bascule

Signup Date: 03/11/04 As for me, I'm one trendy motherf*cker... I still hate MySpace in all its craptastic ColdFusion stupidity

Ewww, McNuggets are anything but tasty

It can be done with JavaScript

Ugh. This is why I don't eat tetrapods. I don't know how anyone can eat fast food, especially chicken nuggets. The idea of chickens being butchered, ground up, and squeezed into an injection molded paste is so morbidly grusome...

Oh please, anyone who has espoused this attitude is not thinking scientifically and will quite shortly be proven wrong. I forget who it was, but Brian Greene quoted some 19th century yokel in The Fabric of the Cosmos who made the ludicrous claim that physics had fully explained the universe but for two things: the behavior of light and the nature of radiation, and that these problems would be solved shortly and our knowledge of physics would be complete. These two problems became the basis of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Science operates under the premise that any accepted idea is potentially falsifiable given enough evidence. Science isn't afraid to be wrong. Science wants to be wrong, because when it is shown to be wrong we move closer to the truth. Technology doesn't think... yet. The main polarization I notice is science vs. pseudoscience, as made painfully clear in Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World That was a lame attempt at a strawman. Anecdotes are fun! I don't think Leonardo da Vinci would've bothered with that if he had the knowledge of physics at his disposal that we do today. He was in an age mired with pseudoscience. I did state the real truth: we don't know. There is no hard evidence of aliens.

I like this one too... beauty in simplicity [math]\phi = {\sqrt{5}+1 \over 2}[/math]

[math]f_j = \sum_{k=0}^{n-1} x_k e^{-{2\pi i \over n} jk }[/math]

Here's me: http://myspace.com/transcendental I really hate MySpace but I use it every day *shrug*

I hope not, but I'm scared it could

Yeah, but the evangelofundies are just itching to get an abortion case into the new Roberts/Alito augmented Supreme Court so they can try to get Roe v. Wade overturned.

Religious bias of any kind should have no influence upon science reporting, as was the case here

It's taken a lot of computation to go from a lifeless planet to a near Singularity culture. A lot of computation. An incomprehensible amount of computation. Too much for a simulation, I would say, at least for the conceivable near term before consciousness consumes the universe.

They think God created a bunch of "kinds" of animals and that descendants evolved from there. Kinda like "Well we believe evolution so far, but as soon as it conflicts with Genesis we gotta go with that"

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11240405/ The IDiots just won't give up...

NASA's budget for FY2007 is $17.9 billion The DoD's FY2007 budget is $439.3 billion (not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Slate estimates brings the total amount of defense spending up to $580 billion) This is a $20 billion increase over the $419 billion DoD budget for 2006 The increase in the DoD's budget alone is more than the entire NASA budget for 2007. When you add in the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined ($509 billion) The next biggest defense spender in the world is China ($67 billion) Maybe we're spending... excessively on defense? Maybe some of that money could go to NASA?

False alarm http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/02/08/nerve.agent/index.html

No story on this yet, but top of http://CNN.com has: BREAKING NEWS: Senate office building evacuated when test indicated presence of "possible nerve agent," sources say. Up to 200 staffers and 8 senators may be exposed

No hard evidence leaves no reason to believe. I can caveat that no with "skeptic's assumption" if you want to be pedantic about the ultimate knowability of all reality, but it's no different from assuming that all accounts of vampires, Zeus, leprichauns, unicorns, maticores, wyverns, and griffins are also false. I think you're suffering from Mulder's "I Want To Believe" complex. An excellent recommendation to read an excellent book

Who wins? Depends on if you're a premillenialist, postmillenialist, or dispensationist... Christians today still argue this silly question

Here's the real truth about aliens: 1) are there any - we don't know 2) are they intelligent - we don't know 3) did they make contact - no 4) is the government covering up about ufo’s - The government has probably covered up sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in the form of classified surveillance plane development projects in the past

The idea was that a filtering algorithm would prevent digital copies of the sleep drug from being made, so that the digital copy would remain awake while its analog counterpart sleeps. This isn't a "split brain" patient though. I suppose what would be needed is for the digital arm to write or type what was experienced by the analog half of the brain. If a continuous wakeful state is reported by the digital arm (and therefore the analog brain) then couldn't we say that consciousness was successfully transferred?

Should we simply trust Einstein that "God does not play dice" and that strong determinism is true? Some faith in authority is in order, but it must be coupled with a skeptical attitude toward questioning what is presented to you on sheerly authoritarian terms, especially if it is not evidence-based or contradicts evidence presented elsewhere. I do have trust in authorities, so long as what is given to me is logically consistent with the information I have gathered to date. If what is presented to me is not logically consistent with my system of knowledge, that either means there are inaccuracies in my system of knowledge or inaccuracies in what is being presented to me. At this point, as a skeptic, I seek out the source of the inaccuracies through research. Blind faith in an authority is, of course, an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy... just because Einstein believed fervently in strong determinism does not make it so. Truth lies in mutually supporting evidence which outweighs evidence to the contrary.

The science classroom is an excellent example of why scientific information can't be authority-based but must instead be built on a structure of mutually supporting evidence. Obviously science teachers are going to teach you things that are wrong. You have to learn to look for the evidence where it lies yourself and internally falsify misinformation you have been given. If something sounds weird to you, investigate for yourself, don't just depend on authority.

Well, here's some irony for you. Iran's response to the Mohammad cartoons is... to draw some cartoons about the Holocaust. Because making fun of the systematic murder of 6 million people is the same thing as making fun of a prophet of a religion, right? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/iran_cartoons My friend made this in response: