Phi for All

Luck affects probability and probability is our way of seeing the future. Imagine this: You really want to drive a car but have no money. When you start saving money towards the purchase, you're predicting the future by saying, "I will buy this car and drive it when I have enough money." You've taken something with a low probability (getting a car legally) and increased the odds of it really happening. If you appeal to friends and family for money you are further increasing the probability you will get the car. If you start checking payphones and parking lots for cash ("Hey, I found a $5 bill, how LUCKY!") you increase the odds even more. Trying to negotiate a cheaper price helps out as well. Of course, getting a driver's license also pushes you further towards your predicted future. Everything you do to help your goal move towards 100% probability is affecting the future. You'll never get higher than 99.9999999...% until you actually make the purchase and start driving the car but you have predicted the future and caused it to happen. I don't know anybody who seems to be lucky who isn't consciously or unconsciously affecting the way things happen to them. The odds of winning the lottery are astronomical if you don't buy a ticket but get better when you do.

I think you're Begging the Question here, Norman Albers. You are assuming that disapproving a boycott of the Olympics is approving China's stance on Tibet. I think most have made it clear that no one approves of China's human rights violations but are questioning whether a boycott of the Olympics would have the desired affect. I remember when one of the politicians went on a rampage about the price of breakfast cereal, which was about $4 per pound at the time. There was talk of boycott then, too. Eventually the cereal companies caved in and reduced the price almost in half. Everyone was ecstatic. So ecstatic we didn't see the price of bread almost triple within the next two years. And by the time we did realize, cereal was back up to the $4/lb mark. I believe in the power of boycotting but you need to make sure the effect is the one you want.

It's called abiogenesis and it is based on the idea that everything in the universe started from simple structures that became complex over time. Whether these simple structures were influenced by organic molecules or created them in the process is still subject to speculation.

In the case of Chevron and large format NiMH batteries, do you think what they're doing is an ethical use of the patent laws? Who are you assigning this jealousy to? I missed the part where anyone mentioned a patent that would result in world peace.

I edited the title of your thread. Since there have been no experiments to test your idea, it is, at best, an hypothesis. Let's be rigorous here and not misuse the word theory. That said, how would one go about testing this idea? Is there anything that wouldn't expand with the rest of the universe that could be used as a control? How would you test for this without one?

I'm glad you didn't do anything you'd now be regretting. The opportunity to read romantic essays to beautiful college girls won't last long. Carpe diem.

IIRC we passed the total cost of the Vietnam conflict* a few years ago (* US$133B, I don't remember what that is in today's dollars).

Perhaps PHP's needs aren't being met by lighttpd so PHP is looking for an app who isn't interested only in FastCGI.

You implied YT didn't know what he's talking about. Although he may not have explained it to your satisfaction, telling him, "There's no shame in not knowing how something works but thanks for trying" was rude and condescending. *You* are the one who doesn't know how it works, not YT2095.

This is more accurate and has the distinct advantage of being closer to the truth. Don't you think the scientists working on BB had to be a lot more rigorous than you're being? This is what people say when a concept isn't immediately intuitive to them. You're no different from a lot of people except you're saying that because it doesn't make sense to you, it must be wrong. This is not logical. In fact, it's a Burden of Proof fallacy. You are demanding that BB prove itself to you because you don't "get it". Since you are in the minority, the burden of proof is on *you*. BB theory has already proven itself to most.

Remembering things faintly and forgetting to post at SFN are two symptoms of radon poisoning. I think you need to leave Finland. No, you can't stay in my basement. We're having it checked for radon.

I think it's inappropriate for a college professor to treat her students like they were still in high school, but if you do something stupid about it maybe she was right. Be the bigger person and handle this through the proper channels. Maybe that's the real lesson here. And don't knock romantic literature. Whispering equations into a girl's ear doesn't work nearly as well as you'd think.

