bascule

I saw this and it cracked me up, so I thought I'd post it here. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1390510 This statement is just ridiculous: "There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities," Clinton told hundreds of delegates, environmentalists and others. "We are uncertain about how deep and the time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear they will not be good." I'd put that right up there with "It depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is" as far as stupid things Clinton has said.

I'm not that bad, but the other day it dropped to about -20C here while I was at work and I had made the foolish decision that morning to wear sandals instead of shoes... The funny thing was everyone kept complaining about how cold their feet were...

Why? Are you saying it isn't? I think we just don't have the technology yet.

It's far too easy for me to slip into deep introspection

I took the WISC III at age 15 and scored 170. The psychologist administering the exam said it was the highest score of anyone he had ever evaluated. I'm sure my perspicacity has diminished somewhat thanks the continual onslaught of alcohol, marijuana, and other psychedelic substances it has had to endure. I hope whatever deleterious effects these substances may have rendered within my consciousness are not too readily apparent. Now please excuse me for a second while I roast a bowl for Jesus.

Three words: lysergic acid diethylamide

If you want a simple, relatively portable entropy harvesting routine in a computer program, here's one in C: #include <sys/time.h> #include <time.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <limits.h> float entr_rand(void) { unsigned long base, i; struct timeval tv; gettimeofday(&tv, 0); base = tv.tv_sec * 1000000 + tv.tv_usec; for(i = 0; i < 1000000; i++); gettimeofday(&tv, 0); return (float)(tv.tv_sec * 1000000 + tv.tv_usec - base) / INT_MAX; } This is best coupled with some kind of hashing routine to improve the spread of the numbers. The amount of time it takes to execute the loop willl vary according to how often the program is scheduled by the kernel, which is dependent on the whole of the system state.

pattern != random

I think the answer to that is glaringly obvious: yes C'mon, I was humping my bed when I was 4 years old... I think there are many many genes which control many many behavioral operations relating to same-species identification and sex. It's possible that could happen, but at least as far as I know my own body it certainly hasn't. I consider myself a fairly cerebral person and I spend an enormous portion of my time thinking about sex. Always remember that so long has sexual reproduction has been around there is an unbroken chain of organisms who have successfully reproduced sexually going all the way back to the dawn of sex itself. With "staying alive long enough to successfully reproduce" being THE MOTHER OF ALL SELECTION PRESSURES obviously lots of genes are going to be tuned towards successful reproduction.

My shyness varies dramatically depending on my particular mental state and amount of alcohol imbibed

Well, there's also the Everson v. Ewing Supreme Court decision: So yeah, seperation of church and state. If a teacher at a public school decides to start evangelizing to his students in class, it's not the responsibility of the students to find a new class, it's the responsibility of the school to fire that teacher.

I guess my question then becomes how does something which is infinitely large to begin with expand?

http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=40.759921~-73.976011&style=o&lvl=2&scene=1650416

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who use "media" synonymously with teevee. The teevee is a mediUM, singular. Yes, liberals dominate it, I'd agree! However if the teevee is your only justification for the "liberal media," you'd be doing us all a favor by calling the teevee the liberal mediUM. I no longer watch the teevee, and still I see an entire rainbow of varied political views and biases depending on who's in charge of content distribution for the particular media channel I happen to be attuned to at a given time. Anyway, if you have a problem with a liberal bias on the teevee, my suggestion is to stop watching it and dedicate the time you otherwise would've wasted to reading books or expressing yourself creatively. It's what I've done and it's had an enormous positive impact on my life.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8432&print=true

The Establishment Clause is there to prevent this from happening

You do realize you're nothing but a pattern right? The overwhelming majority of your constituent atoms are constantly being flushed from your body.

I would contend that a lack of a complete mathematical model of cellular behavior is one of the reasons we are so ignorant about it. Models are obviously flawed; that's what makes them models and not the real deal. But they evolve: discrepencies between modeled behavior and real results given a set of inputs and be compared, analyzed, and resolved as the model is enchanced.

