Sisyphus

needimprovement, do you watch the video in post #12? *That I personally cannot explain something does not mean that it can't be explained. *That something that cannot be explained does not mean your explanation is correct - in fact that's a contradiction. *The "something to be explained" is not the phenomenon described, but the fact that it is described. The question you should be asking is not, how did their clothes dry instantly, but rather, why did some of the witnesses later claim that their clothes dried instantly. (I can't explain that either, but it's not my responsibility to. I can speculate, though.)

It's not just their opinions - apparently the mundane details of their lives are fascinating to a large enough number of people to make it profitable to endlessly follow them around taking pictures.

Well obviously any breed of dog could be dangerous, but in my experience (I've known probably over a dozen labs), I've never heard of any being actually aggressive towards humans (or even other dogs, for that matter). They are absurdly friendly. But yes, they are sometimes hyper, and they can destroy stuff, and when they're excited they're not really aware of their strength. They're very playful and sometimes try to play with humans the same way they play with dogs, and that can involve jumping up and mouthing (sort of but not really biting). The story of chewing on the drugged woman's face is not surprising, honestly, but I would be extremely surprised if that was aggressive, and not just worriedly trying to wake her up.

I suspect you think that because the only sources you are getting your information from have cherry picked quotes to make him look bad. Does it surprise you that he's written books praising American society? That he he argues for secular government, freedom of religion, and equal treatment of women? I don't suppose Rush Limbaugh mentioned any of that, did he? Or is everything you know about him that he has been critical of American foreign policy several times? I'm not being critical of you, BTW, I'm being critical of the conservative pundits who are, essentially, grossly misleading people about the actual situation, to the great detriment of the real war on terror, all so they can have a cause to rile people up about. It's NYC politics and national politics. Getting everybody to agree has been difficult. Whole project seems to be cursed.

I'm not even sure how to begin answering that question. Is the German deli that opened around the corner a celebration of the Holocaust? Would it be if it were in the town of Auschwitz? Let's try to have a little perspective. Why not? Positive Islamic culture triumphing over the scars of hate, in the most multicultural city in the world. A great symbol of why America is better than those who sought to attack it. A symbol that they were not, in fact, acting on behalf of their religion, because Muslims are Americans too. Sounds good to me. Except that: Why not? It's two blocks away. There's another one four blocks away. There are half a dozen churches, several strip clubs, betting parlors, and hundreds of other establishments and offices within the same radius. Nobody cared until demagogues started lying about it for ratings, and they're going to look very foolish when this nonsense calms down. Yes, they do. Indeed!

What a ridiculous thing to think is obvious.

Care to expand on that?

It's because you are standing upright, so that the "down" of your field of vision is always perpendicular to the plane of the rim of the cup. With a clock on the wall, your down is at some other angle unless you're standing directly in front of it. Tilt your head, and the situation changes.

No, it isn't an explanation. It's a tool, and an imprecise one. That we currently don't have to capability to fully explain something as complex as your thoughts about music, does not make it an unscientific question. If you could fully map out neurological processes, there would not be any thoughts that could not be scientifically studied. Do not confuse "unanswered" with "unanswerable." Never say never. See above. Yes and no. As I said above, questions with no observable consequences are outside the realm of science, and "interpretations" are indeed non-scientific (though philosophical) questions, albeit questions that require a degree of knowledge to even understand that generally only scientists in related fields possess. However, just because aspects are not yet understood, does not mean they have no observable consequences. For example, Bell's Inequality falsified the hypothesis of local hidden variables, when many had assumed it was an untestable proposition. And he was wrong. But even if he wasn't, what makes consciousness unstudyable? Even an immaterial soul or whatever can be studied, because it has observable consequences in the world. Counterintuitive /= outside the realm of science unknown /= outside the realm of science Do not fall into the common trap of thinking that because quantum mechanics seems weird to us, the door is open to mystical/supernatural stuff. It is not qualitatively different than the question of how sharks breed.

When I state things as fact, what I mean is that the only viable models of how the universe works that we currently have predict those things. Of course there's no absolute knowledge. Our knowledge is very much incomplete, and subject to change. I've got more than just doubt - I'm sure we don't have it quite right yet. However, it's the best we've got, and it is more than just idle speculation - it makes accurate predictions, over and over. And nobody has come up with anything else that does. Hence, it's what we work with. And I don't want to be your adversary, either.

Science is limited to questions that have answers with observable consequences. For example, whether the "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics is true is not a scientific question, because it has no observable consequences. However, several of the examples needimprovement gives are in fact, scientific questions, if poorly posed ones. For example, why is music A better than music B? That question has unstated and flawed premises. What we actually experience is not music A being better than music B, but preferring music A to music B. Why you prefer A to B is very much a scientific question. And certainly "where does reason come from" is a scientific question. Also: The only difference in how an atheist would deal with such things, is that "because it says so in this particular book" would not be considered a valid answer.

Yes, I do require arguments not to be logically fallacious, if that's what you mean by within the parameters of philosophy. No, it does not allow for a wider interpretation of evidence. It demands a very specific, narrow interpretation of "evidence." It demands that you be incurious about possibilities that do not fit what you've already decided is true. Correct. No quantity of invalid evidence counts as valid evidence. In post #14, John Cuthber linked to a list of 666 "proofs" of the existence of god. They're all invalid, so it wouldn't make any difference if there were 666 million. No. I'm requiring that if someone is asking me to believe what they believe, that they make some reasonable argument that it is true. Not at all. But if you're going to call something evidence, let alone proof, it has to at least be rational. It's fine if you decide to believe something, but you can't possibly expect others to for the same reasons. False dichotomy. I don't know everything, and what most people mean by "god" almost certainly does not exist. Saying "it may well exist" implies a reasonable probability.

