TheFaithfulStone

Yeah, the OA part was always the sticking point for me too. I actually did a fair amount of research on this, and there were a couple of other points that made me rethink the "impossible on it's face" initial impression. Most of the rocket scientist I know were telling me that the problem was in the power to mass ratio of the OA - that there was no way you could get enough power in a light enough frame to actually transport any payload any higher than about 180,000 ft or so, and that there was no way anything like that could get up to orbital speed. If I had to guess, I suspect something like Buckypaper is what they have in mind for the skin of the thing. Lightweight, high tensile strength, and electrically conductive, and insulating. I think to a certain extent they're sort of counting on "technology inflation" - wherein currently exotic things like carbon nanotubes and aerogel will be pretty common by the time they get ready to actually fly the thing. On the one hand, it's sort of bad engineering to count on advances in materials science to make your gadget work - on the other hand, it's not like the space elevator where they're saying "All we need is to achieve the absolute theoretical limit of tensile strength in CNTs and we've got ourselves a space elevator! Oh, and learn how to make a whole lot of them."

Ohhh.... can we talk about my favorite crackpot space theory? Ladies and gentleman I give you the The Airship to Orbit (PDF Warning) Reasons why this is right up there with giant octopi and Trunko for my all time favorite crackpot theory. It's WAY to dumb to actually work. It's not possible that they actually think this could work, right? I must have missed something. Because it's impossible on it's face. NO. It's totally dumb. Isn't it? But, like most crackpot theories, there's the germ of a good idea in there. The rockoons are a (grossly inefficient, but romantic as hell) way to make rockets. It's perfectly possible to float to around 100,000 ft in a ballon, and once you're that high up, you're about 2/3 of the way to "space." (You're still well shy of orbit, but now you have a different problem.) If I remember correctly, the idea was to paint this 8 mile long balloon lifting body with thin film solar cells and use ion engines (of some description - might have been Hall Effect thrusters, or some kind of idealized VASIMIR) to slowly, over a period of several weeks, accelerate to orbital velocity while moving upward. Like I said, I'm 100% positive that this wouldn't work (mostly because ion engines are pretty flippin' heavy, and they produce VERY little thrust.) but it's one of my favorite goofball space theories.

Irony. Ooop, there it is again. tfs

We have consecutive term-limits for state legislators and Senators in my state, and it was the worst damn mistake we've ever made I think. Eg: Corrupt state officials used to "sit" on their seats, and use those particular seats to work their nasty corruption - now, a corrupt senator from say.. the Northeast corner of the state needs to get elected to a wider office (like, say governor) to continue to receive his kickbacks. Furthermore, all of the people who used to hold lucrative state senate jobs now need to hold lucrative state bureaucracy jobs - so jobs like "Assistant Vice Administrator For Programs" which used to go to career technocrats or experts now go to political appointees. It also created an entire array of "charities" whose officers are made up entirely of ex-state officials, biding their time until they can either run again, or are offered a more "lucrative" state position by the next administration. After said person has finished the requisite "time out" from being a state senator, they are normally immediately elected as a state legislator (or maybe as senator again.) In any case, the effect was that we expanded the "good ol' boy" system to include formerly "expert" positions like State Education Director. Politicians are like zombies - they spread exponentially, and once they get their teeth into something, it's not long before it's zombified as well. tfs

Battle School anybody? Who else will save us from the buggers? tfs

Indeed. Well, that's pretty much completely made of awesome.

Well, I'll succumb to temptation and point out that the Urantia Book falls into the "too dumb even for a religious text" category. Kinda like Timecube. I rank it slightly below Dianetics in reliability. Which is to say, if I found a revelation scrawled in feces on the bathroom wall of a Metro station, I'd go with that over the UB. So - do you have any revelatory information from scatological sources? TFS

Not at all. I've written several DSLs in Python using ANTLR as a parser generator. It's not really what I'd call fun but it's not too bad. I also wrote one in Perl and generated the tokenizer and parser by hand - and THAT was my own special version of hell. tfs

Seems like Smalltalk might be your thing. Squeak for instance contains a version of itself written in itself. Plus, you can do foolish things like true := false. Fun. tfs

How would you see something that reflects no light? What is the sound of one hand clapping? tfs [koans]

What is the practical difference between universally shared subjectivity and objectivity? This is akin to the "perfect model" question. If you can create a model, perfect down to the last atomic detail of an aircraft carrier - haven't you built an aircraft carrier? If there's a "shared subjectivity" that's universal, how is that even distinguishable from "objectivity?" Also - what is SGCS's "empirical data" that basically proves the world doesn't exist outside our mind? (In which case, there is the small problem of non-human perception. I can tell my dog to drop the bone, and he drops the bone. Obviously that bone exists outside of my mind.) Whether or not Fido and I are capable of perceiving the bone in even remotely the same way is definitely a question up in the air - but the objective reality of the bone - not so much. TFS

