padren

I could be wrong but I read it as a subforum where the requirement is you are building on an idea not as a "theory for how the real world works" but "something cool that would be great in scifi." so it's not about the origins, but the metrics the ideas are evaluated by.

Pseudoscience and speculations are both pretty easy to define, generally they are attempts to describe real world phenomena in a manner that does not live up to a scientific level because either A) it's purely speculative or B) what "science" there is on the topic is so loose it can only be considered pseudoscience. The common theme though: It's proposing an idea for the real underlying mechanism to some aspect of how the universe works. As much as I love science fiction - it's an entirely different beast. The litmus test is generally (for harder science fiction) whether something seems plausible, in which answers to current questions are given seemingly workable yet untested answers... to (for softer science fiction) axioms of "stuff that exists" in a given fictional reality, and a general discussion of how they would impact that reality, how they would be put to use, and how to maintain internal consistency between them to better maintain suspension of disbelief. Science fiction is fun, but it is quite different from P&S.

I think hard line religious views do make it harder, but the real issue is what is viewed as in the best interests of the clergy. If they feel keeping Israel as a splinter and 'common pain' to unify their following - they will remain hard line or push harder. If they are sick of the limitations caused by maintaining such a hard line stance and the volatile liabilities that come with it - they may welcome a means to save face and get past the issue. Call me jaded but I don't think you can be a successful religious politician without learning to play the fence and steer your "written in stone" absolutist stances to the populous, and at the same time steer the populous to what you feel is the most advantageous unmovable truth.

It may take me a while, I recall reading the articles but it was some time back, one article specifically about a blood transfusion being blocked by parents who 'came around' to see it differently when warned of potential legal ramifications - I don't have the link right now, so I guess for the moment it's anecdotal, I can try to find it but it may take a bit of digging. Social systems don't deal with social problems well in general, which is why it's been a sticky issue for a long time in any society that wants to balance individual freedoms against the protection of individuals - especially when it comes to the balance between protecting youth and the freedoms of parents to raise them. As for the abuse of social systems - I see that as a price we just have to pay if we want to err on the side of helping more people who genuinely need it than on the side of 'safeguarding' against more of those who would abuse it. But this specific issue really isn't about the failings of the government, it's an issue for social groups in general. Whether it's fearing for a kid that goes to school, a family member, or just a doctor's concern for a young patient - it's an issue that has no easy answer. My supposition is simply we already have precedent to require the reasonable use of conventional wisdom and socially approved methodologies in which failure to do so can lead to negligence charges, so I don't believe whether a specific instance invokes religious reasons is really relevant. I could be wrong when it comes to social consensus - but I see religious freedom as protections against being singled out for your religious views, but does not go so far as to allow blanket special treatment for them. That means if you ace your physics test and are Christian, it would be illegal to disqualify you on that basis - but if you apply for a geology job and get a question on "how old does the world appear to be?" you are free to say "I haven't paid attention to the debate because I believe the world is 6000 yrs old regardless" but it isn't a free pass just because it's due to religion.

The term 'parasites' may be insulting, but it is accurate. Even if a parent believes any statistic Jenny McCarthy spits out: The risks of the side effects are far lower than the risks contracting illnesses because so many parents expose their kids to the risks of immunization. That's parasitical, plain and simple.

While I can't say it's the state of things in Kara's case, I do find it interesting that often when prayer is preferred to medical treatment that it is not the deteriorating health of the child, but the threat of legal action that brings parents around to the "oh well, hmm, maybe a little medicine is okay then" school of thought. I'll try not to "over generalize" but that specific demographic truly makes me sick like none other. While I don't want to ever tell someone what is "right" and force a "belief system" on them, even if it is based on scientific evidence - if we allow people to let their children die because "prayer" is viewed by them as better than medicine, how is there any degree of culpability for negligence in any case? I don't mean to straw-man here, but in any case where someone is required to use their best judgment - and that judgment is clearly faulty after the fact, how can you hold them accountable if anything goes? How do you differentiate between truly faulty logic and simply self serving logic? If you "pray for your kids" should you be allowed to leave them by themselves for a few days while you go on a drinking bender? We have child abuse laws that literally outlaw saying certain things or exposing them to certain imagery. There is a fine line between religious beliefs that steer a child in a manner we find disagreeable and outright putting that child in harm's way.

Republicans have always been against deficit spending, just as they have always been at war with Oceana. Honestly what I find the most upsetting is the use of language purely as a manipulate tool - anyone who can't be bothered to actually communicate and state their true sentiments insults the people they are talking at. They are not against government spending, just against government spending on social programs and regulation. They may even genuinely believe our economy is being hurt by the current tax rates and that they should be lower. It's like the curtain was pulled down and they were kicked out of the Emerald City, but they are still trying to play the same booming voice games despite the obvious transparency. (To mix one too many metaphors) I've never been a big fan of the republican party, but I actually hope they get their act together because this is just too sad to watch. I mean, have you seen the liberty tree?

must submit:

If that was the context of the beauty pageant, then that would be the right way to judge it. Since the pageant in question doesn't seem to put any emphasis on whether someone is artificially augmented, it appears the proper context for that pageant is purely the aesthetics - if a boob job makes her look worse then it counts against, if you can't even tell they are fake then it probably doesn't. But out of curiosity, when it comes to "artificial augmentation" does it make you a hypocrite to judge her for getting a breast implants, when you yourself are willing to get a hair cut instead of letting it all grow naturally? Everyone sees in shades of gray - you do, she does - we all do. I don't think you or her are hypocritical... I think everyone has different "judgments" about what the word "natural" means, and where within that definition various lines are drawn.

