bascule

By that logic, there's no difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

That's talking about "property" in the form of land. It's the basis for eminent domain power.

A loud percussive instrument is a great tool to channel aggression through. Wonder if that's why you see hippies playing drums all the time.

Ugh. Everyone attempting to interpret the literal meaning of the text in the Constitution alone and in and of itself, stop. There's over two centuries of Supreme Court case law you need to look over before you can begin to argue what a certain passage actually means.

He makes a number of different predictions about cortical structure and operation, and also predicts what may or may not be there that's coincidental to the underlying function. Perhaps the most compelling passage in the book is one where he compares GR to a neurophysiological discovery: That's definitely a problem. To me there's nothing in the world more fascinating than how the mind and brain work, but I suspect very few people actually feel that way. Well, that provided anyone else cares about On Intelligence. The Trouble with Physics at least has the distinction of being a highly popular book, to the point that I'm seeing ads for it (and lectures Smolin is giving about it) in SEED. I can thus see TwP of garnering considerably more interest. I also notice that when I posed about On Intelligence (mainly because that's what I'm currently reading) I didn't notice you wanted to start a Physics Bookclub. I'm not sure how many other books we could really discuss. There are a number I've read targeted at laymen, including A. Zee's Fearful Symmetry, David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos, Martin J. Rees' Just Six Numbers, okay, well, come to think of it there are a number of these books out there... the real problem is when they're targeted for a layman audience the layman often has trouble telling the science from the speculation. I've since read there's been a lot of criticism of Just Six Numbers, for example. It seems like there's enough people (2) who've read Three Roads to at least have a discussion. Well, in general, you assign reading tasks over specific periods and then have discussions at the end of those periods. Once the discussion is over you assign another reading task. That way everyone is on the same page (literally!)

Actually it was more like a vain attempt to hide my jealousy

Reminds me of my Craigslist experience... for some reason putting down "skeptical rationalist seeks same" turns up Buddhists, Hari Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation nutjobs, and other new age weirdos. Guess it's just the whack ass town I live in. Anyway, I'm disappointed IMM... crawling back to your ex? Although to give you credit, that's quite the horror story of bad dates.

I'd be down if the next book we read is Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence, an arrogant albeit highly compelling take on neurophysiology.

My physics teacher in high school, who also had no idea what she was talking about, gave me that as well. I've managed to hang onto it for the past 6 years or so and still have it today.

I too purchased this book recently, and yes, it is. Yep, that's really the take you get from it... his hope that string/non-string quantum gravity might both be approximations of some underlying theory. Heh, I've really gotten the vibe (as well as you can get vibes through the Internet) that, well, he's not nearly as optimistic about string theory as he was when he wrote Thee Roads Yes, please!

I buy mainly chianti, which you're pretty much always supposed to let breathe. I never do. I have a bottle of Gabbiano Chianti Classico on my table. I didn't let it breathe... just started sipping. Mighty tasty. I'm also the type to drink a heady nitro beer without letting it settle. I dunno, call me a nouveau wine snob but, that's how I roll.

You haven't found the secret to happiness. You found the secret to self-delusion. The happiness will last until you realize you live in an isolated world of self-delusion, at which point you'll feel horrible. Here's what you need to do: GET OUT. You are in a college environment? Correct? Find a party. It's not hard to do. Chances are, even if you can't find someone who knows of a party, you can just go wander around and luck out. Get out as much as possible. Interact with people. Living cloistered in your own isolated world of self-delusion will ultimately leave you feeling bereft of some of the best years in your life which you spent in complete social isolation, but in the end that's a good thing because it convinces you to make the most of your life now. And yes, I'm speaking from personal experience here, but in my case, it was high school I spent like that. College was some of the best years of my life. You should make the most of yours. So cut out the "I Am A Rock" bullsh*t and live your life. (that was the point of the song, you know)

Sounds like an argument for Deism

If anyone is a slave in the owner/pet relationship, I think it generally ends up being the owner. At least, my cat leads me around and gets me to do her bidding, or comes to me demanding attention and won't leave me alone until I give it to her, and so on.

Even as SFN's self-declared #1 meme freak, I don't like either of those choices. Memepool is one of the Internet's oldest blogs, and one I read for years before I switched to using an RSS aggregator to read daily content and, unfortunately, Memepool's attempt at entering the RSS age broke at some point in the past and they never bothered to fix it. Still, I consider it one of the big names in my Internet upbringing, along with other awesome proto-blogs like Suck. As for Memetank, it just doesn't work. Memepool is, indeed, an awesome name, because it's a play on gene pool. Memetank, well, not so much. So, I wholeheartedly voice my support for Martin's suggestion!

It's been #1 for the entire Physics category as well

Hey, an opportunity to pimp my web application framework of choice: Ruby on Rails

Well, as one of the most active posters in P&R (I think) you'll see me over there

I'm certainly for gun rights. I don't care what the founding fathers thought about the situation. I'm much more concerned about the present. Britain has banned all "offensive weapons". The result has been an increase in violent crime and burglary. Criminals are no longer afraid that the general population is armed, and subsequently the deterrent effect of that fear has been removed. Things like "happy slapping", where youth gangs engage in unprovoked assaults of random people, have become popular in recent years.

