Sisyphus

Some people just love their ottomans.

Indeed, Rushdie is one of the most respected living authors, irregardless of politics. Midnight's Children won the "Booker Prize of Booker Prizes," for the best book to win the prize in the first 25 years of prizes (1969-1993). If rock stars get to be knights, he certainly should.

I still like Harry Truman's answer from Futurama: "If you come in peace, surrender or be destroyed! If you're here to make war, we surrender!"

Oh, well, as long as we're going there: About Ayn Rand. My experience is actually pretty similar to what bascule described. I also read Atlas Shrugged around age 15. Even then I knew it had no more literary value than a cheap thriller. I did think it was really insightful and amazing philosophy, though, and I have changed my mind greatly since then. Not that I think she's wrong about everything, per se; We disagree profoundly on several important fronts, but the majority of it is pretty common sense. What she's guilty of is oversimplification and irresponsible use of melodrama and some of the most intense strawmanning out there. She also tends to not leave any middle ground (you're with me or you're evil and an idiot), which is why people who are into her get really into her, and those people are just annoying. And they tend to preach. And they're selfish and proud of it and still somehow manage to develop martyr complexes. Annoying. It's often said that reading Ayn Rand turns everyone into an asshole for about three months, except for the people who are naturally assholes, who take it as divine license to be an asshole for life. Well, anyhoo...

Or if you look at it another way, it makes their existence less explained. The classic example is taking the works of Shakespeare back in time to young Will before he wrote any of them. He then publishes them over the years without ever having to lift a pen. But then, if he didn't write them, then who the hell did?

It's been generally assumed there is a smallest size to objects for a long time (hence "atoms" and "quantum" physics). Pretty much since we saw that "things" in general are not continuous, but made up of more or less uniform building blocks. As it turns out, those building blocks are themselves made up of smaller building blocks, and those even smaller, etc. We're not sure if we've reached the "bottom" yet, but it may well be the case that even if the smallest blocks we can see are made up of smaller ones, we have no theoretical way of detecting them or separating them, so it's a purely speculative and inconsequential matter (no pun intended). This doesn't have anything to do with mathematics, though - it's all empirical. As far as pure geometry is concerned, "infinitely" large and small have the same amount of validity.

I thought people voted on the song on her website. If that's the case, then it's not so much a calculated move towards a certain demographic as evidence of the bad taste of her core supporters.

You'll get over it.

Actually, it doesn't. Observation from any point confirms cosmic expansion always away from that point. This is only possible if the universe does NOT have the kind of simple 3D geometry that you would need to have a "center" like the kind you're thinking of.

See, that doesn't sound plausible to me at all, given the fact that I live and have always lived in the NE and see nothing but harsher and harsher sentences for these people, and even, as lucaspa mentions, unprecedented punishment, wherein there is no longer any such thing as "serving one's debt to society." Sex offenders of all kinds are permanent pariahs, and the ones who are institutionalized as insane are pretty much the lucky ones. Anyway, at best what you're describing is a weird anomaly. What I think is more likely, though, is that you're describing a vague recollection of something which was probably sensationalized and misleading "journalism" to begin with. I've seen similarly incredible stories, myself, which provoked outrage (as they were designed to) until I investigated further and learned to distrust those particular news sources.

Says you. But many comedians believe the pre-joke audience exists as both a good and a bad audience, until interaction with a joke forces the probability function to collapse into one or the other.

:::jabs with pitchfork:::

The center of the sphere is not part of the surface. That example is a two-dimensional (i.e. surfaces) analogy for a three-dimensional universe. You have to use an analogy because our brains aren't set up to visualize that kind of thing. Mathematically, however, it is completely possible. Yes, except where it's used here, where it seems to just mean an unexplained uniform curvature.

Troooooooool! :::Grabs pitchfork:::

Not even the French understand French politics...

Again, nitpicking, but those aren't the same thing. A coma is a state of unconsciousness in which the brain functions, but the body does not respond to stimuli or wake up. In a persistent vegetative state, the person can be "awake" but not aware of anything, and there is no higher brain function.

You've obviously never been to New York.

This is kind of tangential, but it should be noted that biologically speaking, some "pedophilia" as defined by the courts is completely natural. Puberty is just sexual maturity. Humans are at their most fertile during their mid-teenage years, and so evolution makes them the most lustful and attractive to one another (and the rest of us) during those years. And up until very recently, historically speaking, age 14 or so was pretty much the universally accepted appropriate age for marriage (especially for girls). Now, don't get me wrong. I think it's definitely a positive thing that society's definition of "childhood" has been extended, because physical maturity does not mean one is intellectually or emotionally ready to be an adult. But distinctions should be made between that kind of "pedophilia," which is only a matter of poor self-control and lack of complete societal conditioning, and pedophilia for pre-pubescents, which I think is rightly considered a mental disease (which is also rightly not considered an excuse - attraction is one thing, acting on it is another). ANYWAY.....

