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Any President who supports the completely debunked Wakefield link between the MMR vaccine and autism is not pro science. Any president who wants to increase graduate student income tax burden by 400% is not pro science. Any president who wants to decimate science funding is not pro science. Any president who dissolves the DoJ National commission on forensic science is not pro science. Any president blocks public access to scientific data is no pro science. Trump is the most anti science president in recent history. His own party and appropriations committee openly defies him to support science.

So things look like they have improved quite a bit over the last few hours. Looking at our server load averages for the last 12 hours, it's been quite clear that the load has reduced and SFN feels a lot more responsive. We'll see how we can do in relation to the 'bad gateway' issue over the next few days.

If you're looking for recommendations, there are wonderful people here with experience and kindness willing to offer them. You may, however, first need to articulate your objective in taking classes as that will help inform the responses. Is this just for personal edification? Is it to change careers? Is it to build a time machine in your garage? You get the idea... What path you should take depends largely on your goals and why you're going back to school in the first place.

aren't we all?

Thanks, koti.

Because there is no atmosphere in space. The atmosphere keeps the temperatures on earth at comfortable levels for us. The temperature in space at earths orbit (and mostly in all other space in the Universe) is just a little above absolute zero. Also...if you would look into the sun from earths orbit without protective gear you would surely damage your eyes instantly if not go blind completely (because no atmosphere)

Nice how you ignore all my questions and demand I answer yours. Thank you for an excellent opportunity to exercise my self control. Of many options I choose to answer the question. I choose not to drink any whiskey and to guard what I do drink carefully which makes your question moot.

You're going to have to start mentioning your constraints when you ask your questions, otherwise we're never going to get anywhere. If you want to know if we can control how drunk we get after a bottle of whiskey, then that is the question you should ask. You can't expect us to somehow know you were talking about someone spiking our drinks, when the thread is about inner peace. Acting baffled that we didn't somehow know that is what you were getting at is only going to piss people off (see any of koti's responses to you).

In fact Harris anticipates your argument, by telling about psychological experiments where people give reasons for their choices, but the researchers know it is something else (having a cold or war glass in the hand is an example gives): so the reasons we give are confabulations, rationalisations afterwards. The example of the cities however is a very banal one. In this 'experiment' you are asked to choose something where there are no good reasons to pick one city above another. It is the same with the famous Libet experiments: people are asked to flex their wrist at some moment for no reason at all. The point about free will however is a different one: that we can do what we want without any obstruction from somebody else. Harris sees free will as physically unconditioned free will. But that is a chimera. What free will is in daily life, is that e.g. I want to go to my work, and nobody is opposing me to avoid I get in my car and drive to the company where I work, and here I am. If somebody asks why I am driving my car, I have a very good reason: I want to go to my work. Of course you can ask further, why I want to go to my work, and after a few 'why-levels' I certainly come to the point where I have to say "Because I am who I am". But that has nothing to do with free will: free will does not mean 'to be who I want to be', but 'to act according to what I want to do'. So what Harris is doing is defining free will as something that a priori cannot exist (at least if you have a naturalist world view), and then deny that it exists. Fact is that Harris in his pamphlet 'Free will' argues against free will, but then, when he is arguing why this does not mean that we have to give up on morality, or our penal system, he argues exactly as compatibilists do when they defend free will. So as an antidote to Harris, here is Dennett: At 3:25 he defines free will: the capacity to see probable futures that seem to gonna happen, in time to take steps that something else will happen instead. At the end Dennett says a few words about the consequences, e.g. that we have to let go the concept of ultimate responsibility, of sin (which clearly shows where such ideas come from...). And if you think about something you think now morally wrong, it can contribute to your inner peace. Feeling regret, but knowing that you were determined, you might not be too hard with your self. You can think 'I should have done otherwise', meaning: 'next time I come in such a situation I will do otherwise'. In facts Buddhism (at least as I know it) encourages such a stance, to your self and to others. And to make the circle round: Harris is a strong promoter of (Buddhist) spirituality. See his book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. So in their practical consequences, Dennett and Harris might be very close to each other. But Dennett (and I), do not like his rhetoric. We should never forget that we should take as much responsibility for our actions as we can. In my opinion, saying we have no free will does not contribute to such a position.

IPB is Invision Power Board, the old name for the software we use. (Eventually they rebranded as Invision Community or something.) There are two separate problems we're experiencing: The new version of IPB was saving a bunch of cache data to the hard disk with every request, causing enormous load on the hard drives. That seems to be part of why SFN was so slow -- every request was delayed waiting for its turn to use the hard disk. Dave switched it to use the database instead, which can be much smarter about keeping the data in memory instead of on disk. The "bad gateway" errors are a bug in PHP which make it crash occasionally. Our HTTP server, nginx, notices that PHP has crashed and failed to produce a webpage, and reports "bad gateway" to you. If Dave's tweak is right, it should fix problem #1 but not problem #2. I've searched for solutions to problem #2 and haven't found anything yet -- either we're the only people experiencing the problem or it's an artifact of something unique in our setup. But if you encounter the "bad gateway" errors you should be able to refresh and get the page loaded quickly. We'll monitor the changes over the next couple days and see if problem #1 is conclusively solved or if we need to make more tweaks. Big thanks to Dave for spotting the issue and fixing it.

what you are describing could be shown as a special relativistic light cone with imaginary values being the inverse universe which always be in the past from the view of this universe and vice versa. That works under SR.

