Sisyphus

Alright, so no useful conclusions. So Hitler is irrelevant to the topic.

Humans are apes. We're in the same family as chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. human classification: Order: primates suborder: Haplorhinni infraorder: Simiiformes (the "simians") parvorder: Catarrhini superfamily: Hominoidea (the "apes") family: Hominidae (the "great apes") subfamily: Homininae (humans, gorillas, and chimps) tribe: Hominini (humans and chimps) genus: homo (humans, and some extinct relatives) species: sapiens (just us!)

And how do you know without observing them all? You'd need general rules for determining phase under different conditions. That would be more feasible and useful than a comprehensive list, which would have to be ridiculously long. In other words: I agree.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WK7-45R8860-S5&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F29%2F1999&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1300833879&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=e4a7bbc9630c6d544c058c2c2b34e55c Apparently they're "surface-molten solids," for the most part.

A lot more than millions. There are about 20^50000 possible proteins alone. Though I suppose it all depends on what you mean by "naturally occuring."

So, suppose you somehow establish that Adolf Hitler was an atheist using religion. What conclusions do you suppose could be drawn from that?

I know that I'm biased, but I still think that humans are the most intelligent primates, insofar as comparing species' intelligence is meaningful.

So, "what atheism offers" is being Godwinned?

But ending any association with international terrorism could justifiably be NATO's sole condition for "peace talks." What else would "peace talks" mean? If they want to live under Islamic law, there's not really any means or reason to stop them. The Saudis do, and they're our most loyal ally. Plus it's not clear what "establish Islamic law" means when they also claim they have no interest in running the country.

The rationale for the war in Afghanistan was not to build a liberal democracy, it was to destroy a support structure for international terrorism, especially Al Qaeda. Of course, the rationale for the war in Iraq was to prevent Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction, so...

Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh are both demagogues, but entirely different kinds. Pat Robertson probably actually believes stuff like god erupting a volcano to prove him right, as do most of his fans. Rush almost certainly doesn't. He might see people believing that as an added bonus, but I don't think that's the main goal. He is a troll, trying to get a reaction. The mentality is really remarkably similar. Making people mad = "winning the argument."

It would be even easier to do neither. But that's hardly the point, is it? You don't go to Mars because you need somewhere to live. You go to Mars to study it, to move "all our eggs out of one basket," etc.

In my mind, the biggest benefit of anonymity is democratic. i.e., because you don't know who you're talking to or anything about them (at least at first), you're forced to treat everyone the same. Young or old, male or female, gorgeous or troglodyte, all prejudices are bypassed, and all you have to go on is what they say. And yes, we all do treat people differently based on stuff like that, consciously or not. That said, I feel like I know many regular members quite well, despite not knowing their names, what they look like, or very much if anything about their biographies. What I know is how they think, and I like that. A secondary benefit of relative anonymity is, ironically, that people can feel more free to be open. If you don't care if anyone at all can see what you say on SFN, more power to you, but for most of us it's just an unnecessary liability. I personally don't have anything in particular to hide, and I haven't gone to great lengths to conceal my identity, and I'm sure I've given enough personal details that any determined person could find me easily enough. But what's the point in broadcasting it? So for the record, I am not, in fact, the mythological trickster/proverbial symbol of pointless labor Sisyphus, nor a mischievous looking cartoon robot devil. I think it's strange that anyone would read too much into usernames or avatars. I certainly don't. If it really matters, my real first name is Matt.

All functions of government - or any organization at all - are directing collective resources that presumably otherwise would be used individually, presumably in different ways since not everyone is going to have identical priorities. You want to hire a prostitute? Well, you'll have to fund that with whatever is left over from paying for the roads and the coast guard. Who's to say what's a bare necessity, what's a mild need?

How do you figure?

Ha. I highly doubt as many as 12% regularly read the agreements, so I figure it was probably word of mouth spreading the news.

I don't think that's technically accurate. The coral that require light aren't undergoing photosynthesis themselves, but contain algae that do. They then live off the algae. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if it's undergoing photosynthesis, it's not an "animal," by definition. There are, however, some motile autotrophs, and some organisms that get energy from both photosynthesis and ingesting organic matter, like carniverous plants, and some algaes.

The number of death threats against Obama is 400% higher than the number Bush had: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html Just sayin'.

I read Consumer Reports and several consumer-oriented blogs, and I take their advice seriously. I always do research from several different sources before I make any significant purchase or subscribe to any service. All of this takes time, persistence, and savvy to sort out the good information from the misinformed, the astroturfed, and the bribed. All of that said, I have no idea what any of the many, many EULA I've "agreed to" actually say. As far as I can tell, nobody does. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have endless time. So while in Ideal Free Market Land, yeah, I agree to a contract, and it's my own fault if I don't like the terms, and if the other guy violates it I can bring grievance against their army of lawyers and get my money back. But how realistic is that, really? All the power and all the knowledge is on one side of the equation. And even if it wasn't, and I knew exactly how they were screwing me, what could I do? The percentage of extremely well-informed consumers is small enough that a cable company isn't going to care about pissing them off. And necessarily so - even if there wasn't general apathy, nobody can be an expert on everything, so even an extremely concerned consumer base is going to be largely ignorant about most of the things they consume. Perfect information not only doesn't exist, but it's not even close to existing.

I know what the word means. I just don't understand what harnessing a dimension would mean. They're not synonyms. A theory is a predictive model. "This is what we will observe." An interpretation is an explanation of a model. "This is why we observe what we do." A theory can have multiple interpretations, or none. They're really not, though. It's like saying Mars is a split off timeline of Earth. If you want to make the comparison in the religion forum, go right ahead.

I had jury duty the other day. One woman in my group seemed to think jury duty was some new infringement on her rights, and bitterly complained about how "America is changing." Bottom line: a lot of people seem to think there are crazy changes afoot, but have wildly inaccurate notions of what those actually entail. I don't really have any explanation for it that doesn't sound really elitist.

I think you should read the Old Testament again. Israelites and outsiders, men and women, levites and others, masters and slaves, rulers and subjects. Different rules. But again, why limit to shared "communal" moral codes? Everyone ultimately decides for themselves, so there really isn't any such thing as a morality that isn't self-determined. It's just copied or not. Moral relativism is not deciding for yourself (which everybody does), but in not thinking that your own decision is objectively, externally correct. And you can certainly think you're objectively correct without having anyone else who feels similar to you.

Why can't I choose to believe in an absolute morality that makes it morally correct for me to behave one way and others to behave another way?

I don't understand this part. What does morality being relative have to do with hypocrisy? If there's an inconsistency, that's hypocrisy. If there isn't, there isn't. What difference would it make whether or not one believes there is an objective external truth in morality?

And what do you mean by "harness?" "Interpretation," not "theory." And many-worlds is different from brane theory. And it's not that there is a special 11th dimension, but that certain hypotheses have 11, total. It was the introduction of the 11th dimension that enabled Lisa Randall of Harvard University to provide an explanation for the weakness of gravity, but only by introducing a parallel universe. I don't know a lot a lot about string theory, but I'm pretty certain that's not accurate. Not a "parallel universe" in the sense of many-worlds interpretation, but a different brane, separated in a higher dimensional "bulk." The many world's interpretation is not crackpot, as part of the whole idea is that it's fundamentally unprovable. Aristotlean physics is demonstrably false.