TimbaLanD, take a piece of graph paper, trace a quarter coin in the center, and put a dot in the center of that. Now, draw various circles on the paper, at different distances to the center circle - some pretty close, some pretty far - but all the same size. (maybe the size of the hole in a CD) Take any nearby circle, and draw lines from it's edges to the center dot, and lightly shade the space between those two lines. Do the same with any far off circle. Then, compare the amount that the edge of the inner 'coin sized center circle' is shaded as a result of the lines you drew to the two different objects. Each of those shaded sections take up a number of "degrees" out of 360, and when traced among the edge of that inner circle - it can become a distance. If you could graph this in three dimensions, it would be area instead of distance - and that's how the retina in the back of the eye works - light touches the surface over a certain area - but the geometry principles are identical.

This is too funny not to post: From The Onion: "Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars"

Found this one, I think it could be applied to many threads in politics.

I agree with this entirely. One thing I am skeptical about regarding "late comer fiscal conservatives" who are decrying taxes - even if we cut the budget significantly, and did all their tax cuts, would we be running any less of a total deficit? Honestly it seems to me that they only want to play less in taxes and really don't care if doing so continues to increase the national debt at a staggering rate. I honestly feel they are hijacking the increased spending concern to get in their "lower taxes" agenda attention. Maybe they care a "little" in the sense, at they care about the limits to power of the executive branch when it's not one of theirs in the White House.

Just found this one today, but it's probably old:

Why would a "real-worker" be desired? Sounds like a desire of a "production oriented" view, which is just one more obsession brought about by genetic quirks that aided survival. You would literally be preventing a new human from ever having certain choices open, all because of one of your own drives that is no less "pure" than any other pursuit. (Not you personally, I mean the society that would do such a thing.) It may be just a genetic survival quirk that I enjoy spending time in nature or appreciate music and art, but does that mean I should enjoy it less or find it less rewarding? In short, you can't say sex is a "distraction" without realizing all of the stuff it "distracts from" are equally distractions. The fun part is we get to freely miss and match and make choices for ourselves, so I think the "brave new world" or genderless thing is out of the question in my mind.

Only if they take their share of the national debt.

The pirates seem a little upset: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/04/13/somalia.pirates.revenge/ Though honestly, I think it's just bravado. Hostages are the only thing that keeps pirates alive - all they learned is that this isn't a guarantee. I have to admit it's hard to understand how pirates of all people could fail to grasp that "when you point guns at people you may die" and getting all broken up about it is pointless. Talk about an entitlement complex.

Fair enough, I suspect that I may be jaded on anything that allows for more "relaxed" definitions because of the amount of time I spend working with existing code bases - open source projects that choke any IDE's ability to deduce class types due to poor standards or strange techniques by the original programmers. What do you recommend for an IDE when working with Python? Which is fair. I drew the Perl comparison because it reminded me of that on the surface, but I haven't delved into Python enough for a real investigation. It depends on the project. I find java is the easiest to understand when I have to jump into something that was coded by a dozen monkeys that used a copy of "design patterns" to line their habitat and started banging on keyboards. Java is excessive on boilerplate and definitely makes you jump through a lot of hoops to do what is generally simple in a lot of languages. The template syntax is very complex - a lot more so than I like to deal with, but it is a pretty powerful feature that makes a lot of things possible. Do you find that using templates is terrible (the way they designed templates) or the STL code base itself? When it comes to grammar I like simpler ones but accept additions if they improve the power of the language, but find it often gets cluttered with what ends up being hardwired function calls. I'll have to play with it to learn more. I do want to try new languages that break from the classical mold (expand how I think in terms of programming) but I also don't want to just learn an idiosyncratic way of doing the same thing in something else. Is Python a good language for that? If so, what "philosophy" should I approach it with? You've mentioned some languages in the past with novel approaches to issues such as concurrency, is Python primarily a novel approach to code reduction in terms of reducing the need for loops, strong typing and other boilerplate code? I just want to investigate it without "missing the point" by just trying to learn it as "another C++/Java/Etc" and miss the goals of the language.