Okay all, I have changed another couple of IPB-specific options. Initial observations are encouraging (disk I/O has been reduced considerably), so let's see if this performs any better...

Consciousness is a system of sufficient complexity, of which our individual conscious, embodied in the data of the internet and its hardware may give rise to the emergence of another more omniscient form of consciousness by virtue of the fact that it has more inputs. If we think of emotions as drivers towards particular goals then, currently, that is what the internet is lacking to reach this new state... it doesn't have autonomous objectives. Whatever the overall pattern is of our combined behaviours on the internet will eventually be the identity or consciousness of the internet. We are the bees that make the hive but individually we don't proactively design it... it's just a consequence of combined behaviour. That's how emergence works.

in circles couldn't resist

Well depending on how you follow charge flow lightning can be viewed as starting from the ground towards the sky lol. (I lost track of how many high school exams this came up) this comment reminds me of a particular book written in the Star trek series where Enterprise encounters a race that claimed the Universe moves and not the ship. When Kirk argues against it, Spock states "Your forgetting one thing Captain, it obviously works for them" They repeat this theme in one of their movies, with Scotty stating "it never occured to me to think of space moving" when discussing how to use a transporter to deliver Kirk back to Enterprise under warp.

Charlatan! Next you'll be claiming trees grow from the air and not the ground!

For comparison: Refraction is the change in direction of wave propagation due to a change in its transmission medium. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refraction) Reflection is the change in direction of a wavefront at an interface between two different media so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_(physics)) It is defined as the bending of light around the corners of an obstacle or aperture into the region of geometrical shadow of the obstacle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction) So, by your "logic", a change in direction is the definition of refraction, reflection and diffraction. But of course, these are all different things, and so that definition is incomplete.

See equation 1.7 for the above https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/IntroductionLQG.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjYz5nkm6_XAhVO-GMKHcgKCnMQFggdMAA&usg=AOvVaw1gqghLG0TDxskcgiMdoID9

Excellent your getting the correct tensor products involved now. I don't see any errors in the above well done. I've always enjoyed Caroll's articles regardless of topic. His papers are always incredibly well written. I'm also glad to see your applying the boundary cutoffs. I would still like to see you involve the Levi-Cevita with the i,j,k summation. This will give you the complete orthogonal group SO(1.3) and giving the full group with the curvature. (Under relativity the Levi-Cevita affine connection) is the one that corresponds to [latex] G_{\mu\nu}[/latex] where as the Kronecker affine connection i,j is the Minkowskii Euclid. [latex]\eta_{\mu\nu}[/latex] Mainly as this will complete your understanding to arrive at [latex]SO(1.3)=SU(2)\otimes SU(2)/\mathbb{Z}[/latex] where the Z denotes parity, helicity and chirality following the right hand rule under lie groups. Note this is also applicable to the LQG treatments In essence the antisymmetric [latex][L^i,L^j]=i\hbar\epsilon^{i,j}_kL^k[/latex] this is where you should arrive if your doing everything correctly lol how the latex displays the superscript and subscript of the last looks a bit off, the k subscript should be after the i,j superscript but that is trivial. Wonder why it changes the superscript subscript sequence? Anyways the total antisymnetric Levi -Civita is [latex]\epsilon^{i,j}_k[/latex] for some reason I can't keep subsript k at the end of that statement following after the superscript i,j The Kronecker connection being [latex]\epsilon^{i,j}[/latex] though more commonly its written as [latex]\delta_{i,j}[/latex] you will see variations on which symbols are used but thats trivial I used the presentation as per Rovelli under covariant LQC

! Moderator Note I suggest you actually read the mod notes we post if you want to have any threads that remain open. For example: ! Moderator Note I don't see where you have attempted to rectify this at all. Moreover, I see very little substantive difference between this thread and the thread the above note was quoted from. As such, this is closed, and you are not permitted to reopen it.

If you think science says that, then you have so little grasp of science that you have been in the wrong forum anyway.

Perhaps you see the contradiction in your posts, submitted only 5 m8 utes apart

I'm suggesting it's arrogant and ignorant to assume it's impossible to be better than we currently are. I'm also realizing that letting you and Gees play alone here in your little sandbox is probably best.

You state this with such certainty, yet acknowledged yourself as being wholly unfamiliar with his work. The mind continues to boggle... Citation needed

More commonly known as confirmation bias and so no more important to philosophy than verbosity is to understanding.

If you paid tuition for Trump University and expected to learn to become a billionaire without applying yourself, would you be surprised when you failed? I believe Trump is an honest statesman, I also believe he is a dog that will rip out your through with no mercy in the business world. If he wanted to be a politician, he could probably do well. I do believe he chooses to be a statesman.

Trump does not back off, change his story or start making apologies... He doubles down on what he believes and "Damn the torpedoes!" How would you like to wake up in his shoes everyday? Now tell, why does he even bother.

This is fun people, everybody getting things out there! By the way Trump is a great believer in science benefitting the world, I think we will see some great things, if he can get them through the hill.

I am all for socialism on a small level, it is good to have community to do those things... It is not our governments job. He did not change his story, just his actions, he is very anti media... And I don't blame him.

Ok iNow thanks. So you have just abandoned any pretense that this is a serious subject for you?

It's right- NASA are good at that sort of thing. What is remarkable is your failure to understand it.