Severian

I am.

Are you saying that the shots we see of dead and/or horribly wonded Lebanese children on the TV are made up?

Big bang models are testable since they lead to different events after the big bang (like big bang nuecleosynthesis). If you are refering to the existance of an actual signularity, then I agree that this is not testable, so is not a scientific idea.

There is no way any sane person is going to open that word document. If you reproduce the argument(?) here, then maybe someone will respond.

I got The Godfather. Be very afraid....

Then you would be in contradiction with experiment. I have no trouble seeing other people.

Which insinuations? Are you complaining that I disapprove of your military aggressiveness? Surely it is my right to disapprove? Warning: Now I am going to say something controversial (people seem to think I already have, even though I really haven't, so may as well be hung for a sheep as hung for a lamb, as they say). I don't really care about what happened to the WTC. Oh I care that people died - I always care when people die. But I didn't care more for the people in the WTC who died than the people who die horribly every day all over the world. In fact, shame on you all who place more importance on the lives of certain people simply because of the race and country and lifestyle to which they belong. All death is horrible - all life is sacred. Make up your mind. You just criticised me for saying that I was not at any serious risk from terrorists (which ironically I didn't even say). You can't have it both ways you know. And just to let you in on a secret - you are not in much risk in New York either (How many people died in the WTC? What is the population of NY?) Oh, and I must really sympathise with you on that oh so uncomfortable chair you must be sitting in, in front of your computer. To paraphrase a great man's words, "How utterly uncomfortable, and incredibly condecending of you." I am slightly amused by this in the light of ecoli's comments about media brainwashing. I mean, who needs media brainwashing when you can read anything you like into my posts and believe it? Would you care to point out where I called you a 'murderer'? I must admit, I am rather bemused by how rabid this post has become.

Well, I have never had a terrorist point a gun at me, but I have had the IDF point a gun at me. Of course I care. I don't want Iran to have nukes. I just don't think threatening them is the best way to make them our friends. I will repeat the question I asked earlier. Why should I care more about an Israeli citizen being killed by a suicide bomber than I should care about someone being murdered in Darfur? I genuinely don't understand why you percieve one as a problem and not the other. The only thing I can think of is race, but I don't want to believe that that is why you care more for the Israelis. Yes to both. There is no need to expand. No. I think they are both wrong. I think the palestinians have legitimate grievances against Israel, but they go about it entierly the wrong way. I think Israelis think of themselves as the chosen people (literally) so it doesn't matter to them how they treat other people. Killing palestinians is like putting down rabid dogs to them. I have visited Israel and I must say I felt the most unwelcome that I have ever been in any place on this Earth. I even had someone spit at me simply because of my race (I presume - I had never seen the person in my life before). Why should I feel any empathy towards them?

So are you supporting the Sudanese Government's genocide in Darfur? Since you are doing nothing about I presume you must be (by your own argument).

Your argument is grim if you are resorting to the Daily Telegraph. Do you understand the reputation of that newspaper? And even if there is a general hatred of the west in Palestine' date=' should we not be asking why and try and to change their feelings? Do you intend to kill all of them, women and children too? I don't want to die, but if I die in a car crash I am just as dead as I am from a terrorist bomb. You have to weigh up risk with cost. I would be much better off (and have a much longer life expectancy) if my government had spent the money it used to invade Iraq on the UK healthcare system. Given your sympathies and your ties with Israel I could read that as a death threat. Are you sure it will be the terrorist knife at my throat and not yours? Bettina is not worth replying to in her biggotry, but I expect more from you. You know very well that I don't support Hezbollah.

Who cries out? The international community don't. I don't think that is true. That is your propoganda talking. They want death to the people who oppress them and insult their religion. They may try and kill me, but only because I represent these things in their mind, or if I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suspect I have a larger chance of being killed by the IDF than Hezbollah.

You only get bashed by your own people though. Most of the world wants you to leave it alone.

The tidal lock of the moon to the Earth (which we already have) is not the same thing as the Earth being tidal locked to the moon. Edit: rereading your post, I think it is evident that you knew that already. Sorry for being patronising.

GW: "The irony is, what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit." Not very controversial.