I suggest you read Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for his refutations of Godel's and Penrose's assertions of the speciality of "mindstuff." This book comprises many of the underlying ideas he expounds upon in Consciousness Explained when he details his empirical theory of the mind. If you wish I can try to parrot his arguments but I'm afraid this is treading on far too aloof of philosophical waters for me to feel comfortable venturing out on.

Well, your overall sentiment is good: if something is going to hurt people, we should work to prevent that. However money isn't "fictional", it's a symbolic quantity by which we can granularly represent the relative value of any type of commodity. Just how well we can protect people from being hurt depends very much on how much money you throw at the problem. However the supply of money is finite, and to throw more money at one problem naturally requires that you decrease the amount of money you are throwing at other problems. Now, there's a big problem regarding trying to prevent global warming from hurting people: we don't understand the planetary climate system, at least well enough to make reliable multi-decadal predictions. A big problem is that there are teleconnections and non-linearities throughout the climate system which we do not yet fully comprehend and twiddling with certain forcings in an attempt to solve a problem we do not fully understand may have just as drastic of undesirable consequences as not taking action at all. We simply do not know yet. More research is needed. We need more reliable planetary climate models before we can even to begin to understand the full nature of the global warming issue. When it really gets down to it, the earth's radiative imbalance will continue to shift and increase atmospheric heat content even if we completely undid the effects of all anthropogenic climate forcings going back to the 18th century! If the results of this are undesirable, then we're going to have to reverse the course of the natural cycle to solve the problem.

I can accept the possibility that our brains generate quantum "noise" much as a computer generates EM noise. I'm not saying necessarily that there isn't a quantum component to the operation of neurons. However if you accept that consciousness is a purely computational process which can be implemented on any Universal Turing Machine (which I hope you do but I'm worried you might not) then whatever "non-deterministic" effects quantum interactions could possibly introduce into the system are abstracted away in the higher level effect, or merely serve as random number generators to seed particular components of the system. If you ask me these people are trying to build a bridge to one of two flawed ideas because they are unable to accept that consciousness is fundamentally deterministic: 1. Due to quantum effects "consciousness" (the high level process) is inherently non-deterministic, and non-determinism can be used as a basis for an argument for Absolute Metaphysical Free Will. Clearly random behavior affords no more room for free will than clockwork behavior. And I have nothing against random components within consciousness. In fact I think there are several operations, such as the formulation of speech, which start out in essentially random configurations and then order is progressively applied to the randomness. But randomness from computerized entropy harvesting is no different from randomness stemming in quantum fluctuations, and thus cannot be used 2. Consciousness is metaphysical and our brains act as "radio transceivers" tuned into a particular frequency of metaphysical consciousness, and quantum fluctuations provide a not-yet-understood connection to the mystical realm of metaphysical consciousness, where all of our thinking really takes place. Thus replicating the brain within a computer will not elicit consciousness because what you'll end up with is a radio transciever with nothing to talk to. Thus Absolute Metaphysical Free Will is possible because consciousness is an immaterial and non-physical component of the universe whose operation defies any kind of deterministic, mathematical formulation. I do not reject "quantum consciousness" so long as the formulation does not undermine materialism and the brain as an isolated entity implementing consciousness in and of itself (i.e. saying that the brain talks to a metaphysical realm of pure consciousness) or the ability to implement consciousness on top of any universal turing machine. I've seen some pretty ridiculous papers on that site trying to use string theory to explain a connection to a metaphysical realm of consciousness. I'll take a look. Absolutely not.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1383206

The overall curvature of space can be positive, negative, or flat. If space has positive or negative curvature, it will be closed. If it's flat, then it will be infinite. As far as I can tell that statement holds true for a closed universe with positive or negative curvature. However if the universe is infinite flat then how can something which is infinite explode?