I haven't been very welcome in Politics as of late. The reason, I believe, is because the ideas I wish to communicate require such an accumulation of baggage trivia that there's no way I can easily communicate them, and most of these topics Pangloss and I disagree upon. So, I want to go off on a political rant, but rather than going off on one that will invite enmity, it will be one I think is simpler to express. Fundamentally, Pangloss and I are both libertarians, but while Pangloss is conservative (more of a traditional Libertarian) I am a "liberaltarian". I've experienced the dichotomy between these two types at places like Defcon, and it is a weird one, the sort of love hate relationship that can only stem from mutual understandings of so many ideas and mutual disagreements on so many others. What's funny is I have traditional Libertarian leanings in areas where Pangloss seems to have "liberaltarian" leanings (gun control, I believe). I proudly support any American's right to launch any projectile with any mechanism of his choosing, so long as the entire event is conducted on his property and does not affect the lives of others. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent collecting pure hydrogen off a Huffman apparatus, compressing it into 3L bottles, and igniting the mixture with a rocket igniter in order to launch paint buckets some 50 feet into the air (or more!) Anyway, all of that said, here's what I have to say, concicely: * Progressive, modernistic change in human society has increased the standard of living for some. The cost is at creating a destabilized condition at the lowest levels of society in terms of standard of living, in which an untold suffer and die due to deplorable conditions. However, while these deplorable conditions are a fact of life, they have always been, and in the past, the whole of society has been subject to nature's whims, before modern science and medicine were mostly able to tackle the ravages of mother nature and decrease, human suffering. * Progressive, modernistic change occurs best in an environment in which evolution of dominant paradigms (memes!) is able to occur in conditions the most similar to the process of biological evolution by natural selection, i.e. unconstrained by outside, sentient forces manipulating the scenario for any sort of moralistic means. * However (in pops the liberal in the liberaltarian, and the part where Pangloss will disagree), as humans we are moral and should seek to confine the naturalistic confines of our economic system solely to our economic system, and not let economic circumstances impact one's well-being. This means we must vicariously redirect the combined effort of mankind towards the collective well-being. So long as everyone remains in good health, sheltered, and afforded the bare necessities, business can fluorish and so can mankind's standard of living continue to upwardly evolve, following the same progressive trend all evolution over time has undergone to date. The burden of sustaining the collective health of mankind and fighting other moral inequities can be funded by the money reaped by the extremely wealthy, who have reached levels of economic success beyond the point of diminishing returns in terms of evolving the systems which hold society together. As has been repeatedly demonstrated by the overwhelming majority of the extremely wealthy, at this point they feel an obligation to give back what they have reaped from the system to mankind. After all, when you've accumulated more wealth than you can spend in a lifetime, would you rather leave your enormous wealth in the hands of an oligarchy of squandering heirs, or would you feel obligated to give your wealth to fight the remaining ravages of nature in the form of suffering from disease? Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, have collectively given the massive amounts of capital they have expoited from a moralistically bankrupt system (whose moral bankrupcy ultimately does moral good!) to the causes of fighting malaria and HIV, two of mankind's greatest foes. * The more I observe the system, the more I observe that, for the most part, it is self-balancing and any interference by me, in terms of tirades, may or may not drag it closer to the pattern upon which it is asymptotically converging. But then again, everything I say may ideed draw it closer. It is up to me to determine if what I say is drawing the system closer to the central pattern, or is a dissonant force pushing it away. Finding that balance is what all of humanity has collectively spent their time doing throughout all of recorded history. * So I will continue to fight for universal healthcare, while recognizing that capitalism is the ideology which has built the modern world, and an ideology I wish to continue to perpetuate a rising standard of living which will ultimately lead us to the break-even point where we will finally have conquered all of the problems which nature has beset us with and begin a new golden age where we can live utopian lives without worrying about forces beyond our control, for we will have built a world where consciousness has completely conquered nature and we are free from all natural problems. This point has been named the Singularity. That's not an apt term. A more apt term would be an event horizon. The knee of the curve...

As far as I have been able to ascertain, arguments for the existence of true randomness have always been an argument from incredulity... "I cannot conceive of any sort of statistical probability distribution behind this set of numbers" Ergo... "It's random!" An obvious non-sequitur. Instead, I assume the opposite: there is a tracable sequence of causation behind any sequence of numbers. Why? Because every other event, save for quantum events, has such a causal chain leading to its occurance. To assume otherwise, until an acausal relationship with the rest of events in reality can be demonstrated, seems inconsistent. The Bohm Interpretation shows that violation of Bell's Inequality does not demonstrate the existance of acausal, non-deterministic events. Strong determinism can be reconciled with so-called "quantum indeterminacy", because the possibility remains that the alleged indeterminacy is the result of non-local hidden variables. I refuse to believe in randomness until I hear a reasonable defense of its existence.

"I'm stuck in the mirror, man!"

The Princeton research into the Diebold voting machines just underlines that what's needed is a paper trail generated when the vote is cast, which is verifiable by the voter at the time they vote. This is how the Nevada system works. After voting, a printout of your vote passes behind a plexiglass window, allowing you to see what choices the machine logged. In the event of vote tampering, you have a voter-confirmed paper trail of all votes. That, and voting machines should be open source. The open source vote-counting code should be compiled to binaries certified by several 3rd parties, which are then signed, and every voting machine set with a checksum so that the code cannot be tampered with. The ease with which the Diebold machines were compromised really makes we wonder how banks trust them to build ATMs...

Oh, okay, so here's a funny one. I used to live in a destitute rental house. My shower had this awesome habit of clogging up and flooding the basement. We didn't have any draino, and this girl I know suggested trying vinegar and baking soda to clear out the drain. So, after all the standing water seeped through the clog, I dumped baking soda down the drain and poured in the vinegar. Well, surprise surprise, that did jack. So, I went to the store and bought some draino... I poured the draino into the standing pool of vinegar. Hey, draino goes through standing water, right? I then realize I just mixed an acid and a base and the vapor it's producing feels awfully caustic. I open up a window and get the hell out of there.