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1. Past hour
2. Christ is divine!

didn't God tell Jesus, Not to judge?
3. What scriptures?

Why? you know he was a Christian... right?
4. Underdetermination in Science

Yes a good thought. +1 But we should remember that our proposed curve between the points, straight or not is just a model. I think this is also what swansont was indirectly alluding to. Taking this model idea further, we should not say These are the measured points, this curve or straight line fits them so that is the correct reality. but These are the measured points. Whatever this curve measures does not deviate anywhere from the curve by more than X, which is an acceptable model between the points. Obviously straight lines, and therefore direct proportion, are generally the most preferable and often provably accurate enough. But here is a straight line conundrum. The height of a brick wall is given by the staight line function H = cN Where H is the height, N is the number of courses and c is the course size. Given that the standard course size is 75mm how many courses are needed to build a 5m wall? Well 67 courses will give you a wall that is one inch too tall and 66 courses will provide a wall that is two and a half inches too short. So what's to do?
5. Replacing sleep or somehow energizing the human body?

During sleeping human brain is translating short-term memory and working memory to long-term memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_memory#Encoding_of_information There are neurological malfunctions (caused by e.g. accident in which brain has been damaged) in which people are remembering just a single day of life. After waking up the next day, they don't remember what happened in previous day, but remember their entire life to the moment of accident. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2914200/
6. Can you believe in evolution and in god?

Just so we’re clear, humans ARE apes. I choose knowledge over ideological ignorance
7. Today
8. Underdetermination in Science

What about a very shallow minimum.... that could look like a flat line if you are very close to the curve. I am not talking about such situations though. If you are measuring one variable against another and you have 20 points and they seem to be a straight line with gradient m then it probably is... it probably isn't a 21st order rollercoaster which you have coincidently measures at every point along the track which has the same height. You 'assume' it is straight (putting fine structure aside from real life wobbles and wibbles). (Admittedly it would also depend on the context of the experiment and what it was that was being measured for sure). I'll admit there are case where fine structure of a seemingly straight line could be a total roller coaster.... like the fine structure of an Infa Red spectrum... it might look like a parabolic peak for a particular molecular stretch... but the fine structure will show that 'smooth curve' with many wibbles on it from quantised rotational energy levels... zoom in on any of those wibbles of fine structure and you have the same wibbles within the wibbles from the electronic fine structure.. Some things are way more complex still - but it can usually be detected or confirmed - we know about these things. I don't like the thinking that we know absolutely nothing and cannot possibly ever know what we are talking about - which is the view I am seeing from some people - including the OP.
9. Continuity and uncountability

Yes, thank you. Should not try this late evening after an afternoon of lectures. There is an $$x \in X$$ which is not an element of $$Y.$$ Which is the meaning of $$Y$$ is a proper subset of $$X$$.
10. Underdetermination in Science

Reminds me of the value of Pi. It's the concept of "tends towards". You can't nail it down, but it is still an obvious fact. As the number of verifications grows, the certainty grows. As your number of decimal points grows towards infinity, so you approach an absolute value for Pi.
11. The liver knows your age

Thanks to Charon that I've figured out liver does compensatory growth, not regeneration, but how does the liver knows what your liver mass is supposed to be? Question: If I donate 75% of my liver at age 5 the rest of 25% of the liver grows up to about 500g(100% liver mass) and it stops. Which I assume to be the normal mass for liver at age 5. If I donate 75% of my liver at age 30 the rest of 25% of the liver grows up to about 1kg(100% liver mass) and it stops. Which I assume to be the normal mass for liver at age 30. What am I trying to prove here? Oh yes, why doesn't the liver grow to 500g when I am at age 30 but instead become 1kg which is the full liver mass at age 30? If this compensatory growth of liver knows the full mass of the liver, then it is likely that it contains a signaling molecule that governs the full mass of our body at that age. The one that tells the liver to stop growing because it reaches 1kg at age 30. P.S. What to do, lower the expression of this molecule, then regenerate the entire body to match the age.
12. Underdetermination in Science

Not necessarily. First there is the question of how one measures 'fit'. for example MiniMax or Least Squares. Then there is the question of curvature (and even perhaps higher order derivatives). This is particularly true at the endpoints, where the curve may have to fit smoothly into something else. Even straight lines, (and not everything is a straight line especially with 'end corrections') Curvature fitpoints are also used to generate additional equations to solve Physics situations. For example zero at the bottom of an elastic curve and a min or max in some energy consideration. And what about pulse measurement? All the wobbles are at the corners. And even the sags and slants from a stright line are significant. The schoolboy "I got a straight line through the origin sir" only works for Nigel Molesworth.
13. Replacing sleep or somehow energizing the human body?

I seem to remember many of the worlds great leaders who were very busy existed on 4 hours sleep per night. I used to run on 4 hours for many years when I was younger... now I 'need' 5 minimum and prefer 6 at least. Any more is a bonus and I feel like it is a luxury rest. Our chemistry teacher told us that she'd seen studies that suggested that 4 hours was the realistic minimum for humans to continue to live healthily with enough rest to repair the body/mind. She said that people like Thatcher, Churchill and some famous scientists ran on 4 hours a night. (I just looked this up and it seems some took less than 4 even - but I am not sure how healthy that is). Why would we want to sleep less? More time in the day for work, more time for fun etc.. Sometimes I am enjoying myself at 2 or 3am and want to continue watching something or working on something or cataloguing something and it would be handy and enjoyable not to HAVE to go to bed because you know you have to otherwise you won't be having a good time in the morning when you have to get up for work. As Mistermack has just pointed out - it would be useful if your soldier or spy did not NEED to sleep or could postpone it till later.
14. Replacing sleep or somehow energizing the human body?

