Sisyphus

Israel is hated because it's perceived as an occupying nation that has no right to be there. The United States is hated because it supports Israel, and generally meddles in the Islamic world. If they have other reasons I'm not aware of them. mooeypoo, you posted as I was typing. I don't think you're completely right about that. I don't think it's really about democracy at all. Even Iran is, after all, at least nominally democratic, and Hamas is an elected government. Not that we should take anything Osama Bin Laden says at face value, but in his last video he did have a point: "You say we attack you because we hate your freedom, but if that was true, then why do we not attack, say, Sweden?"

Well, what kind of dietary changes did you have, then? I'd love to try it. (Though I can't imagine how changing my diet will change the shape of my cornea...)

That is, unless they love their children so much they want them to die gloriously defending God...

Why, energy from synthesis, of course! Otherwise known as fusion power...

I guess, but it does seem like there's a distinct and identifiable sort which lends itself to crackpottery, which is why I asked about it in the first place. I've been wrong lots of times, I've had crazy theories about stuff, and I've been just plain misinformed, as well. But when the truth comes to light I can generally see why I was wrong, admit as much, and change my views. The crackpot, on the other hand, just seems to get more insistent the more people point out flaws in his reasoning. They often accuse the whole scientific establishment of vast conspiracies, and that kind of thing. It's all very paranoid and obsessive. I was just wondering if "crackpottery" had any special characteristics beyond your typical paranoid obsessive.

I kind of doubt that, just because I know so many people (myself included) whose eyes are naturally poor enough that we wouldn't be much better than blind without assistance. Of course, you might be right inasmuch as maybe our naturally poor eyes were made worse by lots of reading and other uncommon activities from centuries ago, but that seems rather weak. Silkworm, I'm guessing your eyes weren't that bad to begin with. I don't think you can really deny that it's mostly genetic, can you?

Good question, and I would add, what's the advantage of few, large leaves vs. lots of small leaves or compound leaves. I'm guessing it's related to climate, but I don't really know. I'll also put forward the guess that, as far as the serrated edge thing goes, there really is no advantage one way or the other, and that it's just the remnant of separate but more or less parallel evolution. OR maybe serrated edges are in the midst of evolving from compound leaves, OR they were compound, but only evolved to the point where there's no advantage either way.

Jim, I think that "Europe will be Islamic" logic is flawed. It depends on "present trends," but they are just that - present. What seems more relevant is that new immigrants tend to have more children, and old generation families have less. This is true all over the world. But the thing about time is that new becomes old. Looking only at 1840s America, for example, you could have said that "if current trends continue, America will be 80% Irish by the end of the century." Contrary to what one might think on St. Patrick's Day, that wasn't the case.

Poor eyesight is largely genetic, too, isn't it? The invention of eyeglasses has made it nearly irrelevant, though, and so now it's far more common.

Apparently we haven't yet grasped the difference between wrong and crackpot.

I just hope it was Al Qaeda and not more isolated British Muslim radicals.

Thank god. I thought I was the only sane one.

You don't have shades on your windows?

Ok, for the last time: I'm not talking about new ideas, I'm talking about crazy ideas. From the guy who thinks the reason nobody understands what he's talking about is that they're not wearing the right anti-mindcontrol helmet.

Questions: Is there anything more than anecdotal evidence for this sort of thing? Has there been any speculation about how such a phenomenon might work? What about it makes it "emotional" intelligence?

Why is lack of privacy inevitable, and why is it a good thing? I'm afraid I don't really follow you two.

So I was looking through the pseudoscience and speculations sections, and I found myself newly amazed by the number and depth of crackpot theories. They wildly twist mathematics, science, and the english language into incomprensibility and absurdity, yet I'm convinced they're not jokes, just because there was clearly so much time spent on them. They often show familiarity (if not correct understanding) with highly esoteric subjects, and are often accompanied by "calculations" which must have taken hours if not days. So I guess my question is, is there a name for this kind of behavior? What causes someone to do all this?

Unless most intelligent species kill themselves off. Or are, for some reason, inherently incapable of space travel. Or they never saw any reason to bother with our planet. Those are three good reasons they might not have visited, and if intelligent life is exceptionally rare, that might explain it nicely.

American horned lizards can also shoot aimed, poisonous blood from their eyes a few feet. It's a defense mechanism. At least those are reptiles, even if it's a far cry from fire-breathing...

I'm inclined to think that the universe is big enough that everything happens somewhere as soon as it's possible to do so. There were almost certainly planets around earlier stars, and I don't see why some of them couldn't have life, and, once life, intelligent life in a much shorter timespan than it took our planet. Intelligent life has got to be very uncommon among life, but I don't see why it would necessarily take 2 billion years. Certainly there was life as complex as ourselves in far, far less than that after the Cambrian explosion on Earth, and a similar explosion could happen at any time on some other planet as long as the conditions are right. Our star's lifespan will likely be about 10 billion years, which is actually quite long for a star, in general. We've got enough fuel to last a long time, but not to burn too fast. And, unlike most stars, we're in a relatively sparse area, where stars don't heat each other up too much. And I'll echo the tree. That seems fast to you?

Not really. You mean what is the probability that the vowels will be in the 2nd, 4th and 6th positions? If so, just do what needs to happen one letter at a time. The first letter has to be a consonant. Probability 4/7. The next letter has to be a vowel, and you have 3 of each left. Hence, probability 3/6 (or simplified to 1/2), assuming the first letter is already in place. Third letter consonant, of which 3 of your remaining 5 letters are. Probability is 3/5. Then 2/4 (or 1/2), 2/3, 1/2, and finally 1/1, since it's your last letter and there's no other option. Then just multiply each probability together for the probability of all them happening. 4/7 * 1/2 * 3/5 * 1/2 * 2/3 * 1/2 *1/1 = 24/840, which simplifies to 1/35. That's your answer.

I don't see how you could separate one dimension for another, or what it would even mean for a law to apply in one and not another. We are talking about "dimension" in the sense of spatial/time dimensions, right? And not some stupid "alternate universe" kind of a thing?

Aye. The Oort cloud is just whatever random junk is too far away from the sun to be part of the regular, elliptical orbits (of which the Kuiper belt is the farthest extent), but close enough that every once in a while something takes a few hundred million year-long dive. It probably has a radius about a thousand times that of the kuiper belt (or a billion times the volume ), or about a full lightyear.