bascule

Okay Oh god, if you know a meme is bullshit then why do you insist on spreading it?

Yeah, my detector was going off

Podcast is #3 on their music list between Baile and Reggaeton? Pathetic...

"A revised study"? How about a peer-reviewed study? Whose name is on it? (some nebulous faculty member of UCLA, clearly) That's not a source, sorry... What defines "center"? What metric are they using to calculate the political bias of an entire news outlet? Here's what the angsty liberals of FAIR have to say about our old pal Brit Hume: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1072

That's it... watch it until the end... http://www.gop.com/MultiMedia/VideoPlayer.aspx?ID=1039&TypeID=2 Here's the original image that they used: And here's what they made it into in the video: http://www.slate.com/id/2132087/?nav=ais On an unrelated topic, why is that dude watching The Grinch Who Stole Christmas with an unloaded M16 strapped to his back?

Consciousness and qualia are emergent properties of the physical operation of the brain. Like Cognition said, this is known as property dualism. Anyway, back to OP... free synapses - a receiver for the soul? No. You Cartesian Dualists need to stop looking for some magical mystical metaphysical gateway to the soul, be it the pineal gland, free synapses, some as-yet-discovered quantum property of neurons, etc. It doesn't exist.

I'd much rather see Cheney go down for his involvement with the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame case, but he as fall guys too and they'll likely take the brunt of the charges. I see Bush as more of a stooge figurehead and the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz triumvirate really leveraging more of the control in shaping policy. Bush getting impeached would be one of the worst things I could imagine right now. As much as I dislike Bush and feel he's doing a bad job as president, I fear "President Cheney" would be many times worse...

How about those "Fair and Balanced" people at FOX News?

I think that line will go down in history with the same sentiments as "Remember the Maine!"

I always thought the solution to the credibility issue of Wikipedia would be to create all sorts of credibility metrics which would be used to calculate an overall "credibility score" for a particular edit. You could then color code portions of an article based on their credibility score. But hey, as long as it has Semantic Web extensions (i.e. OWL, RDF, semantic interrelationships between articles) I'm all for it

Thanks to sexual reproduction, genes which are beneficial in a given environment are selected out of the gene pool. A mutation isn't needed to explain every shift in phenotype you see in the lineage of a sexually reproducing population. Genes in the gene pool are constantly being "tried out" with one another, and the best combinations win. That's why you can breed for certain characteristics and start seeing results in a few generations. If you had an asexually reproducing species and depended on mutation for that, it would take much, much longer.

They really love framing the debate that way Check out the new video on the RNC web site... it's pretty awful... especially since it ends with a bunch of whiny defeatist democrats ruining some soldier's christmas... except then the liberal media discovered that the picture was actually taken from some soldier watching The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Kinda funny. Ed: 1,000 posts w00t!

The closest thing you'll get to a "perfect random number generator" is probably a Random Event Generator which uses quantum tunneling in diodes or transistors to create "true" randomness...

I wanted to add this little bit in from The Ancestor's Tale where Dawkins references Weinberg:

Holy shit, the two physicists I have the most respect for in the world, Steven Weinberg (who is intricately tied into the whole Dennett/Dawkins atheist memeplex) and Ed Witten (all my knowledge of which comes from Brian Greene, but I know him as the Einsteinesque genius behind M-theory) collaborated to create a theorem. But lo and behold, as I read about it, it flew right in the face of my beliefs in spiritual evolution, namely that all the complexity of the universe is emergent from a system with extremely simple underlying rules. Sadly, when I look at something like: [math]q\delta^3(\vec{p'}-\vec{p})=\langle p'|Q|p\rangle = \int d^3x\, \langle p'|J^0(\vec{x},0)|p\rangle =\int d^3x\, \langle p'|e^{-i\vec{P}\cdot\vec{x}}J^0(0,0)e^{i\vec{P}\cdot\vec{x}}|p\rangle[/math] [math]=\int d^3x\, e^{i(\vec{p}-\vec{p'})\cdot \vec{x}} \langle p'|J^0(0,0)|p\rangle = (2\pi)^3\delta^3(\vec{p'}-\vec{p})\langle p'|J^0(0,0)|p\rangle [/math] Hell if I can make any sense of it. Can anyone give me a boiled down layman's interpretation of what specifically the Weinberg-Witten theorem says about emergence? I'm specifically interested in this in the context of "universe from scratch" models which depend entirely on emergence to "construct" the laws of physics. Unless I'm horribly confused (which I probably am) isn't this how Seth Lloyd's computational universe model works?