There is evidence to suggest that we cannot, depending on how you interpret the incompletness theorems.

Wikipedia isn't really clear, but it seems like "actual" death is when the brain is not just stopped but incapable of starting again (which normally happens within a few minutes of the former, due to rapid brain damage).

Why would they come to me? Surely they would publish such a thing without government intervention. And if they did come to me, surely what I do about it would depend in what that evidence consists in, no?

Lessons of this thread: "Infinity" can mean several different things, depending on context. Most of the time, "negative infinity" is just as meaningful as "infinity." Sometimes it isn't. Some things to toss around in your head for a while: How many even numbers are there? Now, how many integers are there? Twice as many, right? Since every even number is also an integer, and to every even number you can just add one and get an integer that is not an even number? But wait. Look at your list of integers and double every one. Now look at your list of answers: the even numbers, one for each integer, and no repeats! Now it looks like there is the same number of integers and of even numbers, because you can match them up, one to one. How can that be? Well, that's one of the reasons we say that infinity is not a number. We can't have numbers be both equal to themselves and not equal to themselves. That's why we say that infinity does not equal infinity. It also does not NOT equal infinity, because "equal" is something which just doesn't apply to the concept of infinity. BTW, there are different "kinds" of infinity. The two "infinities" that I used, the set of integers and the set of even numbers, are considered the same kind because you can match them up one to one (you can also do this with all rational numbers). However, there are "infinities" which you can't do that with. You can't do it with irrational numbers, for example. You can give a different irrational number for each rational number, but you can't do it the other way around, and so the set of irrationals is a "higher" infinity than the set of rationals. There are, actually, an infinite number of different kinds of infinities, each "more" infinite than the last. If that doesn't freak you out, you're probably doing something wrong...

I'd just like to point out that Snail totally lifted my argument from the other thread. So basically, I agree. I don't mind restricting "obscenities," because I like them. Not cursing at all is missing the point; I'm in favor of only cursing well. It should be something you get in a little trouble for, because that shows you mean it.... Also, if it's true that vulgarity is hardwired into the brain (and I believe that it is), then there will always be "dirty" words, no matter what. Normalizing current obscenities will just force society to spawn new ones. It's not some vague authority figure decreeing some words are "bad," it's all of us, and we're going to keep doing it. Why else would every language on Earth have its own taboo words (and they do)?

But that's just it. You "feel" a connection. And there's a good reason for that - that traditionally conceived "free will" (sometimes called "absolute metaphysical free will") really has no place in a universe governed by unwavering physical laws has been a very uncomfortable subject since the beginning of modernism. When all of a sudden we start encountering stuff like QM that seems to violate the clockwork-like causality we're used to, we WANT that to be the "way out" of our discomfort. But there's just no evidence for it. No evidence the brain operates on the quantum level, no evidence QM behaves differently in the presence of consciousness. Not only that, but even if it did, it wouldn't solve the problem - our actions could be random, sure, but that's not really what we want it to be, since random is hardly "free." (Personally, I happen to believe that free will is not mutually exclusive with either a deterministic or a random universe, but that is a philosophical camp, not a scientific one, and it involves a slightly different conception of "free will" than most people have or think they have.) What I was trying to say above is that the connection is a tempting but false one, based on misunderstandings from purely superficial commonalities and clouded judgment from a desire to think of ourselves in a certain way, i.e. from our VANITY. Scientists themselves are hardly immune from this - to the contrary, their high intelligence and the groundbreaking territory of their work often spawns the misplaced confidence to make metaphysical statements they know nothing about. In fact, usually the supposed connection is little more than an argument from incredulity, the same fallacy as the "god of the gaps," wherein the nature of something we want to exist (in this case, free will) is said to lie in something we don't understand (in this case, QM), merely because we do not understand it, and cannot prove it otherwise.

Running short on time now, but one question for Haezed. You said: "It wont' be impossible once you reduce the flow to a trickle after the jobs dry up. How hard is that to understand?" Apparently pretty hard. Cracking down on employers I'm all for, since I agree it will help remove the incentive for illegal immigration, which is definitely where our efforts should be focused. But what does that have to do with getting rid of the millions who are already here?