I wouldn't say utterly out of proportion. I don't mind the occasional out of proportion response. I would say our response was utterly inappropriate. We reacted to the threat of isolated terrorist cells, a few thousand unconventional fanatics with little mainstream support who rarely congregate in larger groups, with the full array of conventional military tactics and resources at our disposal. It was as inappropriate as it would be to use a shotgun to get rid of termites in your house. It's not so much overkill as it is just using the wrong tool. We used conventional means on an unconventional target. The part that really burns me is the religion angle. We have people smart enough to know you can't fight a religious war and hope to bring it to a reasonable conclusion. Yet starting with Operation Infinite Justice we made sure it looked like we were attacking Islam, a tactic that practically guaranteed our enemies ranks would swell, creating fanatics where diplomacy and police efforts might have found the criminals. Our response been exactly what the terrorists hoped for. How much money have they spent on video tapes, flying lessons and car bombs? They must chuckle when they think about how Osama got us to spend a trillion dollars and put ourselves in a recession... without getting Osama.

Apology accepted. Please go somewhere else because you are inconsistent with our purpose here.

Please post the whole thing here. It's not that long and you'll get a better response on the review.

We can't observe wave state but we know it exists. We can see tracks from the wave state, like spreading flour on the floor will show you the tracks of cockroaches. We don't see them but we see where they've been. But can you even imagine what a fourth spatial dimension might be like? What perspective would a fourth dimension give to the first three? I think this is more the kind of thing that would drive you mad, seeing something from the fourth dimension through three dimensional vision. A new color? We see them all the time, probably.

Can I just alter DNA till I need glasses?

Just the seeds? Why would you want to eat just the seeds? Is someone else who just joined going to chime in on how healthy and beneficial guava seeds are? I hope this isn't going to be one of those sock-puppet account scams.

Pangloss was referring to the thread in which it was determined that waterboarding had proven effective in some instances. I think it's a valid bit of evidence when someone says torture doesn't work. That said, I think torturing prisoners is the height of perversion. We have government medical staff at Guantanamo that provide better healthcare to the prisoners than the average American gets, then we pretend to drown prisoners so they'll divulge secrets. Democracy is better than barbarism... how?! Radical Islam would like to paint the West as monsters and this administration seems bent on providing them with all the colors of the rainbow.

Oooh, that earned you a comment in German. And if my translation is anywhere near accurate I hope you're at least a gymnast, if not a total contortionist. I'd tell you what she said but the image is too graphic.

My graphic designer wife tells me that graphics are all of the images and non-text representations in a design. Images are the individual pieces that represent the graphics of a design.

New colors wouldn't have that much of an impact, for reasons others have stated. I'm sure the brain will categorize any new color the same way it always does ("sort of a lemony blue with a touch of aubergine"). All of the senses would work this way, with the brain categorizing the signals to make some historical sense out of any new input. A new touch is going to feel *like* something, a new smell would be close to something else, a new taste similar to something experienced before. I think the mind-blowing part would come from something we have no senses to measure. How does a fourth spatial dimension lend perspective to the first three?

Did you see the episode of Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT that addressed the border fence issue? Lol, they paid a US contractor and six illegals to build a twenty foot section fourteen feet high, using plans obtained from a contractor who had built part of the border fence in California. It took them all day. Then Penn & Teller split the team into three groups, two guys to go over the fence, two to go under and two to go through. They each got one pair of tin snips. None of the groups took more than five minutes to penetrate the fence. Btw, building the border fence is so lucrative that the contractor who built the stretch below San Diego still made a profit on his contract after paying a US$5M fine. Seems he was caught using illegal immigrants to build the wall to hold back illegal immigrants.

AzurePhoenix is the owner of Monkey See, Monkey Sous, a chef training facility that teaches the art of cooking to capuchin monkeys. AP herself teaches Advanced Whisking so she's pretty busy most of the time. There was a story recently in the Phoenix Sun-Times that linked her to some kind of covert para-military operation which brought into question her motives in arming ninjutsu-trained, lightning-quick simians with stainless steel weapons. The links to the story have been removed from the web so I'm just waiting until someone from the Vice President's staff rats her out (or takes her hunting). Karnage, I PMd AP and told her you think monkeys are stupid.

I'd say the ethics only comes into it when intent is examined. Tools aren't good or evil, nor are they bound to any ethical constraints. It's the intent of the wielder that determines whether their use is ethical or not. A laser can be used to correct human vision (according to the LASIK people ) but it can also be used to sight weapons on targets of ethnic cleansing. The same is true of nuclear power, it can be used in various ways. Intended use is ethically measurable, the tool itself is neutral.