Sisyphus

Yes, you can. That was the case for thousands of years.

Oh, I see. "More than one thing could happen" is not the same as "anything at all could happen." It is "determined" that the result be one of a limited set of possible outcomes. Right?

Well, in the sense that "random" means "not determined," then yes. However: There is still statistical determinism. If you flip a coin 1 billion times, you can be very sure that you will get very close to 50% heads and 50% tails, even though every possibility - including 1 billion heads and zero tails - has a finite probability. In this way, the universe could behave "deterministically" most of the time on the macroscopic scale even while being random on the smallest scales. Also, there's always the many worlds interpretation. Some say that whenever a particle could equally well zig or zag, it actually does both and the universe splits in two - one where it zigged and one where it zagged. Any observer would conclude that it is truly random, but it is also deterministic, because whatever can happen does happen.

Wasn't it already shown that humans are not symmetrical in one of your other threads? Plus, I have a top, a bottom, and a middle. OMG everything is thirds!

There is a term for what you're talking about: minimum viable population Also of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_population_size So yes, clearly it can cause problems, but it's premature to write species off entirely just because they are reduced to a very small number of individuals. As you can see in the bottleneck article, there have been some extreme examples of near extinction followed by amazing recoveries, and there's even evidence that humans have gone through bottlenecks several times.

My choices are planned, yes. I consider options, then choose one. So does my chess program. Which option it chooses is contingent upon circumstance. As far as the positive part of your definition goes, I'm not disagreeing with it at all, so I don't know why you keep insisting on it. Choices occur. Intelligent beings plan things - imagine future scenarios and make choices accordingly. In fact, so does my chess program, though in a vastly simpler fashion, that lacks the self-awareness we possess. Still, I'd say it's pretty clearly a choice reduced to a clear deterministic chain of events. It's the negative part - "not deterministic and not random" - that is incoherent, despite your claims that it is "self evident." That's the reason you're insisting the chess program is not making a choice, right? Because it doesn't satisfy that part of your definition of choice? But then you say, reduce choice to determinism or randomness, i.e. show that choice doesn't satisfy your definition of choice. Obviously that is impossible, by the definition you insist on. If I show that something is deterministic, you'll just say it's not a choice then. I'm "unable" to satisfy your request because it's logically impossible. Aside from being an argument from ignorance ("my explanation must be right unless you can prove yours"), that's also begging the question. It is impossible for the argument to go anywhere. So... agree to disagree, then?

And why is this particular hoop the one to be jumped through? The point is that all information is useful information if it's embedded in the genome, inasmuch as any sequence has the potential to be expressed. Entropy increases the total amount of this information. If there were an original "message" being transmitted, then entropy would degrade that message, true, but if you define information in that restricted way, then you're not talking about how evolution functions. Evolution works with what it gets. So yes, the "random" process of mutation does generate increased information. Whether that information is "coherent" is determined by how natural selection acts on the expression of that information, at that point or at some future point after it has spent time being transmitted as so-called "junk DNA."

I don't know what you mean by this. "Conflict?" You mean flow of energy? Increase of entropy? What does this have to do with the golden ratio? I don't know what this means, either. Evolutionary development of numbers?

Every few years or so, there is a coming End of The World that colorfully deranged quacks widely believe will come to pass. As anyone reading this is no doubt already aware, in the past few years there has been a lot of noise about the year 2012, apparently due to the date of the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, though practically every apocolypse has now become associated with it as well. They even made a mainstream disaster movie about it! There has been so much noise, in fact, that it seems on the verge of a Quack Consensus. In fact, I haven't heard any End of the World predictions about any later dates. So, my question is, once 2012 is in the past, when will the next End of the World be? Has anyone heard of any bet hedging (e.g., "if it doesn't happen in 2012, it will surely happen in 2018")? Any unusual celestial events in the following few years? Will there be specific predictions, again, immediately? Or will they be in the vague near future for a while? What will the SFN Speculations section look like in the year 2013?

There is a trend among "creation scientists" to try to cite "information theory" as evidence against evolution. Just a few months ago we had someone here (impersonating a real biologist, who we informed and last we heard was exploring legal options) arguing this at great length. Largely these objections are based on misapplication of theory, shifting definitions of "information" as it applies to biology, and an apparent lack of understanding of how evolution is supposed to work. Do not be fooled by this. Basically, information is added whenever any change occurs. This is different than it would be in the case of trying to transmit a specific signal, in which case any change would represent loss and conversion to "noise." In genetics, however, change is simply change. Simple sequence: ABCD Copying: ABCDABCD Mutation: DEFGHIJK Sequence DEFGHIJK contains more information than sequence ABCD. TalkOrigins has a whole series on this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/infotheory.html

Well there wouldn't be one single reason for it, just like there isn't one single reason that pi or e show up. And like pi or e, in most individual cases the reasons for it can be deduced - it's not as if it's some random number that shows up all over the place by sheer coincidence. Also, a lot of the supposed examples of supposed golden ratios in nature (like mollusk shells) are not that at all, but rather just similar logarithmic progressions with a good deal of variation.

You can divide zero. The answer is just always zero. You just can't divide by zero. 0/2 = 0 2/0 = undefined If you divide zero apples among 2 people, they each get zero apples, obviously. Dividing 2 apples among zero people... isn't a meaningful proposition.