At first glance, the pyramids of Giza seem like a spectacular waste of resources. Decades passed, the wealth of a mighty empire, perhaps hundreds of millions of man hours of back breaking labor, and all the ingenuity and education the world then had to offer, all for some tombstones. But then again, they're still there, 5000 years later, still the most massive buildings in the world, attracting throngs of tourists and reminding the entire world of the might of the pharaohs. Everybody knows about the ancient Egyptians. Relatively how many know or care about, say, the Phoenicians? Obviously they weren't worth it within the lifetimes of those who built it. But for their descendants, I'm thinking they might actually have been good investments, in spite of themselves.

forufes, the sailboat does move faster than windspeed, so obviously your reasoning is wrong. The sail does act like an airfoil, as there is a difference between the convex side and the concave side in terms of air path and pressure. And as a Newtonian description, it is as simple as altering the course of a mass of air more rearwards, and conserving momentum by moving forwards. There is no reason the boat cannot move faster than windspeed, as it's simply a matter of transferring more momentum, and the wind has more relative momentum the faster the boat is traveling upwind.

Light is not really made up of red, green, and blue light. It is made up of all wavelengths. How we perceive color is the ratio of how stimulated our red, blue, and green color receptors are. There is such thing as yellow light, and that is not the same as a combination of red and green light. We just can't tell the difference, because of how our eyes work. Hence a computer display can trick your eyes into "seeing" all visible colors when it's really only capable of producing red, green, and blue.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. We do observe entropy always increasing in every system. So I guess there's no ruler? Who? One person becoming a Christian is proof that God exists? What about people who stop being Christians? Is that proof the God does not exist?

Perhaps you're right. We're not in Afghanistan because terrorists deserve to die (though I'm not saying they don't). We're in Afghanistan to stop terrorism, and that's a public relations war much more than a military war. So I guess, analogously, the "war" to prevent a culture war in the U.S. is also a public relations war. The people opposing this might deserve to be called idiots and worse, but I guess that isn't productive. I'll try to calmly explain to anyone who will listen. On the other hand, perception is important, and that is the point. If we're willing to prevent - or even loudly complain - about a mosque near ground zero, that sends a terrible message both in our country and abroad. If we're not, that sends a powerful message highlighting what's really great about America, and America which is part Muslim and promotes liberty and tolerance, and makes Al Qaeda look ridiculous. Well, naturally they'll try to spin it whatever happens. It's not whether they spin it, but how effective the spin will be in each circumstance. Perhaps they'll try to spin it to make us look "weak." But is that worse than being a country that is hostile to Muslims? Highlight that we are not only not hostile to Islam, but that there are Muslim Americans, too. Some of them died on 9/11, too. And they're there, in New York, 2 blocks from Al Qaeda's monument to hate, being New Yorkers. I have to believe that is good for public relations, too. While you're tossing that out, don't forget to add that there is already a mosque four blocks from ground zero that nobody seems to care about, as well as about ten nearby churches of various denominations. It's downtown Manhattan: there's lots of stuff around.

The idea is to just not be imperialist. Not wage a war against Islamic culture, as conservatives in both the United States and the Islamic world would like, but against terrorism. Our side, if we want to be the good guys, promotes liberty and tolerance. And, guess what, those Muslims in New York are also my countrymen. Well, again, Islam is not the enemy. What would be weak would be letting Al Qaeda make us like them. America's strength is its openness. We can be the "bigger person," because we are strong. By persecuting Muslims specifically, we prove them right. We "let the terrorists win." They're not trying to plant a flag, they're trying to maintain a conflict. But they're not right. They're not fighting for Islam, because Muslims are Americans too, whether Osama Bin Laden and Glenn Beck like it or not. There will be a monument at ground zero. It's worth noting that this Islamic center is in fact not at ground zero at all, but two blocks away. Personally I think a metaphorically outstretched hand would be the best possible monument, if it's actually going to mean something. (In fact, that's essentially what the Statue of Liberty is.) But that's irrelevant, because we're not even talking about ground zero.

The difference is that the people who are up in arms haven't been told about that one. Or, I assume, the several strip clubs within the same "hallowed" radius. (Facts are clearly of little importance to this cause.) While the demagogues of the right are furiously trying to let the terrorists win, New York (aka "fake America") has long since ruled that out. Yeah, I guess it's obvious that this really pisses me off...

I don't see why that's necessary. It will be built, Glenn Beck will cry and call a lot of people bad names, and then Fox will find some other trumped up issue to pander to people's worst natures with. Why does anything need to be done at all?

It is completely ridiculous and disgusting on many levels that people are even having this argument. Let the Fox News audience act like the Taliban if they want. I'm going to act like an American.

All the major religions claim proven miracles. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. Therefore they must all be true, right? It's the only possible explanation! Several religious people I've talked with have said they find the idea of "proof" of religious truth to be laughable, and contrary to whole idea of faith. Faith is when you decide to believe something is true. But then, I guess there are many different interpretations.

Well it couldn't be that commonplace, because the number of people who need kidney transplants is far less than the total population. Demand for human kidneys as functioning organs (so, I'm ignoring the possibility that they will become a culinary delicacy or something) is constant and low - it just happens that supply is currently even lower. Make the market legal, supply will skyrocket, prices will plummet, and then supply will stabilize too. I think it's safe to say that kidney sellers will be limited almost entirely to people in bad financial situations, and be rarer even than, say, surrogate mothers are now. Plus, I suspect that organ transplants will eventually be largely replaced by artificial organs, anyway.

I've sailed on iceboats also. They're lots of fun. And yet it seems you can!