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It's not just that they're redundant, it's that they're always true because the conclusion and premise are the same

That's where I really draw the line. This seems like a blatant disregard for free speech rights.

Uhhh... you do realize that the capacity of Nintendo cartridges is measured in hundreds of kilobytes (or less) right?

Ugh. Familiarize yourselves with modern languages, people! Virtually all the problems you are bitching and moaning about have been solved by Ruby and Python. They both provide dynamic typing, simple yet strong object models (heavily inspired by Smalltalk), and the majority of Lisp's great features (minus macroes) like closures and lambdas, and both are functionally oriented. To me, Ruby is an excellent merger of really great ideas from both Lisp and Smalltalk. Lisp weenies love to whine about how every language has reinvented Lisp but never pause to consider why Lisp needs to be reinvented in the first place... here's some hints: its syntax sucks and it's too conceptually obtuse to gain mass-appeal. Bitch and moan all you want about great ideas going by the wayside; it won't change the immensely progressive nature of software. Software continues to blow my mind daily, and if you think it's regressing you really need to open your eyes.

Yeah, I saw this a few days ago when it was on /. Magnecules? Aquygen? WTF? I think from what I read in the /. comments the guy was proposing an alternative valence model where a single hydrogen atom could bond with both another hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom, and thus give you "H-H-O" So yeah, this is some more "My product works because physics as we know it is wrong!" bullshit I Googled for "magnecules" and it turned up this guy: http://www.magnecules.com/ Dr. Ruggero Maria Santilli. He was also mentioned in the /. comments. I guess the work on this "H-H-O generator" thingy is supposedly tied into his research.

Aargh, this is infuriating! http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_3823356 Okay, as many of you know, I'm a liberal. But I'm also a libertarian and a skeptic. And well, this place is really starting to freak me out. It's got tons of insane political correctness bullshit going which, as far as I can tell, are all a product of the University of Colorado (famous for its 33 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans) Anyway, this is ridiculous. I don't mind this kind of crap being expected of college students, but you can't just force it onto the public at large. Huge questions remain about who will manage this information or what it will be used for. Anyway, I'm a little POed...

I think life on any planet besides Earth would be far more boring

It was funny but not that funny... I dunno. I was laughing but I'd give it 7/10

It serves as yet another example of an executive agency casually reminding the administration of the civil rights they're supposed to be upholding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/washington/14nsa.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1147579200&en=9a442ce4901ab0c7&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

I totally know what Snail is getting at. It's the whole Extropian idea. But extropy increases with entropy as extropy cannot created by any other way than increasing entropy. Thus both extropy and entropy tend towards a maximum... and as the rate at which extropy is produced increases, so does the rate at which entropy is produced. Yay, pseudoscience/protoscience... but certainly one better than anything sunspot has posted.

Let's start with a quote from the Wikipedia article! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocosm So that's the idea... life plays some critical role in the structure of reality. I would like to think that life evolves into God and God re-creates the universe, but that's just me. Pretty wacky eh?

Kyoto is a farce. It's anticipated to prevent an increase in global mean surface temperature which is less than the precision to which the global mean surface temperature can presently be measured, i.e. the temperature savings are undetectable by today's technology. That's not to say that the Bush Administration's environmental policies have been anything but abominable, but seriously, Kyoto is a joke.

The question is so vague as to be meaningless. There's no real point in answering it.

The curvy things look rather labial...

Holy schnikes batman! So what I'm confused about here is if this is compatible with Lee Smolin's fecund universes model or if what they're describing is more akin to our universe being born out of a "big crunch" type of scenario where our universe begins when another big classical universe ends.

I've been reading Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, although I'd really like to read Life of the Cosmos now... books like that, and the ones Brian Greene has written, may gloss over all the important details but I really think they do a good job of at least conveying the core of the ideas that physicists are working with. Well, Kepler wasn't half as nuts as Tycho Brahe, but probably wouldn't have ever figured out the laws of planetary motion without his data.

