MonDie

Of course, I was implicitly leading others to the absurdity. The child wouldn't need a gun to learn gun safety if he simply didn't have a gun. So don't publicize the gun law reforms. Make the reforms involve education rather than restriction, which will inevitably lead to more restrictions being enforced by an educated public. Covert yet effective.

It appears that one of my favorite artists, Stephen Coates, is actually a . Well, I still like to interpret these lyrics as satirical, and I will continue to enjoy his music.

0:35 Mommy: "Pay attention!"

One youtube commenter says it's good to teach gun safety early on. I guess that justifies giving the child his own deadly weapon.

No, you are the one with the pleasant response. I don't have textbooks for nothing... ... ... ... ...

If you can't beat them, join them. In this case, "them" refers to those with the abeyant hive-link that intermittently function as composing units of the metamorphic superbeing known only as krash661. Wow, this sounds sinister! There are certain things electronic music doesn't do for me.

Let me do some reading before I respond to this. It may take a day or so.

The representation of a principle isn't the real thing, but it does refer to the real thing. If principles don't exist, how does our world behave as it does? You might assert that "things" exist, defining a "thing" as what is, and a "principle" as what it does. Well, we only need to explain how things do, not how they are. If you cannot get a "do" from an "is", abondon this notion of a thing separate from its principles. D'oh! "Do" is infinitive, and "is" is present tense. I will never let this go. Please don't repeat my error. Say "get a does from an is."

Maybe I shouldn't joke about Nazism, but that's what the march portion of this song makes me think of.

I agree with the arguments given in the OP, but I think ydoaPs has yet to address the issue of how we can refer to things, especially very small things like molecules. Only recently have I taken an interest in philosophy, but I will do the best I can. Nobody can deny that our world follows principles (or laws). I will make the case that, (1) although the fundamental subject of science is the extent to which these principles can be extrapolated, (2) certain principles lead us to judge theories as true or false. I do not think physical things are separate from the principles they follow. Rather, I think physical things are manifestations of principles. I hold to this sort of mechanical monism only because I find it extraneous to assume things must have non-principle components. Now, I will give an example of how science studies the extent to which principles can be extrpolated. Kinetic molecular theory is the extrapolation of certain physical laws to molecules. I don't know the history, but I assume the progression went as follows. First, we derived these principles of motion from large scale phenomena. Second, we tested the hypothesis that these same principles apply to molecules. Yet there is a problem that arises from the above. We judged that large, visible objects and small, invisible molecules follow the same principles of motion, but we did so using different observations in each case. We were able to do this because of Occam's razor. Hypothetically, there are infinitely many explanations one could propose for a given set of observations, making it impossible to falsify every single alternative. However, kinetic molecular theory was preferred because it was the most conservative assumption-wise. Although Occam's razor tells us what makes one theory more probable than another, it itself is not a theory, it is a principle. Unlike a theory or hypothesis, it has no competing alternatives. You can observe this principle in action yourself by applying the scientific method, and observation (step 1 of the scientific method) is all that is needed for verification. I think this makes me a scientific realist. Does everyone else agree that I am a realist?

Correction, I think the solstices would actually be 4.6 (or 7.4) months behind their normal spots in the year, but I'm not sure of this.

Question One: Well, it looks like the path of Earth's axis is already there in the image, but I'll explain the underlying concepts anyway. As the earth goes through its daily rotation, a given point in the sky will move parallel to the equator. However, this doesn't apply to a star that is directly above a pole (i.e. a star with a declination of +90 or -90 degrees); such a star will remain at that same point in the sky throughout the day. Currently, the star directly above the north pole is Polaris, the declination of Polaris is nearly 90 degrees. (Get it? Pole-aris, hehe). However, as the Earth's axis precesses, a different star will be on above the pole, and Polaris will have a lower declination. I proclaim open use and/or alteration of this image without accreditation requirements. It's not copyrighted anyway. I have attached an image, so there should be an image in my post. The yellow line represents the orbit of the earth around the sun. Alternatively, you can look at the yellow as the ecliptic, the annual (yearly) path of the sun through Earth's sky. The red lines show Earth's equator and poles. Question Two: Are you sure it's not 10 thousand years from now? I am going to assume it is's actually 10,000 even though this contradicts the direction of the arrow in the image given. The precession cycle is approximately 26,000 years. 10,000 divided by 26,000 is 0.384615385. 12 times 0.384615385 is 4.61538462. That's a summer solstice 4.6 months ahead of the normal summer solstice. If it actually is 10 million years, I would suggest finding a more precise number for the length of the precession cycle, but I'll use the rough approximation of 26,000 years. Divide 10,000,000 by 26,000. That comes out to 384.615384615 precession cycles. You just need the decimal place to determine how far it is into its current cycle. 12 times 0.615384615 is 7.38461538. That's a summer solstice 7.4 months ahead of the normal summer solstice. This should be enough info for you to figure it out, so I'll leave you hanging. Note To Self: Don't drink coffee when the western horizon is nearing the sun! You won't get any sleep!

