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If there's some way to repair that kind of damage, I haven't found it. There are ways out of the "friend zone," but confessing unrequieted love for your friend is one of the two easiest ways to destroy a great friendship, the other being to wake up in bed next to them after a night of acute drunkenness. The best advice I can give you for now is to put her out of your mind and try to find someone new. Maybe after a few months or so, when your feelings for her have subsided, you can try to reconstruct your friendship. Isn't it funny how girls can get all weepy and romantic over unrequieted love on movies/TV, but when they're actually confronted with it they just freak the f*ck out...

I think there's a lot of liberals out there who really despise Hillary (myself included)... so I'm going to go with "no"

If you were going c you couldn't "turn your lights on" because for you time would cease to pass. But provided you could the light would continue to go c away from you. Saying that you're 'going ftl' basically removes whatever ability relativity has to answer the question.

All my nickname will tell you is that I read Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn 12 years ago

"Life results from the NON-RANDOM survival of randomly varying replicators." -- Richard Dawkins

I mentioned this here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=261646#post261646 Yeah, one step closer to wetware...

Yeah, we know, so am I, but I can at least assert a certain degree of humility from time to time...

False dichotomy. Your poll suggests that climate change via a natural cycle would not pose a problem. Climate vulnerabilities remain regardless of whether climate change is primarily natural or anthropogenic.

Why do unverifiable anecdotes happen? SCIENCE CAN'T EXPLAIN SPITTY SLURPY BTW, are you related to krstlmthd?

Anthropogenically forcings are overwhelmingly the cause. However, to pin it all on greenhouse gasses is naive. There are a number of local and regional climate forcings which global warming via greenhouse gasses amplifies, and these too are contributing. That's not to say that CO2 isn't the primary cause, but it's certainly not the only cause.

Politics is the face of incomprehensibly vast and complex systems that no voter could possibly hope to comprehend, the scale of which only continues to expand with each passing year. Given the impossibility of having a firm understanding on the issues, especially in light of the ignorance of the populace as a whole, it's no wonder that substance has evaporated from politics and we're left with little more than a dog and pony show.

I had the opposite experience yesterday, I went to bed the night before feeling awesome, self-actualized and basically in what I'd consider to be a state of nirvana... woke up and found out everything was going to all hell thanks to event cascades that I had initiated... not really my "fault" per se but for some reason I sure like to dwell on them. Didn't really sleep well last night.

Phil, the real problem is that memetics is supposed to be a unified study of how information evolves in collective intelligence systems, but the modus operandi of consciousness is not yet understood. You sound rather well versed in Dennett so I will assume you understand his multiple drafts model, which I would equate to neocortical columns employing a selection mechanism to extract phenomenological objects ("phenoms" in Dennett's language) from the global workspace of consciousness, believed to be the thalamus, and apply transformations which they resubmit back to the global workspace of consciousness, where they can in turn be selected by other neocortical columns. In this way the most selected objects become the most developed, and this in turn parallels the alleged memetic approach to the way in which collective intelligence operates. Consciousness itself (if you ascribe to something similar to Dennett's model) provides the selection engine by which memetic theory operates, and therefore memetics cannot and will not have any sort of scientific footing until we have a detailed, empirical theory of consciousness. Without an empirical theory of consciousness (although Dennett asserts multiple drafts is "an Empirical Theory of Mind" and tries his best to substantiate it with real-world experiments) I admit that memetics must be taken on faith.

Well, this is going to come off as a weird list, probably 1. Citizen Kane 2. The Godfather 3. Lawrence of Arabia 4. Colossus - The Forbin Project 5. Powaqqatsi

You clearly missed the point of my post. The infrastructure has broken innumerable times throughout history, but evolves around its own deficiencies. Saying the infrastructure has "begun to break" ignores how many times it has broken throughout history. This is the traditional "Not enough people notice until it's too late!" response, and it ignores the ability of the system to rapidly adapt to changing conditions, instead assuming temporary setbacks are irrepairable. It's the typical platform from which the alarmist operates. And here you're ignoring the power of innovation and accelerating change to modernize failing legacy components of our infrastructure.

Phil, you certainly seem well versed in the subject, but it seems to me you're merely attacking the novelty of the idea and glossing over the new concepts it brings to the table and unifies into a higher level system. Really it's no different than the arguments that I hear against the novelty of Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (itself an extrapolation based upon sociotechnological evolution), or for that matter, the Singularity concept itself. The idea of the Singularity as machine surpassing man was pervasive throughout the '50s, seen in places like Fredrick Brown's "Answer" as early as 1954. The truly novel idea behind memetics, as far as I'm concerned, is that the type of relationships we see developing via the collective evolutionary process of all life on earth are repeated throughout human cultural evolution. Perhaps the best example of this, and the easiest to parallel to the biological world, is language, because individuals overwhelmingly tend to reproduce within the same language group, which is a part of the overall power of a common language to unify a particular group. Languages appear to speciate as we see various groups who originally spoke the same language becoming geographically isolated, and through random drift we see the languages eventually diverge to the point where they become incompatible. We see the same thing with religion. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share a common ancestry as Abrahamic Religions, but have diverged to the point of incompatibility. We see speciation playing itself out within these groups as well. For example, among Christians we see the Catholics, Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and a whole assortment of Protestants too numerous to name. Judaism has fragmented into Kaballah and Messianic Judaism, and Islam into the Shia, Sunnis, Wahhabists, and other groups which have diverged in the precepts of their beliefs. Do you see these sorts of parallels as simply irrelevant, or already encompassed by some other area of study?

I'll go ahead and state that I myself see memetics as a protoscience, but one I have a great deal of faith in (more so than Dawkins himself, it would seem) because it's so intuitively obvious to me. I think perhaps the most rousing argument for it came in the form of Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. I could try to restate the ideas from that book in this thread, but what I'd rather know is what aspects of memetics people feel are particularly unevidenced or otherwise unsubstantiated. (I'm guessing the likely answer I'm going to get back on that is "All of it")

Another thread with an intriguing title which fails to deliver the discussion I so desire. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem speaks to the limits of knowledge. There's also this idea of a "consciousness singularity" floating about, when consciousness consumes the entire universe and reaches a state of eschaton.

I think save for existential risk society will not collapse. Unstable elements of our infrastructure are naturally replaced as they begin to fail. Society is held together by everyone's collective interest in keeping society together, and while we have this attitude now about how apathy will lead to our own destruction, people will be much less apathetic if, say, they lose electrical power and their teevee stops working, can't afford enough oil to drive places, the beer dries up, etc. Basically, the system has to noticibly begin to break before any real collective effort will arise to repair it.

Not that it has anything to do with the blather above, but this article implied just that: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=19556

That's what the second definition I gave was meant to encompass

If performance anxiety were an insurmountable foe, humanity would never reproduce

I didn't want to touch this thread with a 10 foot pole, but to toss in my two cents, I call BS on the Berkeley hippies

Anyone with actual physics knowledge have something to say about this? http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html