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Hey look, it's more excellent work by Steven Jones, the same man who said, in a non-peer reviewed paper, that the collapse of WTC1 and WTC2 violates the second law of thermodynamics! He was also rebuked by BYU: "The university is aware that Professor Steven Jones's hypotheses and interpretations of evidence regarding the collapse of World Trade Center buildings are being questioned by a number of scholars and practitioners, including many of BYU's own faculty members. Professor Jones's department and college administrators are not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review." And BYU's structural engineering college: "The structural engineering faculty in the Fulton College of Engineering and Technology do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones." I don't want to pull a fake statistic out of my ass, but it seems like 90% of conspiracy theory rumors trace straight back to this guy.

I'd be inclined to think that way if I had ever seen a creationist argument that wasn't based on the appeal to incredulity fallacy. Are there any arguments for creationism which don't stem from a human inability to explain the exact course of events which occured in the development of life, and using a non-sequitur to conclude that "God did it"?

I believe an overabundance of attention is placed on greenhouse gasses, primarily CO2. While I doubt there are many credible climate scientists who will question the idea that CO2 is the primary anthropogenic forcing affecting the climate system, it certainly isn't the only one. Furthermore, forcings that are global in scope receive and overabundance of attention, while regional forcings are almost completely overlooked. I think more attention needs to be paid to the regional scale/mesoscale, and that combined work at eliminating regional warming could dramatically impact the global climate system in ways attempting to curb greenhouse gas emissions cannot.

I've not been exposed to information which would lead me to believe otherwise. If you are in possession of such information, I'd certainly like to hear it. It certainly sounds like you disagree with my position (particurly in regards to your ad hominem against the mainstream media) but if you're unwilling to put up information for formal debate, I'm rather curious why you posted such an adversarial response in the first place. You may not like the mentality of people who feel similarly to me, but unless you're willing to challenge my position in formal, logical debate, I'm forced to conclude that you have more against people who feel similarly to me than you have logical arguments against my position. We are borrowing unprecedented amounts of money from foreign countries, which has weakened the dollar and thus America's role in the international marketplace. In what way is our continued presence in Iraq beneficial for America or the Iraqi people?

Gravity is a lame ass requirement of physical entities. Let the crew be digital. Then they can have "artifical" gravity inside a virtual reality environment.

Ad hominem So I take it you disagree that the war in Iraq is unsustainable

The war in Iraq is unsustainable. Something has to be done. What's a viable alternative to a timetable to getting us out of an unsustainable situation?

This article covers Penrose's argument: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/quantum.html Debunked here: http://www.1729.com/consciousness/godel.html And here: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-17-mcdermott.html

"Arms races" between predator/prey in biological evolution are perhaps the foremost example of a way in which evolution works progressively. The slowest prey get eaten and the predators who are too slow and cannot catch enough prey starve.

That's actually a caricature of me, or at least was originally, then I added the halo after having gone all devil horns for 6/6/6

That's a contradiction in terms. Past, present, and future define causal order. If you disregard causal order, the concepts of past, present, and future become irrelevant. I believe they're both manifestations of causal, material processes. I believe the accumulation of knowledge is manifested by the strengths of various synaptic connections and memory peptides, both of which rely on causal systems to accumulate/have meaningful value to the brain as a whole. Thought is a causal process. Without time it is irrelevant. I think the subconscious merely registers information, so yes, that's technically correct in that the subconscious doesn't "perceive" anything. Brains could not operate without causality. Sorry, I got bored of responding to this post. I think the answers to your subsequent questions have already been addressed earlier in my reply. And here I wanted the chance to predict the future! Oh well, now I don't feel like it any more.

I think integration would be immensely helpful for them, but I see no reason to foist it upon them. It's something many have done voluntarily. If they don't want to integrate, so be it.

I agree only because I have the sneaking suspicion that if one were set, it wouldn't be followed.

I don't know who Roldolfo Llinas is, but Paul Adams has had a number of very illuminating insights into the operation of the neocortex.