*sigh* I guess I will give my piece. This is the speculations forum. Remember how space/time travel works. Imagine their home planet is millions of light years away. Although a trip back home might not take very long for them, it will take millions of years in Earth time. The same goes for making a call back to their home planet. Imagine they place a call to home from their space ship. The other end of the line, home, won't recieve their call for millions of years (in their time), and then it will take even more millions of years for the response to reach them in their space ship. So going back home, waiting for a fleet to arrive, or waiting for a response are all options that would take an unreasonably long time. This would be a problem if they don't have the necessary resources or knowledge at hand to help us. In our society, science incorporates a much larger body of knowledge than it did a decade ago, and this trend continues as we advance our understanding. That's why we have a specialists. One guys knows everything about the electron, one guy knows everything about thermodynamics, and so on. Together, they know a lot, but they know very little on their own. The same would probably apply to the aliens. Of course, the alien technologies for data-storage might be advanced enough that they could have all their society's knowledge in one little microchip. However, they might not have enough time to sift through all the information themselves, and handing all the information over to us could have disasterous potential. If you don't remember relativity, here's a video.

Wow, never has it been so apparent to me, the BIG difference between appearing nice and really being nice. It reminds me of Romney apologizing for his use of the term "Obamacare" even though he would continue to use the term.

If green is magenta, magenta must be cyan.

I didn't know about the finding until now. However, it looks like people hyped up the improbable hypothesis (little green man) rather than the more probable hypothesis (little green man). You don't think they actually believe what they're talking about?

The current evidence suggests that any real extraterrestrial lifeforms are probably much, much, much smaller than six inches.

What if you intentionally make it look like you unintentionally led the audience to make the fallacious connection?

Whoops, I didn't listen to the whole song the first time! I liked it quite a bit, and I listened to more Tim Minchin.

Actually, I learned an important lesson during the one live debate that I had. If you have something conceptually intricate to communicate, it would be a good idea to have the exact words practiced and written down, and some visual aids if possible. You might think you can communicate it in a minute or so, but time really flies when you're actually up there. Regarding the post by SomethingToPonder, I think it's anyone's game once people begin appealing to emotions. However, I think well laid out, accessible, extensively thought-through logic and analysis will trump emotion nearly every time. The only problem with logic is that it extrapolates. Any well-defined system of decision making will lead to liked conclusions and disliked conclusions because we're all fundamentally irrational creatures.

I'm no master debater, but I have a tip that goes along with iNow's tip above. Pick the battles you can win. Through devil's advocation, you might find that your teammates are taking an angle that doesn't work for them, so you have to take a new angle. Plus, taking a new angle will give the opponent a curve ball.

I suspect that Christians find religion palatable because they leave a lot open to interpretation. We all know they use loose interpretations to make the Bible compatible with things like heliocentrism and evolution. In addition, I think Christians would eventually realize that, hypothetically, a spiritual entity might find itself at a loss of words when describing spiritual things (like heaven) that have no earthly equivalents. Given these points, they may not think heaven is a literal after-life, like their death will be immediately followed by heaven tennis with their aunt. Of course, you can then ask: (1) Why didn't God think to include illustrations? (2) Doesn't understanding what a thing is necessarily precede beleiving in it? But those are topics for another thread.

.odt, but I also have some .docx versions laying around.

I haven't been in college long. I keep the textbooks on subjects I like, but I take laptop notes whenever I read a chapter of a textbook. The laptop notes are superior in many ways.

Ask Lindsay Lohan. She might know.