I believe the Bible says "like a thief in the night" So the next time you're about to wallop that random burglar with a candlestick holder, check to make sure he isn't Jesus first...

I just wanted to say: I voted yes, but "invade" is the wrong word. If anything, I'm expecting precision air strikes... and "we" represents any number of interested (er, intimidated) parties...

Not to mention a HORRIBLE NBC version in the '90s

Not sure how many Singularitarians there really are around here, but if anyone is interested I've started my own Singularity-related forums. http://singularityforums.net/

Not that I think these Blacklight Power people are anything but crackpots, but I thought I should point this out. (and please don't respond with "search the forums" because this is the only thread that seems to have anything definitive. I found it using the search feature) Authors: Andreas Rathke Journal-ref: New Journal of Physics 7 (2005) 127 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0505150 Well, the guy responded: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html Not that this constitutes anything, but I'd like another source debunking this guy if possible...

For those of you who still think Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, they also bought the plans for casting an implosion lens from enriched uranium hexafluoride from the former head of the international nuclear black market, A.Q. Khan http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5424337,00.html

The source of their technology: the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, A.Q. Khan. If they were truly looking for peaceful nuclear power, why did they buy their technology from the head of the international nuclear black market (at the time)? Iran is working on long range ballistic missiles, specifically the Shahab-6, the Iranian variant of the North Korean Taep'o-Dong 2. Anyway, it's all circumstantial, but nuclear weapons are not something I want to give a country like Iran the benefit of a doubt about. They pose an existential risk to the human species.

I'm sorry, and I can't help but putting this bluntly, but virgins, and the thought of the associated busted hymen bloody cooch, disgusts the hell out of me...

I'm a pretty extreme liberal, and I don't fit into your cookie cutter composition fallacy group Of course I'm also a libertarian who supports (and practices) gun rights, etc. But I agree overall with what you're saying... there are people who don't rationally pick and choose the planks of their political platform (to the point that they don't mash up with the major parties) and instead just get themselves into groups where they re-enforce and spread their own collective group beliefs without a careful consideration of each of them.

Yes land use is a first order climate forcing, and agriculture has multiple, significant impacts to the climate system. It impacts near surface water elements and the regional hydrologic cycle through the physiological and physical properties of the land cover. It influences the availability of energy and water vapor mass for moist deep convection on the local and regional scales. By creating latent heat flux discontinuities, it may induce mesoscale circulations that initiate moist deep convection. By affecting the level of stored soil moisture, moisture that is available to the vegetation during a later period, it can influence the level of convective activity within a region during a subsequent season. Spatially coherent and persistent patterns of thunderstorms play a role in the export of heat and moisture from lower to higher latitudes - this may effect the general circulation. Thus agriculture, by influencing the occurrence, location and intensity of moist deep convection, particularly in the tropics, may also influence global weather and climate. Perhaps they're so sickened by the nattering of global warming alarmists that they've tuned out. Yet another reason why alarmism is bad: by the time we do understand the problem, people will already be sick of hearing about it. If the present shifting of the Earth's radiative imbalance really poses a threat, then eventually we're going to have to artificially reverse the course of the natural cycle. There isn't much we can do about it but continue to research the problem. Our biggest problem right now is that we don't understand the issue because we don't have skillful multi-decadal planetary climate models. At any rate, Kyoto is an expensive waste and will not solve the problem. The estimated net savings in increased mean planetary surface temperatures are BELOW the precision with which we can measure it (0.07°C)