Sisyphus

I believe that the best thing we can do for Tibet is to help liberalize China, and the best way to do that is to continue doing what we're doing: trading with them and encouraging cultural exchange, so the Chinese can see for themselves the advantages of capitalism and the free exchange of ideas, and so they want to be peaceful and cooperative in international affairs because it has proven to be so advantageous for them to do so. They voluntarily let foreign inspectors in their factories. Why? Not because we threatened them, but because they want to sell things to us, and to do that they have to demonstrate that they meet our standards. War against, say, the United States, is basically unthinkable. Why? Not because we dominate them militarily, but because they have become so prosperous in their peaceful relationship with us. As was mentioned above, we're not exactly in a position to turn away from China, ourselves, but even if we could, we shouldn't, since that would only give them an excuse to be regressive and aggressive. Take a look at the last fifty years of Cuban history for the extreme ineffectiveness of that sort of approach.

I always wonder what "global domination" is supposed to mean. Unify the world under a single caliphate, right? That's what Rudy Giuliani has been warning me about, as if it's a real possibility. Well, how is that supposed to happen? Does Al Qaeda have plans to convert me and everyone I know to fundamentalist Islam? Because I don't think I'm very susceptible, and I haven't even heard a pitch, yet. I'm thinking nobody in that organization has really thought this through in the long term. I mean, hell, at least Hitler had a plan.

I don't think it was quite that simple. Oil was definitely a factor, but I doubt the most important one. Mostly I think it was the overall atmosphere of groupthink in the upper reaches of the Bush administration. Loyalty is valued above honesty, and so opinions contrary to the dominant one never get heard, and so the facts that might derail the pre-existing agenda get filtered out. Decisions are based on the word of, say, Chalabi, despite his making unsubstantiated claims and having obvious ulterior motives. Intelligence showing suspicious but ambiguous activity becomes proof of imminent nuclear attack. All analysis to the contrary is simply ignored as purely "political." And thus Dick Cheney, who a few years earlier gave an accurate prediction of the aftermath of the then hypothetical war as an argument for why it should never happen, becomes its primary proponent and mastermind.

You might be right. On the other hand, I'm trying to imagine taking the budget and manpower of Fort Knox and multiplying it by the ratio between the circumference of the fort and the U.S.-Mexico border. It probably wouldn't be that difficult, but the point is it might still be something we literally can't afford. ...crossing the Canadian border? Seriously, though, while I agree your general assessment and your specific guess that, say, a 50% failure rate would be enough to deter a terrorist, I seriously doubt a terrorist would use that route even today. For one thing, there's the aforementioned, largely unwatched 5500-mile swath to the north. Second, Mexicans have a high success rate in crossing because there are networks in place to help them along. A terrorist would have to first infiltrate Mexican society and convincingly portray someone in desperate need of a higher paying job (maybe he could acquire a hungry family with lots of medical bills) before even making the attempt. And finally, I'm guessing a terrorist on a 9/11-like mission would have a much easier time if he could interact with society in a traceable manner anyway, which someone with illegal status couldn't do. There are already easier ways. And you would have to be quite an super agent, which frankly I don't think terrorist groups like Al Qaeda really have, since intelligent people capable of subtly don't hold ideologies like theirs...

Just for the record, the seven deadly sins are not in the Bible. They were declared by the church in the 6th century. (Am I the only one here who's actually read the thing?)

Science is the best tool we have for refining and expanding our observations of the universe. It's relationship with what is now commonly known as philosophy is one of providing generalized a posteriori content. It is common and completely understandable for those with scientific training to mistake "philosphy" for pseudoscience (which is just science contaminated with fallacy and excessive speculation), as if they were reaching for the same goal, and philosophy were just an undisciplined and speculative version of science. Feynman's quote is accurate but misleading, since predicting what data science will provide is not really the business of philosophy.

Any assertions about the existence or nonexistence of god are not scientific statements, because it is not a scientific question. It has no testable consequences. Certain specific religious beliefs do and are proven false, but even they are not "targeted." For example, vast amounts of scientific data unambiguously contradict the notion that the Earth is only 6000 years old, but those data were not collected for the purpose of refuting that particular claim or any other. Rather, the refutation is merely incidental. There is a large amount of religiously motivated pseudoscience floating around, which certainly is contradicted by legitimate science. So in that sense there is a "war," but it is being waged on science, not by science. There are, of course, legitimate scientific questions that would seem to assume the nonexistence of "god" as a prerequisite. But they only seem so. I can, for example, legitimately ask what the evolutionary advantage of religious belief is. This would probably offend a lot of people, who see it as an "atheist" question. However, it is no such thing. You might, at best, be able to say that people would believe as they do even if those beliefs were completely false. Such a statement would not be in a scientific paper, it would just be something that might logically follow. But basic logic can also tell you that that has no bearing on whether those beliefs are true or false. If it contradicts somebody's personal argument for the existence of god, that is entirely their problem.

