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"The right" paints her as "a sharp turn to the left" "The left" sees her as one of the most moderate candidates in the pack According to a Rasmussen Reports telephone survey, Clinton is viewed by Democrats as politically liberal by 33% and seen as moderate by 45%, which paints her just a bit more centrist than Obama, who is viewed as politically liberal by 34% and moderate by 39%. When the same survey includes all voters, the situation reverses: 53% of American voters believe she's liberal while 29% consider moderate, compared to 42% of all voters see Illinois Senator Barack Obama as politically liberal while 41% say the same about former North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Why is it that the mainstream population considers Hillary to be the most liberal candidate when liberals see her as one of the least?

No, wrong. Your statement, which you've repeated over and over and over, doesn't even make any sense. 1) Humans have all the same brain structures as most simians. There's no novel structures in the human brain. The human brain represents a refinement of an existing design. 2) You're saying there's two "structures of consciousness". Consciousness is a metaphysical construct and relating it back to structure cannot be done, certainly not within a scientific context. Many would argue it can't even be done in a philosophical context. 3) Your two "structures of consciousness" seem to be: conscious and unconscious. Your statement is utterly self defeating, wrong, and riddled with misinformation

I'd also be interested

Why? I've seen subsequent experiments which rule out certain types of non-local hidden variable theories, but I was under the impression that the Bell test experiments only ruled out local hidden variables.

Actually Bush would appear to be following Petraeus's recommendations regarding a partial withdrawal. I suppose there are the 5,700 troops he's withdrawing before Christmas. Beyond that, the 15-month tours of duty of the five combat brigades that comprise the surge will begin to expire next April. With no combat units ready to replace them, service chiefs refusing to extend the tours any further, and the President refusing to mobilize the reserves any further, withdrawal is the only option.

I wonder why Admiral Fallon's position isn't receiving any attention from American media. IPS had an excellent article on him: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39235 It's also curious why Petraeus is linking success in Anbar to the Baghdad surge... are the two related at all?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2419340.ece Interesting... apparently the CENTCOM chief Admiral Fallon wants a significant withdrawal of US troops from the region for redeployment in other areas that need them (like Afghanistan) and disagrees with Petraeus's assessment. This has apparently been something of a prolonged clash between the two. Does Petraeus not see the big picture?

You're entirely missing the point. Tegmark is suggesting that physical law is emergent from underlying mathematical systems. The closest analogy might be Wolfram suggesting that the universe emerged from cellular automata.

The Constitution is effectively America's social contract. As long as you keep in mind it's an evolving document and must be interpreted in the scope of the entire SCOTUS case history, it's something that Americans should respect.

What scientific theory is that? There isn't one. Penrose's microtubule hypothesis is falsified by this paper. The neocortex, thalamus, and interconnecting loops No, it doesn't, it suggests classical systems are deterministic. Obviously quantum effects played a huge part in the Big Bang and explain the non-uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Why? Randomness in lieu of determinism gives way to free will? Do you consider "free" behavior to be random? You really need to stop using science as the basis of metaphysical statements about consciousness. You're merely confusing yourself. This thread is about the brain. The brain is not consciousness! Your brain can be unconscious. Unless you're a reductive materialist you really shouldn't use the two synonymously.

How does classical theory offer a metaphysical statement about consciousness? You really need to read Kant. Or Dennett. The former offers a monist take on the difference between consciousness and brain activity. The latter offers a materialist take on free will (Freedom Evolves).

Have you expressly accepted the YouTube TOS? I haven't. Federal court precedent (in the US) regarding deep linking to-date has supported deep linking and has not upheld an implicit acceptance of accepting TOS by accessing a resource on a web server. As far as US law is concerned the TOS applies to those who have expressly accepted it, i.e. those who have signed up for an account. In the UK YMMV, but here the court precedent is in favor of deep linking.

I'm entirely willing to concede that if you're willing to concede that Michael Savage and Ann Coulter fans are the conservative base.

That's okay, at the behest of Rush Limbaugh there's a contrary meme spreading to label Chuck Hagel as "Senator Betrayus"

The same can be said for any objects in the same reference frame. Newtonian mechanics is sufficient to explain their behavior. Obviously there are some relativistic effects, but they are so minuscule they can be safely ignored. What's your take on Tegmark's paper?

Yeah, they're being awfully nice to what's little more than rumormongering. It'd be nice if the mainstream press actually went after the lies and showed that they're scientifically untenable (unless you're a particular ex-BYU professor), but perhaps they're afraid of being labeled part of the conspiracy by the 9/11 Lies movement.

Saw an interesting article on Petraeus and the Iraq Report today: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20657191/site/newsweek/ Among other interesting tidbits, it talks about the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 4-23) authored by Petraeus, used as the basis for the surge, was largely obsolete by the time we actually got there. Its original focus was on boosting loyalty to the central government, a strategy which proved unteneable. According to one of the coauthors of the manual, Sarah Sewall, director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights: Hence the focus on progress in the Anbar province: And that's the sad state of affairs in Iraq. We're just trying to keep the place from falling apart. Now the strategy is to wait and see if "pockets of stability" can actually foster government loyalty. This report, and Petraeus's call for a partial withdrawal by July 2008, at least give me confidence that he's focusing on the reality of the situation and not looking through it with the White House's rose colored glasses.

This time substituting the rampant speculation of the 9/11 Truth Movement with things like calculations, figures, data, and evidence. Surely these things have nothing over the immense believability of conjecture! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6987965.stm Yeah, looks like WTC1 & 2 were pretty weird buildings. There's nothing else like them in the world. Massive skyscrapers with load bearing walls, a design that hasn't been used by anyone since. Thanks to this, there was very little resistance to collapse: without an "egg crate" structure, the floors easily give way to immense force from above.

http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/

Fortran / HPF are still major scientific languages as well, although a bitch to work in. C++ is definitely less painful, but may or may not be used depending on what field you work in. For earth and atmospheric science models, Fortran is pretty much the definitive standard.

Antenna? (you can spell Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but not antenna? ) Transistor radios were powered by RF exclusively (in the days before widespread distribution of batteries) and represented the first practical portable radios aimed at your average consumer, in the early 20th century

No, wrong No, wrong No wrong So you're saying humans have two centers of consciousness, one conscious, the other unconscious *headgib* What you're doing here is assuming, a priori, that animals do not have consciousness. You're then defining terms in a contradictory way, pulling in some garbage from Freud, and using it all to spin some completely nonsensical conjecture. Is there any neurophysiological basis to what you're saying, or are you just making shit up?

And therein lies the problem: you're using nociception and perception synonymously. By your definition, someone undergoing open heart surgery under general anesthetic feels a tremendous amount of pain as surgeons rip their body apart. Clearly this isn't the case. Perceiving pain requires a conscious perceiver. That isn't the case with fetuses, sorry.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9704009 Any thoughts on this idea? Just more Max Tegmark being crazy or what? I really like it

Terrence McKenna is awesome, but his "stoned ape" hypothesis is hardly his most famous. Have you never heard of "Novelty Theory" or Timewave Zero? The basic tenet of novelty theory is that the universe is coalescing towards some sort of teleological attractor at the end of time. Please note that none of Terrence McKenna's ideas are remotely defensible scientifically. They're all conjecture.