If anybody knows about this subject, it will be the military. A pill to duplicate the effects of sleep would be worth far more than a new missile guidance system.
15. Underdetermination in Science

Isn't it usual to pick the simplest curve that fits the data? Of course if new data turns up then the curve can be refitted, but surely it makes sense to 'assume' the curve with the least inflections and least complexity when fitting? With the suggestion/knowledge that there could be an infinite number of possible orders to the equation of the curve I would have thought the most simple is taken unless proven to be otherwise in the light of further data points. In other words - if your 10 points make a straight line then it probably is a straight line if you have taken data points at a decent spread. You don't assume a 20 order equation snaking between the 10 points - you draw a line through the lot. if there seems to be reason to suspect possible deviation at certain points or under certain conditions then this can be tested for and the data added to the curve. You don't 'assume' or conclude the most complex situation if there is no evidence for it.
16. Replacing sleep or somehow energizing the human body?

I doubt we can, and why would we? If there were an advantage to eliminating sleep then I assume evolution would have found a way to do it. It appears to be a necessary part of the way the brain works. Mainly carbohydrates and fats.
17. Banned/Suspended Users

Reg Prescott has been banned for serial hijacking, which has become worse with time.
18. Underdetermination in Science

This reminds me: a week or two ago a colleague was telling me about a paper he was reviewing (internal process, before it goes to submission to a journal) and he was critiquing their curve fit, because the authors had not justified why they chose that particular function as a fit. The "let's pick any function that works" just isn't what science does. It's a caricature. It's apparently what some non-scientists guess that scientists do.
19. climate change intensified the amount of rainfall in recent hurricanes

If you got hold of a big computer, one of the biggest, and wrote a super program to forecast the lottery results, and then put all the previous lottery results into it, and tweaked and tweaked until the model correctly forecast all of the previous lottery numbers retrospectively, your chances of forecasting the NEXT result correctly would still be nearly nil. I wouldn't even spend a pound on a ticket. Start a gigantic bank account, and make all of the climate scientists put their pension money in it. When they come to retire, pay out on how successfully they predicted what the climate would be like on retirement day. You might see some more realistic efforts, if their own money depended on it.
20. Voting Twice in the Midterm Elections

This kind of voter fraud rarely happens. But, you could be registered in two separate voting districts. You could have a false identity. You could try to vote in person and also with an absentee ballot. You would likely be caught, since they check, but nothing would prevent you from trying. edit: four cases in 2016. Two were Trump supporters; one of them voted in two separate locations. One was a person filling in an absentee ballot for her dead spouse, and the last was an official who filled in absentee ballots that they were in charge of counting.
21. Can you believe in evolution and in god?

You're a great one for stating the bleedin obvious. But the bleedin obvious DIFFERENCE is that I KNOW it's not safe to cross the road, I CAN SEE and HEAR the traffic. It's not a question of belief in heavenly cars that nobody has ever seen, heard, or been hit by. If I believed that god would keep them safe, I'd still be an LOONY to teach them to cross without looking. But according to your logic, that would be ok. You believe it, so teach it. The difference is between knowing and believing. Every single religious person with a brain had doubt. They may profess belief, they may never admit it out loud, but they know perfectly well that there's a real possibility that their religion is utter bollocks. But they still indoctrinate their kids, as if it's all true. That's why I call it child abuse.
22. Vector theory of Gravity

! Moderator Note From rule 2.7 (see the guidelines, in the "browse" tab; emphasis added) Links, pictures and videos in posts should be relevant to the discussion, and members should be able to participate in the discussion without clicking any links or watching any videos. So, as studiot has suggested, posting at least the abstract is a must, along with a summary of the relevant material you wish to discuss.

No it isn't. C is the offspring of, you guessed it, B. Which in turn derived from BCPL. Which was influenced by algol. And there are a great many other languages that owe nothing to C (lisp, Cobol, ML...)
24. More of Reg's hijacking from Underdetermination in Science

Exactly right, my good Grolsch supplier. Something I scribbled the other day... One example of the double standards that obtain here is that whenever some stranger wanders into a serious thread on biology, say, who is clearly not only ignorant of, but hostile and abusive to, the subject matter, said stranger is dealt with swiftly. And rightly so. Alas, the very same situation, as you may or may not have noticed, happens routinely in the philosophy section -- with no disciplinary action whatsoever. The consensus seems to be that philosophy is just empty semantics and mindless rhetoric. So all and sundry saunter in to join the navel-gazing -- after all, any fool could do it -- unaware that without the requisite background and training they are ill equipped to appraise the discourse. My most recent thread was dominated by one particular senior member (#\$@^%* - my own personal stalker) who, if I may be frank, is not only clueless of the relevant material, but apparently lacks the wherewithal to grasp what is being explained. The result is an incessant stream of slogans, spam, and quotations tantamount to nothing more than "science is super" and "philosophers are a bunch of w*nkers", utterly devoid of analysis or autonomous thought. Add to this his insatiable contempt and penchant for besmirching the character of those members who are actually competent to participate. And at the end of the day (or hour) the suspect held in custody for "hijacking" is yours truly. C'mon now! To be clear, what I'm fulminating against here is not disagreement to any views I'm advancing -- stimulating and thoughtful opposition is most welcome -- but just the hypocrisy and the failure to administer discipline, when necessary, in an egalitarian manner.
25. Banned/Suspended Users

Olin has been banned for not correcting his soapboxing behavior, along with other transgressions of the rules.
26. More of Reg's hijacking from Underdetermination in Science

ah, I see - childish dummy spitting then. I nearly thought better of you.
27. More of Reg's hijacking from Underdetermination in Science

He's just stamping his foot because no one is taking him seriously any more. (and thanks for the spelling correction in an earlier post)