Sisyphus

Or just change the rules as needed to keep us baffled. Every time we almost get it figured out, He makes it more complicated (and erases the evidence that it was ever less complicated). Quantum mechanics could be a particularly spiteful example of this.

The entity I'm referring to is not an egg OR a sperm, but an egg AND a sperm. So yes, it stands alone.

If that's true, then you couldn't simulate our universe within our universe. However, you could simulate a universe. And you could simulate this one, in a larger one.

Would the programmer of a universe simulator fall into this category? Not literally omnipotent, but able to exert more influence on and have more knowledge of the universe (the simulated universe, that is, not the one the programmer lives in) then any being living in that simulation possibly ever could.

A sperm and egg cell absolutely do meet those criteria. They reproduce by merging into a zygote, then dividing and growing for a decade or so. They, like the zygote, are just two stages in the same process. And DNA testing on one of my skin cells would also show it to be human, so I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

Yes, it is living matter at the moment of conception. And the moment before conception, too. Sperm and eggs are living cells, too. To avoid being too much of a pain, I'll just come right out and say that I think that life is simply a continuous process, that an individual life is a manmade distinction whose characteristics gradually emerge, and that any single cutoff point is necessarily going to be arbitrary. Also, this isn't informed by any particular religion, because I don't have one, although some would probably disagree using broader definitions of "religion."

And why is that?

They would just argue that that fern's genome isn't information, by arbitrary proclamation.

Given the presumed premise that causing someone pain normally is immoral, then yes, I would say so. It's not the fact that the memory of abuse lasts a long time that makes it immoral. If it was, then it would never be immoral, because we all forget everything eventually, when we're dead.

I think this is contradictory, given the laws as we understand them. Or maybe I'm just not understanding the god you're proposing.

Speaking for myself, I didn't bother to check the math because even if it was correct, there wouldn't be anything to say about it. If the math had led to an interesting conclusion or was the basis for an actual question, I probably would have checked it.

Is there more to that thought?

The various questions all pretty much devolve into tautological reasoning. "God" is defined as "omnibenevolent," so you can't demonstrate it otherwise. If you look at God's actions and see maliciousness, then that just means what you consider malicious is actually supremely benevolent, by definition. So sure, it is right for God to needlessly torment Job, because that's what God did. And yes, that is circular reasoning, but only if you're trying to demonstrate benevolence by actions. But that's pointless, because the benevolence is a fundamental premise.

Information theory is not a sham. It just happens to be one of the more recent talking points of creationists, who use discredited ideas in information theory and misapply them to genetics, to make it seem legitimate and intimidatingly technical. If, like I did, you actually parse what is being said and take the time to research the references, you'll see that it's all just bullshit circular logic. Still, any mention of "information theory," especially in biology, should be a red flag from now on.

That doesn't make any sense. That's like saying I'm pretending to be a chicken because I want the eggs. If evolution was "fake," then why would he think eugenics would work?

I assume he meant geometric mean rather than median.

I'm just curious where a south Floridian is going to evacuate to. Pangloss? Have any tsunami contingency plans? A boat in the driveway, maybe?

Actually, no, it wouldn't. Exactly half and half is far, far more probable than all one way or all the other. If you expand that to "approximately half and half," it becomes extremely likely, and more and more so the more entities you add. Coin flips are probably a simpler example. No matter how many times you flip, there are always only two ways for "order" (all heads or all tails), but the total number of possibilities doubles with each additional flip, so order becomes less and less likely. And half and half is always the single most probable outcome, with probability of heads vs. tails ratios looking like a bell curve, that gets steeper and steeper the more coins you flip. (There are vastly more ways to get 51-49 than 99-1, etc.) A precise even distribution like that would also be extremely unlikely, yes. However, again, the vast majority of "messy" configurations are approximately evenly distributed, and become more so the bigger the checkerboard you have.

The meaning of "see" gets kind of fuzzy down there, though. If you "see" the atom, you are seeing the shape of the electron cloud, so aren't you seeing the electrons? Really, aren't photons the only things you actually "see?" So the "smallest thing you can see" is just a photon of violet light, it being the shortest wavelength the human eye can detect. (And the biggest would just be photon of red light.) But are we limited to human eyes? I guess not, since you certainly can't see individual carbon atoms with the naked eye.

You have a Newtonian force in gravity. Unless the entire universe is precisely uniform and balanced, gravity will get things moving. And a big cloud of dispersed matter can build up a whole lot of acceleration as it collapses over huge distances, and conservation of angular momentum means things get spinning fast as they get more compact, like a figure skater pulling his arms in, only multiplied by billions of times.

They should implement a new system, whereby the people who complain only get notified when they're really sure.

Adding C to anything will get you an answer of C, though. So from the "photon's frame," everything would be moving at C relative to it, meaning objects and photons in the same direction would have zero relative velocity, etc. In other words, it breaks down.

I watched the movie with Rifftrax. Hilarious.

We were winning the whole time, by living better. Our "losses" were when we managed to convince ourselves we needed to do stupid things, like invade Cuba, or "police" Vietnam, or run up crazy deficits.

If only we had kept spending money we didn't have, Al Qaeda would never have existed!