking business not science or academics) then you have to learn to love it and use IE. Visual Studio.net is the greatest programming platform in the world. It allows you to quickly build web applications easily and very quickly which in the business world, means money. Unfortunately, VS is tailored to work with IE and with 90% of the browser market share, why would you build for any other browser?

I've had the opportunity to test it at work in a lab and it does have some bugs. The biggest one I found (and the the one reason I won't deploy it to my clients) is that it doesn't work well with any version of Adobe Reader. The browser integration frequently fails and often will max out your CPU resources when opening PDF documents in the browser. The only 2 features that are an improvement are the tabbed browsing, and the anti-phishing security features.

What is your role in this project. Are you asking for help with it? What do you need, programming help?, bandwidth? Hardware? It sounds interesting and practical.

Open Mycomputer, right click on the CD/DVD ROM drive, choose "explore". Then click on Setup.exe or Install.exe to install the program without the autorun feature.

If you can get your hands on it, VS 2005 is the way to go. Its the easiest and fastest way to build a server side web app. There are many asp.net programing examples in C#, J#, and VB.net on the Internet that do what you discribed that you can use to get started.

This is great. Thanks for posting it!

Actually it's proven that the higher your caloretic intake, the shorter your life span is on average. Even if your not over weight, the impurities in food will damage your cells (Oxidants) which will lower you're life span. So don't eat more then your body actually needs and odds are you will live longer!

'IMPEACH BUSH: A global disaster, a national disgrace" Unfortunately that's not going to happen. And even if it could happen, you would just have old Dick running the show so is that really a big improvement? (And this coming from a Moderate Repub...).

Nothing. The reason current FM is of low quality is because it's analog and not digital. There is a new radio format called "HD Radio" that just came out that is actually better then CD quality. It will allow stations to transmit up to 3 different channels of HD sound on 1 frequency using compression technology. There is also an AM version of HD Radio that will allow better then CD quality sound over AM (We will finally start hearing music over AM again!). We will start seeing HD Radios becoming more popular in the next few years. (It also means the death of XM and Sirius which currently have less then CD quality sound and monthly subscriptions so if you own stock in either, you better sell it now)

I wrote a program that convert's all files in a directory to PDF (MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, rtf, txt, html, open office files, etc). You need the free version of Adobe and .net 1.1 or higher installed on your PC for it to work. What's your e-mail address and I'll shoot you the executable.