I admit this is a dodge, but monkey laborers would be wildly impractical. Monkey craftsmanship is notoriously inconsistent - far more than humans, let alone machines. You would need a great deal of supervision, and monkeys are expensive to breed and train to begin with. Human or machine labor would be much more cost effective. Yes, there have been domesticated labor animals for as long as there has been civilization, but those animals are more like tools than workers. You don't send an ox out in the field to plow by himself, or push a hound dog out the back door and tell him to come back with dinner.

Fidel Castro announced his retirement from the presidency of Cuba. The embargo worked!

Mine: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=16023 I had a question, YT had the answer and his impatience, and eventually I goaded him into explaining it.

That's interesting and surprising that we're seeing signs of de-alignment from a voting bloc that only a couple of years ago was considered as entrenched as they come. In retrospect, however, it does make perfect sense. Evangelicals obviously are very socially conservative on the whole, but other aspects of Republican ideology, like Reaganomics or hawkish foreign policy, are seriously dissonant with Christian rhetoric. It's been too easy to forget recently that we've already had an evangelical President, and that was Jimmy Carter.

I think your question is too vague, since anything can be compared with anything else under the right circumstances. This might be too presumptuous, but I think what you're really asking is how similar is human life to mechanical objects, and how similar is it to nonhuman life. Right? Well, a human is definitely more complicated than any single artificial object, that's true. But really, it's perfectly valid to consider the body as an extremely complicated, self-repairing, highly-adaptive, self-replicating machine. We are made of parts (LOTS of them) that operate by the laws of physics and chemistry, just like everything else. And you're right that there is a whole lot of it that we don't yet understand completely. That's why we take the "bigger picture" view where we focus on the parts we can "get at" more easily. For example, the way thinking really works on the basic level is still too complicated for us, so we look at its effects and study those. As for humans and nonhumans, sure, of course. Different organisms have lots of closely analogous structures, because hey, we're all related. Generally, the closer the relation, the closer the analogy. For example, chimpanzees are among humans' closest relatives, and a chimp body "works" in almost exactly the same way as a human body.

Everything else aside, is there a reason you didn't say "75 spiders per year?"

In what way do you believe it is being abused? Give an example.

As far as I know, there's only one institution that officially grants authenticity to miracles, and that's the Catholic church. Maybe the Mormons do too. Since Huckabee is neither Catholic nor Mormon, he can't produce any documentation! This is Bush's National Guard service all over again.

A 16-year-old who hits on an 11-year-old is a creepy, creepy loser.

I've heard a few people say that, too. White Obama supporters all (so it's not a "black community" thing, and it's not a ploy to sway votes to Clinton). They were also all boomers, interestingly. I think part of it is that he reminds people of Bobby Kennedy: young, charismatic, offering hope and inspiration in a dark time, etc. Add that to the fact that he is black and that we all know that racism is not a thing of the past. And that a black president was impossible for so long that the very possibility now seems too good to be true, that it has to be snatched away somehow. To me, it's not surprising at all that so many people start thinking along those lines.

The two sides of this argument don't seem to be meeting one another head on. On the one side, you have people saying it's exclusive, and on the other, you have people saying it's not a major issue. Those aren't mutually exclusive. I happen to think both statements are true. Was I deeply offended or traumatized by having to say it? No, of course not. But that doesn't make it right, does it?

It can be tested if you calculate what that external force is.

But "not mentioning it" is neutral. Would your attitude change if you had to declare yourself an atheist every morning?

Obviously cells don't have brains, but I thought the question was more like what is analogous to the brain. It might be a rough analogy, but I would have to give credit to the nucleus. Yes, it's ultimately "regulated by physics and chemistry itself," but so are brains. I'm just thinking about single-celled organisms like a paramecium or an amoeba, and how they sort of respond to stimuli, and how they have such enormous genomes. That's as far as my thought process can go, because a)I'm not a biologist and b)I'm pretty sure the mechanisms are only vaguely understood anyway. But still, it is suggestive, no?

The purpose is to set us apart from godless communists. In more recent years it's become bait for people who think maybe it's not appropriate, so they can be called godless communists.

That's exactly it. That's what should happen. His running for president will never result in President Ron Paul, but it already has resulted in a relatively small but highly (though narrowly) informed army of zealots. They will not win their "revolution" (pardon, but thank god) but they are adding a distinctive and tenacious voice to the national discourse. If his ideas hold water (and I believe some of them do) they will eventually and gradually be absorbed into the mainstream, which, despite the rhetoric of every politician ever, actually is the best way for change to occur.

I think there are many people who are glad of Paul's input who still don't think he should really be running things. Being in Congress, where he can have a pulpit and shake things up while still being kept in check by 434 others could be considered a good place for him, while the Presidency might not be.

"Perpetual motion" usually means getting more work out of a system than you put in. Newton's first law just says that if the system isn't doing any work, it will continue in motion indefinitely. This doesn't actually happen in our universe (stupid entropy), but it could. Sort of. "Perpetual motion" taken literally is the limiting case, which can be approached indefinitely close but not reached. "Perpetual motion" in the usual sense is impossible for more reasons, such as that pesky conservation stuff.