I could understand if the Republicans were opposed to the idea that these spending programs will help the country return to a balanced budget sheet. If they were highlighting critical flaws that demonstrated the futility in spending our way out of debt. But to hit taxes are too high and the government is taking our money away from us instead of giving it back? Did we pay off every cost of the Cold War, and every big spending endeavor since then in which we basically mortgaged our kids to protect this country so that people could remain here with safe borders and um, accumulate wealth? Do we get car loans and then mail tea bags to Ford because we don't want to pay for what we've benefited from? Is there a magical way that cutting everyone's taxes would suddenly undo or even help the crippling debts that we incurred? At least the democrats are arguing that we need to worry about these debts, and by raising taxes, borrowing more, running stimulus and social programs will allow us to get a handle on this problem. If the republicans want to argue that the plan is horribly flawed, or that they have a better plan - lets hear it, because I'm all ears and not exactly trusting that the democrats can discipline themselves in a vacuum. But they aren't arguing that - and they have no plan for getting on track - just a series of loud arguments about how they don't like the way things are with no regard for where we need to be. That's why they seem irrelevant to me at this point.

I'm curious about Python, but I've been skeptical so far - what does it do that is difficult in other languages? From what I can tell, it appears to have a lot of keywords and built in functions to handle various complex data types and has short hand syntax to perform tasks you would use functions for otherwise - but nothing you couldn't do with a library if so inclined. So far it sort of reminds me of Perl, which is great for writing short crypto-code but for the most part is just an idiosyncratic way of doing with syntax what function patterns would do generally. Personally, I have been drawn to languages with the fewest possible keywords and syntactic rules and puts most of the functionality in well designed libraries written in the language. I will say syntax does make a difference (passing functions as parameters for instance can't be overcome with a library) but how does python make a difference? I am genuinely curious because I've heard it recommended many times. On the surface it looks like an obscure syntax structure with a lot of top-level datatypes that would be suited to an STL implementation.

I still like Java as a language to start with when learning. It covers a lot of the core concepts, and has a similar syntax structure to C++ on which a number of languages are based. It's simplified in terms of memory management, but gives you a decent foundation in OOP, multithreaded applications, and primitive datatypes. The APIs seem "over engineered" somewhat, but the documentation is all quite excellent. It's a fairly strict language (enforces specific rules one way) but that can help when you are learning a new language, because you don't have 10 different flavors of "shortcuts" to absorb while reading example code and trying to master the basics.

First, the fun thing about paradoxes is they apparently show how the universe contradicts itself, because they play on our model of the universe - it's only our understanding, not the universe itself, that is flawed. With regards to the question of "one second" and whether it's an infinite amount of time - answer would be "no, but you could have an infinite number of slices each half the size of the previous slice, in one finite second." If space and mass could be infinitely dividable, take one grain of sand that weighs x. That grain is the sum of two halves of a grain of sand. Each of those halves, are the sum of two halves of that... Since you can keep dividing forever without running out of mass to cut in half, you could have an infinite number of "parts" of sand in that one grain of sand. Does that mean it's infinitely massive? Of course not, because while you can have an infinite number of slices, each slice accounts for half of the last, and the sum does equal one grain of sand. More importantly, these divisions don't exist in the grain of sand itself - but in our minds, in how we choose to think about that grain of sand. We may look at it in a way that boggles our minds, but that's just our mind failing to process the model in a manner that reconciles with our observations about the universe.

If i was in your shoes entirely, thinking the way you do, perceiving as you do - yes, I'd probably come to the same conclusions but it wouldn't make those conclusions right. You may want to filter the sort of questions you feel make sense in a science forum. You may as well ask if ghosts exist, and cite as grounds as to why they may exist an experience witnessing something you admit you can't even explain. How does that make for a discussion? What is the quality of sharable information? The scientific method isn't too useful in these sorts of discussions, but these sorts of discussions are highly prone to inaccuracy and research bias - so much so they aren't even generally engaged in here as they are entirely unproductive. None of us can observe the phenomena you describe, so our ability to use your information is so limited it's immaterial. It also apparently is the only basis for the idea put forward. This is basically a non-starter in my mind - all you can do is perhaps get back some interesting stories from people that are similar, but it won't teach you anything because of the observer bias effect. You can only evaluate the quality of the stories based on how much it resembles your own experiences. Then if it passes the evaluation, you'll decide it's credible and - low and behold - reinforces the bias you started with. In other words, it's the sort of topic that is outside the effective range of this sort of discussion group.

I would say the issue of "reckless disregard for collateral damage" is an issue of ethics, but it is still different than terrorism. The goal of terrorists generally is to traumatize a civilian population to the point they don't feel their military can keep them safe, and cave into terrorist demands. Ironically this is highly ineffective, and admittedly sometimes terrorists do have other motives but it is generally to manipulate through fear and terror. The "Shock and Awe" tactic, as applied to military targets would not qualify, but if the psychological impact on civilians due to civilian collateral costs was a desired side goal, I think it would qualify as terrorism.

Any superficial and even inaccurate cue to denote a woman is "easy" increases the likelihood of the male to feel confident in making a pass, in which negative results will often be ignored and positive results will reinforce the belief that cue is indicative of the preconception. On a purely "loose logic" level, it could imply that the woman in question is more likely to reject conventional social norms if she is uninhibited enough to exhibit tattoos and piercings - which could arguably be a signal that she may be less inhibited sexually with regards to social norms. Of course, the empirical studies necessary to evaluate such a claim would be nearly impossible due to the overwhelming desire of any researcher in such an appropriate setting to just consume very large quantities of tequila and forget the whole thing.