No they don't. There is no reason for Iran to want to kill me. They want to kill you because you want to kill them. I only knew one person who was klilled by terroists and that was the ANC. You might have grounds for saying that terrorists would like to kill me (which is not the same thing as Iran). But they only want to kill me as a statement to my government - if my government would stop playing silly buggers I would be much much safer. Anyway, even with a crap government, I am still at more risk from passive smoking than I am from terrorists. And I am not planning on mass murdering smokers any time soon.

I remember being in a cafe in Paris for lunch with my wife. She had French Onion Soup, which as usual had crusty melted cheese on top. To her disgust she found a cockroach embedded in the cheese. We complained of course and the distraught waiter went to get the manager. the manager panicked and tried to think of an excuse. The best he could do was "In the summer time when it is very hot, the cockroaches crawl all over the ceiling. It is inevitable that sometimes they will fall into the pots." We left in a hurry.

The biggest question to me is why should I care what happens in the Middle East anymore? Both sides have shown that they are not willing to compromise - they both seem to want to fight to the death. Maybe it is time we let them? If it is your perception that they are a problem then it is you and your country who has to do something about it. I do not perceive them as a problem, so why should I get involved? I would much prefer my government spend my money sorting out Africa than the Middle East. Tell me, is Afghanistan less of a problem for the west or more of a problem than it was 10 years ago? How about Iraq?

I can handle that OK, as long as they don't shake hands for too long. I am fortunate that I live in a country where touching anyone else is considered rude. Handshakes are pretty rare (only for first introductions).

When I was little I felt a bit left out that I didn't have any phobias. Everyone seemed to have one but me. So I made up a phobia about spiders. They didn't really bother me (I mean I don't like having insects or spiders crawling on me, but who does?) but I pretended to my family that they really scared me. Strangely enough I have become sort of claustrophobic as I get older - it isn't really a fear of enclosed spaces, but it is a fear of not being able to move. I even find I am uncomfortable being hugged because I feel like I can't get away, and if anyone needs to torture me for secret information all they have to do it tape my fingers together and I will squeal like a pig. I can't even wear mittens...

To be honest I am not sure. Generally, if one had deterministic laws and physics which was rotationally and translationally invariant, then you would always have a completely symmetric universe (ie. no non-uniformity). To get non-uniformity you need to break the symmetry somehow. In Quantum Mechanics this is quite easy to do, because you can do it dynamically but it is mor difficult in classical systems. Imagine a ball sitting at the top of a perfectly symmetric hill. There is a stationary point at the top of the hill, so in principle the ball can sit there quite happily. With a classical system and no other effects it would sit there forever because the law of gravity is symmetric (it prefers no direction for the ball to roll down). Now you could imagine that there is a gust of wind. It will blow the ball ever so slightly off-centre and then gravity will take over and the ball will roll down the hill in one particular direction. The symmetry has been broken. But this was really a cheat because in a purely classical (deterministic) world I should be able to predict the direction of the wind, so the laws of physics could not be symmetric around the hill after all. I had to choose the wind direction myself or include a non-rotationally invariant mechanism to generate it. In a quantum mechanical system, the ball makes its own movements, without needing the wind. It wiggles about in random directions due to quantum uncertainty and this wiggle will move it away from the top of the hill (just like the wind did) and it will roll down. The difference here is that the direction is completely random since it is set by the random wiggles, not an outside effect. So my gut feeling is that you are correct and we need non-determinism to get any structure whatsoever in the universe (assuming a symmetric starting point). On the other hand, just because I can't think of a mechanism doesn't mean one doesn't exist.

No, Athiest is correct. You said: inequality holds => hidden variables Athiest said: hidden variables => inequality holds Since the inequality doesn't hold, your statement would give no information (since there is no implication 'inequality false => no hidden variables'). Atheist's statement can be written in the negated sense to read 'inequality false => no hidden variables' (a negation changes the statements to their negatives, and changes the direction of the implication), so finding Bell's inequlity to be violated does imply no hidden variables.

That is the definition of non-deterministic! All physics statements' date=' like "the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties" are already "general statement[s'] about the universe". First of all, many worlds is also non-deterministic, in exactly the same way (since it is random which branch the measurement is made on). Secondly, that "indeterminacy isn't the result of unmeasurable properties" is exactly what Bell's Theorem is all about. Bell's inequality has been proven, which implies that there are no hidden variables ("unmeasurable properties"). Edit: I agree with what ajb said - if this was what Hawking was meaning then I can't complain - but I don't think it was. Edit2: Apologies for taking this completely off-topic.