Sisyphus

Well it's definitely far more reported. The internet is the ideal propagator of weird "viral" news items. The question is whether it's also more frequent. But then, what is the "it?" Weird events?

What the hell? How are there 62 posts on this?

Your design requires getting more out of the batteries than you put in. In this case, charging the other batteries and running the motor. It can't work even ignoring inefficiencies, which of course you can't do in real life, and in this case I expect would be rather large. For the second design, not only will it not go forever, but it won't go as long as it would if you just took out the two reversed batteries.

I'm not sure how much detail to go into, but the short answer is that yes, you have about a quarter of the genes of each grandparent. And yes, you can still carry a gene without it being expressed, if you don't get it from both parents (genes come in pairs, and you get one half of every pair from each parent), and that can be passed on. (This is called a recessive gene.) The flip side of this is that it if you don't carry the gene, it can't be expressed in your children either, since it has to come from both parents. It just has a 50% chance of either being present and not expressed (if your partner passes on the recessive gene), or absent entirely, if your partner passes on the other half of the pair.

I'm looking at the PDFs and I still don't know what you're talking about. How about this: There is a triangle with side A=3 and side B=5. By your method, what is side C? Obviously, you can't answer that given only that information (your original claim). All you can say is 2 < C < 8. So what I'm asking is, what additional information are you using?

If you have two sides and a right angle between them, there aren't just "only so many combinations," there is one answer. But then you don't just have two sides, you have side-angle-side, which is all you need for any triangle. If you mean only so many combinations wherein the triangle can be split into two right triangles, then that is false. Any triangle can be split into two right triangles.

If all you have is two sides, there are an infinite number of possibilities for the third side. Specifically, it can be anything greater than the difference between the two sides and less than their sum. For example: Side A = 3 Side B = 4 Side C = unknown Any number greater than 1 and less than 7 will work for side C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation It's an "interpretation."

No, I didn't. That was The Bear's Key.

Humans can be "turned off" too. In fact we all eventually turn off permanently and automatically, on a long enough timeframe. Yet humans are still capable of causing all sorts of trouble.

What do you mean by seeing the things you see at the same time? You mean the same speed?

"In a way" meaning "not?" And what about those things, exactly? Can you state something factual that is negative about Obama relating to ACORN or Czars? FOX News isn't just 90% biased, it's about 90% contrafactual insinuation. That's all they do: insinuate. I'm sure that's what they say, but notice they're not so big on the numbers. That description is contrary to fact. ... Anyway, as for the topic of the OP... eh. The President probably shouldn't be getting involved (though it's hardly unprecedented), but I don't know if he should be willing to pretend FOX News is news, either.

No, that is precisely what is controversial. There is a huge set of assumptions about the nature of human beings bound up in that, unsupported by empirical science. That man is a unified mind with rational, simultaneous goals, etc. It's real crime, however, is not in making those particular suppositions (which, like Newtonian physics with planetary orbits, gives neat and good enough solutions in many situations), but in pretending they are inevitable, thus closing off the whole school of thought from the very beginning. This is exactly how medieval theologians worked. Alright, so ask yourself if those universal laws apply to a computer, or a cancer cell, or a chair. How is "acting being" defined, if not via Cartesian mumbo jumbo? I've gathered that much. I'm saying that makes it fundamentally flawed. Observation is a necessary part of science, but it is not science in itself. As for the diamond-water paradox, the cartoon answers nothing, at best restating the problem with the additional burden of more assumptions about the human actors. I haven't read it yet, though I intend to. I may as well admit that my reluctance (besides having much else to do) has to do with annoyance at constantly being redirected to a single source. I have to ask: have you ever studied economics not from an Austrian perspective? If not, how do you justify that?

The solution would just be to tax more than you spend in times of prosperity, thus decreasing the money supply and making up for the tax cuts and stimulus spending in hard times. And yes, politically this would be very hard to do, as the political pressure is always to tax less and spend more. And that's putting aside the problems that deflation inherently causes, and whether they are better or worse than the problems of inflation. This probably should have its own topic, though.

What country? You're in England. This happened in America. Has either country seen a rash of people being arrested for indecent exposure in their own homes? Or is this just an anecdote searched out for its quirkiness and to illicit a particular response? That said, assuming FOX gave an accurate overview of the facts, I hope this guy countersues and wins.

...and it's disadvantage is it's over-reliance on metaphysics. "Actors" are metaphysical beings, separate from their bodies. They are unified, rational minds. From here are its axioms derived, and conclusions are reasoned to rather than tested. It throws up its hands in despair at the thought of supposedly impossible empiricism, instead relying on statements like "you can't imagine it otherwise," the ultimate refrain of the unimaginative and wrong dogmatists since the beginning of philosophy, from geocentrists to medieval theologians to deniers of quantum mechanics. What a human actually is, as far as empirical science can tell us, is a complicated mass of organic molecules, a product of biological evolution mindlessly and persistently sifting towards ever-more complex reproductive strategies. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, but no consistent rules govern its behavior, and in fact the very notion of a "being" as a unified whole appears to be largely illusory. It is no more bound to obey the axioms of Cartesian dualistic metaphysics than a soda machine. That's not to say that nothing can be known at all about how humans tend to behave, just that it can't be reasoned to, at least not with sufficient accuracy. Empirical psychology and neuroscience, though still far from perfected disciplines, offer the most promising windows into human - and thus economic - behavior, yet these things are apparently rejected by the Austrian school, or simply not considered, their basis contradictory to what has already been decided cannot be otherwise.

It actually doesn't answer the question of "why something rather than nothing." It (I guess) answers the question, "given the laws of physics, why is there stuff?" The former question is philosophical in nature and, I think, not one to which a direct and meaningful answer can be given. Arguably, the question itself is meaningless.

What specific issues are we talking about, here?

abskebabs isn't an expert on economics, he's just read a lot about a single (fringe) point of view, and accepted its assertion of indisputable truth as license not to bother with any others. That's the impression I've gotten, anyway. That said, it's not like there's much substance in the rest of this thread, and there's plenty of juvenile, bullying behavior all around. Good work, everyone!

Yeah, to say that fossil fuels wouldn't survive for 65 million years is no different than saying that any rock can't survive for 65 million years. Ancient rock layers are exposed and erode all the time, that doesn't mean they're not ancient, or that they (those specific layers) are being "renewed."

What issues?

I'm thinking ParanaiA's question is more about what is physically occuring when we experience a "thought." Which I'm assuming is something, unless "thoughts" as individual events are illusions. (I don't have a helpful answer, just trying to head off some unhelpful ones.)

coberst, You seem to have posted basically the same messages on many different forums. You also seem to be getting more or less the same sorts of "grafitti" responses everywhere. What do you make of that?

There is literally no possible practical physical use for more than 60 digits or so, as at that point a circle the size of the cosmic horizon can be calculated with more precision than the planck length. Fun fact! Also, couldn't someone just beat any arbitrarily large record by mental calculation? It would take longer than simple recall, but it doesn't seem like wasting time is much of an issue.

Can the human eye even resolve that much detail?