Uhoh, Ice-9 is becoming a reality

Not in the slightest. Multi-decadal global climate models are not yet skillful. Your point? Yes, land use and water have enormous impacts on the environment that are often overlooked almost completely. CO2 is the primary climate forcing responsible for global warming. That's where the buzz comes from. Deuterium/tritium fusion is seen as the most likely candidate for fusion power.

Look for the 100% Organic sticker. Accept no substitutes.

I'm glad I live in a town completely divorced from reality, where nearly everyone (including myself) is a skinny and athletic arch-liberal.

Yeah, I'm aware that verbal explanations are completely unsatisfactory in converying underlying details, and thus without a mathematical understanding there's little I really can know. I hope it isn't too annoying when laymen like me attempt to extract the most general understanding verbally... I tried reading this paper. The first few pages were incredibly compelling, then it starts getting into math and weird guy's names I've never heard of and ugh. I think I'll wait until after I can link my brain to the Internet before I try to understand this stuff. Awesome, I had no idea LQG was making testable predictions. This paper reiterated to me one of the ideas I got out of Brian Greene's books, namely that at the Planck Length space seems to be a lot less smooth and uniform than the way we perceive it on the macroscale. Seems to me that figuring out the geometry of space on the Planck scale is what the quantum gravitational theories are all trying to do. As I don't understand the math I have no way of satisfactorally visualising what these sorts of geometries might actually be like, but it's alluded to (by descriptions of M-theory I've seen, and as far as I can tell, this paper) as being some kind of web structure. I don't really get the spin connections you and this paper were talking about... all I really know of is the Aspect experiment demonstrating quantum entanglement affecting spin. I'm not sure if what you're describing is anything like the graph structure of interactions I envision. I'm sure that means something very different to you than it does to me, guess it gets back to your triangle of physics knowledge... In one of my baseless thought experiments I've envisioned something which I think seems like that, although, again, the triangle: what I read, and what really is are two very different things... Sadly, for me, it's of primary importance, because the rest of what he does is completely inaccessible to me. Of course, I'm useless in working towards a solution to the problem, so I guess it doesn't really matter. The quote comes from his response to the EDGE 2006 question which you linked! I was assuming the quote (and his entire response) was in regards to his fecund universe theory, which is the main aspect of his theories that I've been interested in.

You have no frame of reference from which to make that assertion. Yes, sounds like she's out of your league. No, she's a normal falliable human being with all sorts of problems which you either choose to ignore or don't know about yet because you haven't spent enough time with her. How long have you ever been together alone with her? You have some perfect archetypical image of her in her head. Chances are she's nothing like that. The more time you spend with her the more you'll realize that the fantasy image you have of her in your head is nothing like the real person. If I were you I'd go to this girl, apologize, and ask for her help with girls. Ask her if she has any friends who she thinks might make a good match for you. That way you can let her know that you are trying to move on and can hopefully improve your friendship with her. If you become better friends with her, you can spend more time with her and perhaps learn how much your mental model deviates from the real person. You don't know that, however you do know this girl doesn't want to be with you. There's another 3 and a half or so billion women on this planet you haven't tried yet. You can assume at least a few dozen million of them are pretty desperate. If that's your attitude, then that statement will be correct. Jesus christ, get a little self-confidence. There's probably at least one girl you know who has a crush on you: it's your job to figure out who that girl is. Step one is to form a circle of close friends and hang out with them on a regular basis. At least every other day or so, and every weekend unless you have a conflict. Once you have friends they can introduce you to people. Make friends with guys who have girlfriends, ask for their advice on relationships, and ask their girlfriends if they have any friends who are looking for someone and might be interested with you. Seriously, that's one of the easiest ways to meet girls that I know. You need a social network you can leverage for help, and it sounds like that's what you're desperately lacking right now.

http://www.localnewswatch.com/skyvalley/stories/index.php?action=fullnews&id=185896 Who watches the watchmen? Guess it's not the DOJ...