So. Much. Wrong. With. That. Post. Numbered by sentence. 1) Logic? 2) Evolutionary Scale? Evolution isn't a ladder. 3) Or fake time. Humans of course, react in Greenwich Mean Time. 4) Really? Pre-civilization humans didn't have gods? I'll assume you meant "culture" and point out that chimps and dolphins both show culture. 5) Neither of them can follow this post? Humans have God(s) so we have somebody to blame when things really go south. It makes us feel better. So what? The destructive part of religion isn't believing that there's a god, it's believing that everybody else needs to believe there's a god. Nobody who tells you what to believe has anything but their own best interests at heart. tfs

Surely this is a distillation of a more complex argument? Of course objectivism does not "recognize that truth and falsity are relative to conceptual frameworks" - it considers truth and falsity to be universal values. There's a problem with the extreme relativism / post-structuralism presented here though. The claim is that "true" and "false" are relative to conceptual frameworks. If we take something that is basically a binary logic gate, the only way we can make the answer ambiguous is by changing the basic rules of the games. Does Bob have an apple, right now? (The answer is either YES or NO - in any language.) What if we think of right now as being equivalent to "at any time in the past or future." (Or, we redefine "have" to mean "is able to plant" rather than "is holding.") Now the answer is ambiguous in our "conceptual framework" but we've destroyed any idea of what the question actually is. Not only are the ANSWERS always in flux, but any QUESTION you ask can be interpreted to give whatever answer they like. So, yes, true and false are "relative to conceptual frameworks" but the questions are not equivalent from separate perspectives. If I structure the question in each "conceptual framework" in such a way that I am after an independent piece of information - then the answer IS objective. If we all agree to interpret the question the same way, or I supply who ever DOESN'T agree with the necessary "translation" to extract the same piece of information, then that answer is either objectively true or false. In the above example, if you only consider a person to have an apple if they have it available to plant RIGHT NOW, and I consider them to have it, if they ever have or ever will be able to hold, then I must structure the questions differently in order to get the same piece of information out of either of us. What is the current location of the apple? It's in Bob's hand. What is current location of Bob's head? TFS [point nuking post-modernism]

So, I've always considered the "Vaccines Cause Autism" crowd to be more than a little bit crazy. But lately I've been seeing some kind of disturbing trends that make me think that even if they're barking up the wrong tree with the thimerosal thing, that they might actually be on to something. Anyway, it turns out that my wife is likely suffering from lupus, which although a serious disorder is not (usually) life threatening. While researching lupus, we found out that Live vaccines are contraindicated for people with SLE. Whether this is because SLE sufferers are susceptible to infection from live vaccines or because the treatments for SLE leave them susceptible is an open question. Furthermore, there's some evidence that certain types of autism are linked to autoimmune disease in family members. Autism is an autoimmune disease Troubling case study Outspoken neurobiologist who things autism is autoimmune related. And then today, on Slashdot I saw this Immuno suppressant drug restores function in autistic mice. I'm increasingly of the opinion that my infant son, with a family history of autoimmune disorders on both sides of the family may be at greater risk receiving live virus vaccines like MMR than not. Measles, mumps, rubella are all bad, yes, but not really THAT frequently encountered. Autism strikes me as much, much worse. Somebody with a medical background point me to appropriate journal articles. I posted this in another location and was frankly appalled by the response that I got - telling me that I was no better than a child abuser for even considering such a thing as skipping the MMR. The information that I'm operating on is not from a bunch of hippies with crystals - these are all peer reviewed articles in respectable medical journals by real scientists and doctors. (Of course Halton Arp is a real scientist, and ALSO a anti-big-bang maniac.) If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong here - but I need some hard facts, not just strident repetition of the conventional wisdom. TFS

Why not? God himself has a whole bunch of sock-puppet accounts. There's the original YHWH, then there's just "God" or "the Lord" (but that's actually three accounts, but really there's only one account... there's "the Son" you see and also the... you know what - best just to leave that one alone for now.) And, then there's Allah - and God (or is it YHWH?) does this really funny thing where he pretends to pretty much be a total ******* for like half the Quran. Also, he switches back and forth from like "mad-dog-son-of-a-*****" to "wishy-washy-hippy" several times in the New Testament. Depends on what Pauline flame war he's involved in at the time. And he cares what you do in your bedroom (or in the kitchen, if you like) too. And he needs money. Lots and lots of money. And he wants to help you get that new job, so you'll have lots of money. He says things like "Yea, verily I say unto you..." Really? Seriously, I think God is a spam bot, and the universe is all one (more) complicated (more) f**ked up version of USENET. TFS [sure, God can create the earth in seven days, but can he solve a captcha?]