Listening to a Republican science critic I really got the feeling that the general public believes that the human inability to formulate a comprehensive scientific (i.e. material/naturalistic) theory of consciousness in some way demonstrates that consciousness must have an immaterial component. Or to put it more simply, we've tried the materialistic approach, that hasn't worked, therefore Cartesian dualism must be correct. I'm something of a passionate materialist. I feel if we had a comprehensive scientific theory of consciousness, the Singularity would be upon us as it wouldn't be long before we had self-improving artificial intelligence (i.e. seed AI). Nevertheless I am convinced that consciousness is an emergent effect of material systems, and furthermore, that we can state with some confidence which parts of the brain are doing the "heavy lifting" of the conscious process, i.e. constructing from scratch (or close to it) a self-contained and continuously updated model of reality. There's a third camp here... materialists who still refuse to acknowledge that mind is merely a manifestation of chemical and electromagnetic systems. The brilliant physicist Roger Penrose, author of The Road to Reality, perhaps one of the most comprehensive guides to modern physics knowledge, argues in his book Shadows of the Mind that consciousness comes about through a quantum effect, and thus our brains are not responsible for consciousness and our actual mind is non-locally connected to our body and resides elsewhere. While I cannot disprove this I do not see this explanation as being consistent with either neurological or evolutionary explanations. So what do you think? What/where is your mind?

http://media.libsyn.com/media/sciencefriday/scifri-2006061623.mp3 Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, debates Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science. I can't believe how many blatant falsehoods Bethell manages to bilge throughout this piece. I may be a bit biased having worked in climate science/global warming research, but I can assure you that those who dissent from the majority opinion absolutely do not see their funding pulled simply because they dissent. I used to work for such an individual. He served on a number of influential committees including the National Research Council. His opinion was very much appreciated. In a rather critical bit of peer review he did on the Hansen et al 2005 for Science, Hansen welcomed the criticism, and in fact scorned one of the Science judges who was clearly an underinformed global warming alarmist. This debate exists, and it is cordial, at least among the bigger names. It certainly has not been politicized in the way Bethell claims, at least as far as my first hand experience has shown. I'm guessing whatever people he claims had their funding cut, if they even exist, got slaughtered in the peer review process. He claims competition doesn't exist in an environment with government funding. Clearly he's never had to write a grant. It really sounds like he wants an end to the government funding of science, and for applied science to step up to replace it. Anyway, I'd be infuriated more by this guy if it weren't for Chris Mooney's calm, common sense replies to his lies and elaborate misconceptions. (Ed: Whoops, meant to post this in Politics)

Diamond makes a great substrate

I kind of got a sense of "Americans may be fat, stupid, and lazy, but at least they know how to have fun." I thought one of the most telling moments was the "Why use robots when we can use PEOPLE?" ha ha stupid american part

Microsoft's encoding detection sucks. *gasp* IE uses the same (lame) tricks to try to determine the MIME types of various files. Put any remotely HTML-looking tags in a text file and serve it text/plain and IE will render it has HTML.

I was interested in gravity wave communication for a long time (it was what the bass player for Iron Butterfly was working on before he mysteriously disappeared, *gasp*!) But I believe GR predicts that gravity propagates at c, and this has been confirmed experimentally, although I believe the results of that experiment are still in question.

Martin, I'm obviously a layman and have no real basis for having an opinion on any of this other than "what I like" from a purely arbitrary conceptual standpoint, or I'll like a person for their ideas (such as Lee Smolin) and go with what that person advocates. I really like Lee Smolin's fecund universe model... and that eliminates the issue of singularities, does it not? Oh, and I really like The Singularity, but that's a different matter entirely I greatly dislike the idea that our universe is the One And Only Universe which began its life as a singularity and before that causality did not even exist. But then again I greatly dislike the Cosmological Argument/"first cause" explanations to the origin of causality.

Cool. I'm working for a startup now which has a partnership with a Chinese company, and that's involved quite a bit of culture shock and been a harrowing learning experience. Well, personally I enjoyed the juxtaposition maintained throughout the tirade, particularly the dilapidated amusement park, ostensibly in that state because the populus is too busy working to make use of it. I further enjoyed the knocks on "New York ****ing City" from a purely population-based metric. They talk of the greatness of Wen Zhao as they pan across shots of dilapidated slums. It's this disconnect that I particularly enjoyed... that beneath the smug arrogance of their burgeoning economy and America's missteps are a number of seething social problems. I certainly love a great deal of '80s music, but I primarily like '70s music... I also enjoy grunge and even a number of newer indie bands.

You're both right. This movie clearly does a bad job of telling people what they already know. Who cares about its aesthetic value when it obviously has zero informative content. Pangloss, go ahead and delete this thread. I'm going to go burn down an art museum now.