I think that depends on the religion. For example, The Catholic Church, surprisingly, is actually rather open to the idea: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0802629.htm

Hypothetically some, yes, but nobody in reality. News sources with an agenda can get away with all sorts of things by not technically saying anything that is objectively false, even if what is said is obviously misleading. Against what are you judging its accuracy and comprehensiveness? BTW, I might think that FOX is the worst of the bunch, but I think pretty much all TV news is terrible. And no, none of this has any bearing on whether FOX has become the "news of record," which is something I'm still pondering.

I'm not redefining anything. A choice is made. Options are considered, and one is selected. How else can you possibly define choice? You're insisting that it's not a true Scotsman choice because it is deterministic, or because it is random. But you've only offered negative definitions - not this and not that. To make matters worse, in this case "that" just means "not this," and so even the negative definition is logically incoherent. The only "metaphysical belief" I'm expressing is the Law of the Excluded Middle. But if it is not bound by logic, then there's no point in discussing it, is there? Meanwhile, all you've offered in support is that "introspection" tells you you're right.

The universe does not have a speed. As jackson said, the "expansion of space" is not objects moving, but the space in between objects growing. Because this growth is distributed equally throughout the universe, nearby objects recede from us slowly, and farther away objects recede more quickly. If you get far enough away, then objects are receding at even faster than the speed of light. This is true no matter what the "rate" of expansion is - if it were slower, it would just mean the objects moving at faster than the speed of light were farther away. Another thing to mention is that there is no such thing as absolute speed. What I mean by this is that it is meaningless to say that the galaxy is moving at 600km/s or whatever. It only makes sense to say that the galaxy is moving 600km/s relative to some other object. That is measurable. It's like saying your car is going 100km/h. What you really mean is that your car is going 100km/h relative to the road. Relative to the sun, it's moving a whole lot faster. Relative to the person driving, it's not moving at all. And relative to the car, it's the road that is moving 100km/h. All of those statements are true, and the math still works the same way no matter who you decide is moving. This is called the Principle of Relativity.

Light is the only thing you perceive. You see it when it enters your eye and hits your eye. It can get there directly from the source (the sun, light bulbs), or reflected off something else (most things you see). Those two phenomenon are the same. In both cases, you're getting a large number of photons ("particles of light") of different colors all hitting the same places in your eye at once. Your eye has three different kinds of color sensors, each most sensitive to a different range of colors. You distinguish colors based on the proportion of light that each detects. When they're roughly equal, you see that as white. EDIT: I just realized what you probably meant with the colorless until incident upon something comment: different objects can appear to be different colors under the same light source, e.g. the sun. The reason for this is not that light is colorless until it hits something. It is because different objects absorb and reflect different colors of light. So, for example, sunlight is made up of all the colors of visible light, in various quantities. An object that appears red in sunlight would be one that reflects red light, but absorbs the other colors. Thus the only portion of the sunlight that hits your eyes when you look at it is the red light. However, under a light source that doesn't include any red light, it would not look red, because there is no red light for it to reflect. And again, objects that reflect a wide range of colors in roughly equal quantities will appear on the gray scale, from bright white if it reflects all light, to perfectly black if it absorbs all light.

I think that you should ponder this statement some more, and think about what exactly "introspection" is actually telling you. What does that have to do with anything? It is absolutely making choices. It considers different options, evaluates them, and picks one. That's what a choice is. That's what you or I do. Of course there were multiple choices available. The program spent time evaluating them. It is true that, being deterministic, the choice that the program eventually made could have been predicted, given all the relevant data. I agree with the first sentence. That's what I would call "free will:" self-consciousness coupled with the act of choice. The second sentence is still nonsense, though.

Because light travels as a wave, all light has a frequency. Of the light that the eye can see, we interpret this frequency as color. "Red" is light with the lowest frequency that we can see, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, and finally violet with the highest frequency. Therefore, light cannot be colorless, because that would mean it didn't have a frequency. I would describe an object as colorless if it was transparent. There is also no such thing as "white light," really. What we perceive as white is just a mixture of different colors. If red, green, and blue light are all hitting your eyes at once from the same direction, you perceive it as white. A white object like milk is perceived as such because it reflects all the colors of visible light in approximately equal amounts.

That is 2000 times the diameter, yes, and hence 8000000000 times the volume. But only about 20 times the mass.

Wow! So, it would appear as bright as our sun does to us at a distance of about 3150 AU, or about 1/20th of a lightyear. By contrast, the Kuiper Belt, home of frozen dwarf planets like Pluto, is about 30-55 AU from our sun.

The chess program I play against is capable, at any point in the game, of making any legal move. It must explore possible options, and then pick one. Your claim seems equivalent to stating that because there were multiple possible outcomes considered, that the end result was not deterministic. However, I suspect you will agree with me that my chess program is, in fact, entirely deterministic. The difference, then, is not that there are multiple possible choices. It is "introspection." I'm not really sure how to respond to that. Yes, we are aware of multiple possibilities. We consider multiple options, and we don't know which we will eventually choose until we do, else there wouldn't be any need to consider them. So?

Won't it still work some, though, as long as humidity is less than 100%?

No, the longer strap will not make the bag heavier. The downward force of it just hanging there will be identical. Moment of force, i.e. torque, comes into play with "twisting." In the bag example, because it isn't rigid, it always hangs straight down, in the direction of force. You would only get a torque if there were an orthogonal ("sideways") component. So, for example, if he bag was on the end of a rigid stick held out horizontally, it would be exerting more torque if the stick were longer, and it will be more difficult to keep it horizontal. The force here is applied downwards (by gravity), perpendicular to the stick.

But that's just it. They believe in different supernatural beings.