Sisyphus

The desire to appear neutral really just enables dirty campaigning. If you can't talk about some truth stretching without saying "but of course the other side does it too," then there's no incentive to be more honest, because you'll come out looking the same as your opponent anyway, just with hopefully a few more thousands who heard the lie but not the correction. The great majority of media outlets are either pointlessly "neutral" like that or blatantly partisan (so you can't trust what they say, anyway). There are legitimate nonpartisan watchdogs, but they get lost in the static. "Is he saying that because it's true, or because he's a liberal shill?" Etc.

I don't understand why it would be either horizontal or vertical. At horizontal, the range would be zero. And at vertical, it's just coming back down on your head. But since they bother to mention curvature, they can't be looking for vertical height. I would have to assume they'd be talking about a 45 degree angle, which will give you the maximum horizontal range.

What does the rest of the problem say?

How were there two people that said yes on the poll? I smell a sock puppet.

You'd be surprised what some adults think are good ideas.

Your attitude is definitely appreciated, but what would it take to convince you you're wrong? You definitely are: the only common source between, say, the water in the carton of orange juice in my refridgerator and the water supply of some village in Africa is the ocean, and the oceans aren't receding (I promise you. I saw it yesterday. Still there.) Even if the amount of water "stored" was significant compared with the oceans (and it isn't - the total volume of the oceans is about 370,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons), it still wouldn't matter, because it's totally cyclical and constantly replenished. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nMuR1TFq1s

I'm going to say not likely, but I'm willing to be convinced. Basically, there has to be an acceptable level of contamination if you smash the whole thing into a cornfield, and I don't see how that's possible.

I thought it was you people's job to think up new ways to mess with people and see what happens.

It's the companies! The companiiiieeeess!

Yeah, if there's one thing we don't have to worry about, it's the oceans receding.

I know we're not supposed to talk about it so I won't, but you might be interested in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism

I don't think psychiatrists generally do those sorts of tests on patients. That's more of a psychologist thing. I agree with insane_alien; I'm guessing you're reading too much into it.

I'm going to say no. The amount of water we store (remove from the environment) at any given time is many orders of magnitude less than the overall supply, i.e. the oceans. Any shortages caused by overuse would have to be local only.

It's actually not even unbelievable. In order to be so, you would have to be making some coherent assertion which could be disbelieved. But your story is mostly just nonsense.

Guys, seriously, this topic is a waste of time. If he's being serious, then the problem isn't that he doesn't understand physics or what a scientific proof is, it's that he's delusional and probably paranoid, and nothing anybody can say is going to change that. If he's not being serious, then he's just having some weird fun at your expense. The last time he posted this the topic was closed. What is different this time?

Man, were those Matrix movies stupid.

But obviously those would have already have been the rules of society, written or not. People didn't just go around killing and raping each other whenever they felt like it, because if they did, there wouldn't have been a society to impose rules on. People follow rules because of both natural impulses and societal pressures. No society tolerates free murder, so it is also to the individual's advantage to conform. Adding religion to the mix does not cause any fundamental change, it's just a reinforcement. It makes it that much more to one's personal advantage to follow the rules. Instead of just general condemnation and exile and perhaps punishment by authority, there is specific religious condemnation. And more importantly, the punishment comes not just from conscience and society (both inconsistent), but from a much more powerful and consistent being. If anything, religion makes morality more about concrete personal gain, because the over-riding motive becomes not internal reason and willpower but external "divine" favor or punishment. The other effect of religion on morality is that it means there no longer has to be a reason for any particular moral rule. You don't have to rationalize why you're not allowed to work on the sabbath, or you have to wear certain fabrics, because the rules are imposed entirely externally, and the answers to "why can't I eat pork" and "why can't I rape my neighbor" are exactly the same: God said so. And because it doesn't have to "make sense" any more than that, it often doesn't, and you get situations like raping the virgin so you can kill her, because the letter of the law is all that matters. If, on the other hand, morality was based on philosophical exploration of empathy and fairness or of the benefit to society generally, that sort of thing would never happen, because it's obviously absurd.

Yes, it is. Although it's actually even worse than that, because over 1 billion people are discussing the fact that some dude didn't call someone else a pig with lipstick.

All social animals have "collectivist" behavior. It's to the individual's advantage because an individual that can exist in a cooperative group has a large advantage over one which cannot, and groups need social rules to function. For humans, religion naturally gets mixed up in these rules for several reasons, but it's not the source of them. We have both natural empathy towards one another, and a natural sense of "fairness," and we're not the only animal to have either. (Since all monkeys are atheists, that rather deflates your hypothesis.) Humans remarkable ability for abstract thinking allows us to generalize our natural impulses and resolve contradictions. That is philosophical humanism. Religion, on the other hand, explains the impulses differently, by creating an external entity to impose them on us.

Well, that's got to be embarrassing.

That's certainly the narrative the Republicans are trying to push, yes. I was asking more for thoughts about that narrative than a straight repetition of it.

Perhaps flood myths are so common because floods were so important to early civilizations, which mostly arose around annually flooding rivers like the Nile. Too little flooding, and the ground is infertile. Too much, and everything gets washed away. How could stories about disastrous floods not be widespread?

Well, you see, all those Russian billionaires like to stay out of politics, and would never use their influence inappropriately. And their foreign policy is totally fair and reasonable, which is why Russia is so popular right now, just like America would be if we were nicer. And they don't actually censor liberal voices, they just have nothing to say. And they're not drumming up jingoism in their youth, it's just civic pride. So you see, clearly the United States is the only evil country, and is responsible for all problems everywhere. It wouldn't be on the internet if it wasn't true. Read some history, my friend!

Well, that certainly explains a lot.