I think we've probably been over this before - and this thread has really mostly turned into mouth-agape horror at what a drooling fool Ben Stein turned out to be - but still, I feel strangely compelled to point out that there is no BEFORE the big bang - it's a nonsense question. Before the big bang, there was no such thing as time. What's north of red? tfs [questions without context]

Apostate. God doesn't use lightening to kill children - he uses bears. tfs [2 Kings 2:24 FTW!]

You're doing it wrong then. tfs

Hey, Craig, looks like Mother Nature beat you to it. It's about halfway down, where the explain this interstellar gas cloud is like a big ol' light delay box. You can take a peek at Sag A* past using something pretty similar to the same technique. Neato. TFS

Because if I transverse the space between my head and my desk in a short enough time it hurts me physically. Normally I do this while reading your "posts." TFS

Apparently. In the context I'm using it, chaotic means "Future is not predictable from the past, OR future states are unorganized (meaning there are no predictable discrete structures.)" Organic life is definitely well structured. That's kinda the problem isn't it? tfs

It seems like you're trying to rewind the tape, and then when you can't do it, saying that there must be some OTHER factor that keeps you from doing it. Look at the Conways Life thing. You can literally draw random crap on a 2D board and wind up with complicated global structures. Emergent complexity IS the emergence of complex (and unpredictable) organization out of simple rules. It's NOT chaotic. The aardvark thing has already been addressed multiple times - it's a variant of the blind-watchmaker argument, and it just doesn't hold up. If you selected ice crystals for "could be part of an aardvark statue" - you'd end up with an aardvark statue in short order. That said - there may BE an answer to "How does speciation occur?" Or there may be more than one right answer to that question. So to break it down: The fact: It's not readily apparent how current cell formations arose out of whatever prior state they held (if any.) 1) You claim: A) Given the current state of cells, it's looks unlikely that the current state could have arisen out of a prior state. B) Therefore we must be missing some vital piece of information that would enable us to deduce the prior state. Fundamentally, that there is some "secret fact" that will give us the keys to the kingdom. 2) I claim: A) Given the notion of emergent complexity, it's often impossible to determine what the prior state is. :) Therefore, the fact that we cannot determine it is not absolutely indicative of a missing piece of information. Fundamentally, that gaps in our understanding are not necessarily gaps of fact. Your proscription for a solution: We should look for whatever vital piece(s) of information would enable us to deduce the prior state. My proscription for a solution: No amount of information would necessarily enable us to deduce the prior state, so we should concentrate on finding prior states and rule sets that COULD lead to the current state. We may never find the "correct" answer, but our understanding of the processes will increase. TFS

Nope. In answer to the question I'm saying it's because the system is non-reversible, that the "rules" aren't preserved - and that you may not even be aware of them all. For instance, most Cellular Automata become extinct or static after a finite number of generations. Just because you know the current rules of the game, and the current state doesn't mean it's possible to extrapolate backwards! If you have an empty "board" for instance, it's impossible to know what the previous iteration looked like. If you have a static board, you can go back as many generations as you like, but it's not generally possible to say what the previous "non-static" iteration looked like. With a repeating configuration, you can only go back as far as the "loop-point." Furthermore, given a particular board, it may be impossible to deduce all of the rules by looking at the current situation. For instance, a static configuration in Conway will NOT tell you what the conditions for "living" and "dying" are. In fact, you have NO IDEA whether the "rules" allow for the level of complexity that's currently achieved, because you have no way of going back to see if they do. I'm not just making a tautology here and saying "life exists because it exists" but I'm saying that it's not necessary to introduce another level of "rule making" to explain it. Just because you don't KNOW the rules (and CAN'T know the rules) doesn't mean the rules don't exist or are insufficient. In fact - the inability to successfully deduce all of the "rules" is actually in a way one of the rules. ID requires God, or aliens, or some omnipotent bio-engineer with bad taste in knees and a penchant for left-over nipples. All emergent complexity requires is that you acknowledge that you can't (necessarily) put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. TFS [that doesn't mean you shouldn't try...]

Emergent complexity is a how. It's the mechanism. Where is it lacking? When I say we don't understand "HOW" the complexity emerges, I mean we can't recreate the conditions and watch it play over again. The same goes for Conway's Life. It's impossible to play it in reverse and figure out what the starting condition was. Also why would prokaryotes and eukaryotes be the first "living" things? It would be difficult (at best) to have preserved semi-alive molecules (that you would actually KNOW are preserved and not just... well chemicals.) TFS

A) Nothing travels faster than light. Radio doesn't use sound waves - it uses radio waves. Which is more like light than sound. (It's electromagnetism anyway.) C) I'm able to travel forward in time at the rate of 60 seconds per minute,so there. Ahh. Not quite. From the point of view of the object (the fast one) it actually takes a little bit less time than that. Search for relativity on this forum for lots of good reasons why this is so. For a great laymans explanation - try this one tfs