Cap'n Refsmmat

"We haven't seen any aliens yet" is only a valid point if you discount all the aliens people claim to have seen.

I think Wikipedia uses a bunch of the AMS packages by default. I could add some to our package list if you find out what we need.

\and and \or aren't symbols in LaTeX. You can use \wedge and \vee though. [math]p \wedge q[/math], [math]p \vee q[/math]

Now you're turning into Glenn Beck.

I was thinking more of the TV show, but your ideas work just as well...

The trick is that I don't see why we need atoms, stars and galaxies. I am of the view that if they didn't exist, something else would, in whatever incredibly weird form it is, and some strange version of life might emerge. Intelligent life doesn't have to be atoms clumped together exchanging chemicals. It could be any complex interacting system of stuff.

Whoops. I just put up a notice there to explain it. Basically, based on previous experience with philosophy and religion forums (i.e. having to ban lots of people when they got very angry at each other), we've limited the forums to people with a certain number of posts as a kind of quality control. Philosophy requires 30 posts, Religion 50. So far the forums have gone quite well, so we might lower those requirements.

I seem to remember reading that .22 hollowpoints often don't mushroom simply because they're so small. But I may be completely wrong on that.

You'll have to find a library where you can get access to climate science journals, or fork over money to see the articles online. The scientific papers are what you want, but most of what you get for free online is reporting about the papers, which somehow never catches what they mean. Most of the reporting cites the papers, though, so you can dig up the original work.

Fill with air? I didn't think air was the point of hollow points.

Any paper published in a decent scientific journal has been peer-reviewed by other experts in the field. Those with significant problems are sent back to the author for revision. The review comments are generally not published. What specifically are you looking for?

Adding to what Azure said, it's worth noting that the light was emitted 10 billion years ago, when the galaxy was much, much closer to us.

No. You immediately treated the claim as unscientific nonsense, suggesting that ponderer must be in a fantasy world to even suggest the idea. Then you compared the idea to government experiments on ESP. Ponderer's mistake was to not preface his posts with, "In Heim theory, ...", perhaps linking to a site about Heim theory. Of course, as ponderer rightly points out, Star Trek physics is hardly "mainstream" physics. But in any case' date=' I am merely fed up with our continuing validations of Alex's Second Law. Perhaps it should have a new corollary: Many of our members do not have a formal scientific education. They read something interesting in a science magazine, or maybe on an interesting blog, or just somewhere in general, and they think it sounds reasonable. Then they post about it, and what do they get in return? A long lecture on the scientific method, using peer-reviewed sources (which they do not have access to, and don't understand anyway), and what constitutes "mainstream" physics; or, on other occasions, they're just told to bugger off. This is no way to handle speculative subjects. Idealistically, it's perfect, but in practical purposes it just seems to annoy everyone.

Part of being a good skeptic is not dismissing things as pointless nonsense until you've seen the evidence.

Okay. Suicide Watch has been around as a SFN tradition for a year or two now, but I think this thread has already jumped.

Well, here's how my professor treats this question in his notes: Later, he says: Also, another related argument:

You could use that for anything God does. You'd end up splitting hairs with this one; "observing" implies God has eyes, and he doesn't: he merely knows everything about the universe. So you could say he goes from the property of knowing that it doesn't exist to knowing that it does, but one might respond "no, he simply had the continuing property of knowing everything about everything in existence." I don't think this kind of stuff is very helpful, though, which is why I'm skeptical about Anselm's work.

You can do whatever it is physically possible to do. Nobody can do what is logically impossible, so it is pointless to describe logically impossible actions as actions. No, here's Anselm's argument against physicality: Physical objects can change. To change involves losing one property and gaining another; for example, losing the property of redness and gaining the property of purpleness. If the being loses a property that contributes to its perfection, it is now imperfect. If the being loses a property that contributed nothing to its perfection, it had superfluous properties, which make it imperfect. If it loses a property that made it imperfect, well, it was imperfect. So anything that can change cannot be perfect. Material bodies can change, so they can't be perfect. (Note that "perfect" means "perfect across all time", because a truly perfect being can't just become imperfect later)

Indeed. Also, Anselm would point out that the desire to burn oneself with a hot burrito indicates a lack of power (being divided against oneself is a problem), and so any god that wants to burn Himself with a burrito is not omnipotent. Similarly, God can't have a material body according to Anselm, because material bodies can be altered or destroyed, and that'd make God imperfect. But God's inability to walk through the park (since he has no body) does not mean he's not omnipotent. Walking through the park is due to imperfection, not perfection. It results from a lack of power, not a power.

And how do you get connected to other ISPs?

Dunno. You'd have to see what ISPs operate locally, and if there are any Internet exchanges near you. Then you'd have to contact them. I doubt they'd be interested in peering with one guy, though. One person peering with a large network is basically just like buying Internet access from an ISP, but harder.

The point of peering is that you have an agreement with the other person to share traffic across your networks. The Internet is merely a bunch of computers networked together; you just have to get a connection into that network. Peering is how you do it.

You'd have to lay your own cable down to an Internet exchange, where you can peer with other ISPs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

There's also a bit of investment involved. You have to get a botnet (or rent one out), or find a crime-friendly ISP and pay for some servers. Then there's the programming, the web site development, accepting credit cards, and hiding the funds so nobody gets suspicious. Tricky business.

A tiny percentage do (less than 1%), but when you post millions of links on millions of sites, if you get twenty people a day to buy your $100 Cialis, you're doing fairly well.