bascule

Unless you live in the heart of a bustling metropolis, mass transit is also going to be slower. Nobody can see the whole picture. You can only make some gross assumptions and take your best guess. But I see a highly dynamic system which shifts depending on the state of the market, and as gas prices have risen I've seen an enormous shift towards the use of bicycles. Don't get me wrong, I support the use of mass transit, but I find your view rather short-sighted.

"debates"? What debate? That makes the issue sound as if it were debatable. Sadly, idiots v. sensible, intelligent people is a debate that will never end.

If you had: A complete, background-independent, deterministic, and fully quantifyable (i.e. discrete) model of how spacetime behaves A complete snapshot of all the discrete units of reality in a particular region, whatever they may be Some way of monitoring everything entering/leaving the region without disturbing it (which the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle basically says impossible, but we're dreaming here) Some way of modelling all of this data in faster than realtime Then, yes, I'd say it's possible.

It's obviously a joke, and an awesome one at that

I work in atmospheric modelling, and I can assure you that at this point we can't even perform remotely realistic multi-decadal simulations of the Earth's entire climate system. There are too many nonlinearities in the system's behavior. Even if you had a complete, background-independent, deterministic, and fully quantifyable (i.e. discrete) model of how spacetime behaves, and even if you had a snapshot of, say, a spherical region with a 1/2 AU radius surrounding the earth, your snapshot would be useless for multi-decadal predictions. Think about how much energy has entered your snapshot in the form of solar radiation, even in the first nanosecond after your snapshot. Think of how much solar radiation impacts life on earth... things like the impact of sunspots/solar flares on electronics, etc. You would have to make so many assumptions about energy entering the system that your model would soon be rendered worthless.

Memetics is far from a science. It's an application of scientific ideas to another field in a way that makes a great deal of sense, but can't be experimentally verified in any easy way. But I think it can be said with some certainty that what sets humans apart from other animals is that the natural selection process was able to come up with a species that interoperated in such a matter that the fundamental concepts of natural selection were used to allow perceptions of reality to resonate between members of that species in such a way that they began to take on the characteristics of natural selection itself, namely by being selected (through an intelligent process) for replication when one member chose to pass an idea onto the other, and through variation, either due to intelligent shaping, a transmission failure, or improper recall. If you look at lifeforms and ideas both as variating replicators which obey some basic principles about trends in systems of variating replicators (in which copies contain a great deal of similarities but may contain some key differences from originals) then you can induce how religions are products of a memetic evolutionary process in the same way that you can induce that man is a product of a genetic evolutionary process. This can be done by similar properties between the evolution of religions and the evolution of lifeforms. There are all sorts of problems with trying to do this, such as that you may end up with similar memes which evolved without ever influencing each other and therefore have no common ancestor, whereas all lifeforms MUST be linked back to a single common ancestor because of the immense improbability of abiogenesis. However it's pretty obvious that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (as well as Kaballah and various other sects of all the afforementioned religions) share a common ancestor. But bottom line, I see the very nature of religion as being a system of beliefs which is imbued with the properties of good replicators. Namely, that an immense body of the teachings are for the express purpose of ensuring the success of the meme. So yes, it's all an extrapolation. Call it "faith" if you like. But it's a "faith" very much grounded in reality, in seeing patterns between things which science has shown to be demonstratably true and between the rest of reality. What exactly are your religious assumptions grounded on? I very much doubt it's scientifically-oriented thinking.

arkain101, your description of your "theory" reminds me a lot of this guy: http://thefinaltheory.com/ ...only the way you write is slightly less coherent. I've independently rediscovered innumerable great ideas that innumerable others had before me, sometimes thousands of years before me. But you can't really take credit for ideas like that, because chances are you have been indirectly influenced by the original ideas. I can't tell you how many great ideas I've had which I've soon realized are because I read about them maybe 5 years ago, discounted them at the time because I was unready to understand them, only to have them pop up in my head years later and feel like new and original ideas of my own, because I forgot about when I originally heard about them. I think you'll find a lot of high IQs around here... I'm 170 myself (or at least I was almost a decade ago, according to the WISC-III). But someone with a high IQ can still be the biggest ignoramus you've ever met.

A big fancy car influences the behavior of the person driving it? I don't think so, I think if anything automobiles might somewhat reflect the personality of those driving it. However that big fancy car might, say, take a firefighter to work, who saves dozens of lives every month alone. I'd say America is way more individual-oriented than other countries, and this has lead us to be rather innovative.

Yeah, the linked article claims we can learn "two bits per second" which I'd say is pretty obviously false, considering how well we manage to associate visual/audio information which obviously takes up more than "two bits per second"

The easiest way to prove it to yourself is look at the moon on the horizon through a paper towel tube. The moon will appear smaller when you look at it through the tube than it does without it.

I was having trouble finding an exotic Imperial unit of mass, heh

If you're referring to what Dennett calls a "phenom", an atomic unit of mindstuff, then yes, you're probably correct, but I'd say that the reasoning is because it maps against your own internal ontological structure, and when you abstract that away, you will be left with a coding which is common to everyone, at least for humans. Yep, this is not an electronic gateway into the "mind's eye"

I'm sorry, I assumed you could interpret my statements in a historical context and exact semantic correctness was not required of every statement I ever type. I guess I forgot that there are overly pedantic individuals who would rather nitpick away at the phraseology of my statements rather than concerning themselves with the ideas contained within. So, your little red herring aside... The only difference between a terrorist and a revolutionary patriot is whether or not the revolution succeeds.

You can use 1.8026175 x 1012 furlongs / fortnight for the speed of light if you want, and put in the mass in stones, and it will spit out the energy in terms of stone x furlong2/fortnight2. However, that's not a particularly useful relation.

I dunno, somehow the terrorist acts committed by the American Colonists are now collectively known as the "Revolutionary War"

Except tax revenue is dependent upon how well each person and business is doing financially, and that fluxuates. When you combine the dot com bubble with 9/11, it makes for a pretty dire financial situation.

Internal memos from Philip Morris from April 1980 indicate that the tobacco companies have been fully aware of radioactivity in cigarettes for over two decades.

It was odd to see some stories of the British accusing the Iranians of this today. I'm not really sure what their motive would be...

I'd do something with ontologies... maybe import the WordNet ontology and try to make something which processes natural language and dynamically expands the ontology (maybe using a Markov process?)

I said nothing of Abu Ghraib, and I don't think Godwin's Law applies to discussions of torture. My real problem is that Bush has finally elected to use his veto power, and what has he been saving it up for? Stopping a bill that bans torture... which passed the Senate 90-9 at that... To keep this from descending into a semantic argument, how about we use the definition from the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Republican John McCain chose to use as the basis of this bill, which from the votes it received certainly does not seem to be a partisan issue. http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm

So it's okay to torture someone in the name of our country as long as we're torturing someone who isn't fighting in the name of theirs? I'm failing to see how that distinction wouldn't make us monsters... That's a lot of highly specific information you'd have to extract from other sources. How do you know your other sources aren't lying, and how do you know that when torture is applied, that the answers you get from the person you're torturing aren't lies? If they are, haven't you just tortured someone for no reason? The use of torture in any form makes us no better than the Nazis...

Just wanted to say I did a little research and I was way off on this thread. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction everyone.