Bender

You implied that religion was good because it could be used to save a suicidal person I want to nuance this by stating that it is the fact of saving the person is (usually) good, that doesn't make the method used inherently good. Extreme example: I could persuade someone to not commit suicide by threatening to kill his family. (The point about the medical conditions is about euthanasia and not people on bridges, in case you missed the point; in countries were euthanasia is legal, it is less likely to find people with serious medical conditions having to resort to bridges)

You are mixing up two things: 1) "saving a suicidal person" (which can be good or bad, depending on his medical condition) 2) "with religion" (which is neutral for all I care, but certainly not a necessary condition for 1)

Part of the explanation could simply be that humans found asses attractive for a sufficiently long period in our history.

first link on a google search

I can program my computer to do recursive thinking. In fact, if I compile a piece of code, my computer is going to think about the optimal way to compile it so it has to think less while executing the program afterwards. My thermostat prefers a specific room temperature, so by your definition, it is self-aware. If you define fear for me, I can program my computer to experience it. I can e.g. set it up to run regular virus scans to avoid a hard drive crash and take automatic backups to reduce the consequences, if you want to define "fear" as "taking precautions to avoid something undesirable" or as "reducing risk".

- I used to be a horrible eater as a kid, up to the point where I almost had to vomit from some foods. One day, I made the conscious decision that that was silly, since then I quite enjoy a lot of the things I couldn't swallow before. I guess it was probably a bit more gradual than just the one day, but not much. - It is not because we do not record memories while sleeping that we are not conscious. Moreover, the fact that we sometimes do remember our dreams proves that we are conscious while dreaming at least some of the time. - the subconscious mind is also buried somewhere in our skull - our subconsciousness is simply a handy filter to make our lives liveable, it is also a part of us, so any decision it makes, it is still our decision. It makes handy preselections for me to choose from. I like the preselection, because my subconsciousness knows what I like, because it is part of me and has all my experiences to work with. e.g. when deciding what to do this evening, it presented me with options like: clean the kitchen, watch the next episode of Game of Thrones or read the next chapter of my book. That way I don't have to consider stupid options like clean my neighbours kitchen, watch the previous episode of Game of Thrones or start reading a different book. It is silly to claim that I had no part in that decision making process, because all my previous experience lead to the decision, which happened in my own brain. Another example: imagine consciously having to process the millions of tactile stimuli we receive every second. It is still me who is receiving those stimuli, even though my subconsciousness conveniently selects and groups only the relevant stimuli.

A priori, nothing had to develop. A posteriori, everything has had to develop, otherwise it would not be here today. It may be a mystery to you, but that doesn't make it a mystery to scientists. There are plenty of animals that employ language with different levels of complexity. The "consciousness" part is fuzzy without proper definition. My computer knows its own serial number, name and IP-address and is able to perform self-diagnostics, so who's to say it is not conscious?

Interesting. Do keep in mind that you want to manipulate 50+ kg. They state a 6" mirror would take 40-80 hours, since your mirror is about 6 times larger, you need to remove 200 times more material, so you might be looking at 8000 hours.

Would it help if there was more space behind the toilet? That would be relatively easy to accomplish with some existing models. I have been in Japan twice, and I can't remember seeing a toilet like that. They all had self-cleaning seats and nice spraying and drying facilities. But to avoid mud on the seat, I need to add:

I guess it depends on the required thickness and accuracy. I have no experience with this whatsoever, but if I had to make a mirror that size, I would consider doing something like that to have a rough shape before grinding it more precisely.

If it was a mirror used to heat stuff with sunlight, I doubt it is going to be accurate enough for any distortions to matter.

Of course, this require extrapolating observed facts far outside the observed range. We might just as well end in a "big freeze", where everything continues to move apart, but not necessarily rip apart on smaller scale.

Spherical should be doable, but with the aberrations, he shouldn't care about any distortions due to the thickness of the glass. For a parabolic mirror, you can melt the glass and cool it down while rotating, so you only need the raw material. Still, I'm also interested in the technique he is going to use (which will help determining the requirements).

I think you mean dwarves

I wonder: was Joseph gullible enough to swallow the cover story, or did he just go along with it to keep the peace?

Since ugliness is a relative property, the less attractive half of the population is always going to be "ugly". Not too long ago, everybody had crooked teeth, so it wasn't a big deal, but now we all wear braces, so suddenly somebody with crooked teeth stands out as deviating from the norm. Also now we can get an ugly lump surgically removed from our face and pass on potentially flawed genes anyway. Cosmetic surgery is making humanity more ugly, the same way that opticians make our eyes worse. Genetic drift in action.

All animals with pregnancy have miscarriages. Interestingly, the reasons stated are environmental rather than chromosomal. Of course, a very early miscarriage would possibly be even harder to study in animals, especially when they have multiple healthy embryos at the same time.

I wouldn't be surprised that buying a telescope would be cheaper than having such a mirror custom made. I have no idea how big a telescope you can buy on the market, though.

To be honest, it sounds like wishful thinking. As long as there is no indication of such a sequential system, it is completely useless to explain anything. I'll highlight two reasons why I think such a sequential system is highly unlikely: 1) it requires neurons who are not in contact with each other to know their place in the sequence 2) why would we use our brain, which is very costly to grow and maintain, in a horribly inefficient sequential way?

Interesting. Do you have any source on the relative size of this effect with respect to the torque the moon and the earth exert on each other?

If the information only becomes 'information' once the classically transmitted part is received, does the 'instant' measurement contain any information itself?

Unless one is identified by one's entire brain and not just the "conscious" part. In that case any decision made by the subconsciousness, is still a decision made by the individual.

According to the article, which isn't exactly a scientific publication: I don't know more about it then what I can find on the internet. It sounds at least plausible that some genetic defects would result in miscarriage and some wouldn't. Another article from the same site. I don't know how reliable it is, but at least it sources peer reviewed journal publications.

- If you are at a university, chances are your university has a glass workshop somewhere hidden in a basement: ask them. - ask local glass company - why does it need to be that thick? Strength? optical properties? heat transfer?

If that is the only requirement, just use what is cheap and available.