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patcalhoun

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Everything posted by patcalhoun

  1. It's looks bad with inline TeX, but that's the general FLRW metric. The [imath]\bar{r}[/imath] is defined as: [math]\bar{r} =\begin{cases} R \sinh(r/R), &\mbox{globally hyperbolic} \\ r, &\mbox{globally flat} \\R \sin(r/R), &\mbox{globally spherical} \end{cases}[/math] ...where [imath]R[/imath] is the radius of curvature.
  2. I believe is the point Card was trying to make is that conspiracy theories don't help ID's cause. It's an argument we should expect either from the: 1. weakest (knowledgably-speaking) critics of intelligent design, 2. or from the most authoritarian (psychologically speaking), 3. or as part of a concerted effort to frame a public policy agenda for the benefit of an audience consisting of members of the first two groups. Insofar as Card is critiquing the effectiveness of this attack, weak participants aren't useful, authoritarian ones (I'd number Dawkins--hell, maybe even me--amongst these) lack persuasive appeal, and for whatever reason the public advocates are stalling at the grass roots. I don't think Card was thinking of the last group when he wrote that, though, but I suspect group 3 fails because it apes the tactics of so-called neoconservatism's critics. Replace Paley with Strauss and you have something that comes across like tinfoil conspiracy-mongering. On the other hand, you might find a judge in the Third Circuit amenable to such a story if its the only disspositive history admitted into evidence. Another way to read Dembski's remarks is as retort to an attack on his credentials; that is not covered by what Card describes as credentialism. Offering the least favorable take of Dembski's reaction to score in a "well, they do it too" attack is also behavior I don't think Card would find especially useful. Then you have a low standard for persuasiveness [1]. A majority of Americans believe that man was created in his present form, and the next largest group excepts gene frequency change but considers either mutation or natural selection to be purposeful rather than random. Yes, the "we only mean that allele frequency changes over time" and "evolution is not abiogenesis" smirks are not very helpful. That evolution is now widely considered to include abiogenesis speaks a great deal about science educator's success in persuasively transmiting the theory. Card is referring to the "oh this is wrong and here's why...oh, everything else is wrong (hand wave) so the conclusions are wrong" approach. This is where you zone in a handful of objections and then say "oh, and there's a crapload of other problems." Maybe Card sees everybody zoning in on the same handful of issues. Maybe the lay critics need to spend more time browsing through talk.origins. Whatever the problem is, Card thinks it's not doing enough to slow down the ID movement. Me neither. This is only my personal experience, but the loudness of a lay critic on points of the law is inversely proportional to his lack of awe in his ignorance of the law and its application. I don't profess to be anymore knowledgeable about law than anyone else, but I think I know enough that impresses me how unqualified I am to look at a decision and say "this is what it means and this is how we should apply it." Yeah, which is why Card's preferred means of attacking ID isn't working on a national scale. Who the hell reads talk.origins besides (admittedly tens of thousands) of committed Internet activists? A review of ID criticism does not begin or end with Internet celebrities; arguably, it need not consider them at all. There are plenty of well funded, well publicized organizations at the national scale advancing arguments and seizing the five minutes of airtime and three paragraphs of print space this debate gets in a month.
  3. The scale factor [imath]a(t)[/imath] captures the scale of the space component (the [imath]dr^2 + \bar{r}^2d\Omega^2[/imath] stuff). The scale factor is given as 1 in the present day' date=' and if the universe is spatially flat, then the FLRW metric reduces to the polar coordinate version of the Minkowski metric (which is [imath']ds^2 = c^2 dt^2 - (dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2)[/imath] in Cartesian coordinates).
  4. patcalhoun

    Iran

    Those links were to refute bascule's claim that a cruise missile attack would be sufficient. It's borderline obvious that the inability of an airstrike to achieve the objective's effects necessitates an airland operation.
  5. There's no reference sticky at all in the Politics forum, and since we have no academic history or social science section to speak of I thought this might fit in best here. I was thinking that since there is a vast body of research in countless fields and subfields, members should start off by picking a well defined and supported area of history or social science scholarship and provide links to only open access general resources. Perhaps, if SFN ever spins off a separate section for social sciences, we can delve deeper and maybe draw on particular avenues of research. Well, I'll start off with my area of interest. Strategic Studies Globalsecurity.org - Excellent open source strategic studies repository and portal. Defenselink - DoD's information portal. Jane's Intelligence Review MIT SSP - Security Studies Program at MIT DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals (Law & Political Science) Dispatch Archive - Electronic archive of State Department's premier magazine Economic and Political Weekly Joint Force Quarterly - Check out the broader Joint Electronic Library Military Review - Combined Arms Center's bimonthly pub MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies Naval War College Review RAND Review Parameters - US Army War College quarterly Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents I'll continue to work on this one, and I'd definitely love to do one for public policy and operations research.
  6. That said, I've got a few questions. 1. Can the creationist movement achieve its objectives where science education is concerned? I suspect we'll see a movement that has the political and legal energy to secure a major reconsideration of establishment clause case law or at least craft an argument for some significant ID education program that would pass the present judiciary's muster. What do you think? 2, If creationists overcome at least the national legal hurdles, the battle in most states will turn to the legislatures and school boards. In that war of public opinion, what can secularists do to prevent a resurgence of anti-evolution pedagogy in the schools? I have no idea; I haven't thought that far ahead yet, but maybe a few of you have.
  7. It looks like you've just ended up at the Rydberg formula. How does this do away with wave-particle duality?
  8. patcalhoun

    Iran

    Okay then, I'll accept that. Fair enough. Well, we have: Source 1. Source 2. Your remarks aren't especially uninformed because you suggested an air strike. You suggested a cruise missile strikes. Tomahawks have no deep penetration ability whatsoever, and they only carry 1,000 pound warheads or nukes.
  9. patcalhoun

    Iran

    I gotta ask, and I'm only asking once. What did you get out of that snide remark to Dog? Dog at least made the connection that the only way you can present get to a bunker that deep in limestone and granite is with nukes. And, like you said, "[w]e don't need a ground invasion as much as just some cruise missile attacks." A conventional penetrator can only achieve about 300 meters per second in its terminal run. How deep can it penetrate, bascule? We don't need to go for each other's throats, and I have no intentions of taking the bait. So why don't you and I put our differences behind us and get along. And apologize to Dog. I know you're better than that.
  10. patcalhoun

    Iran

    You're the one who suggested a cruise missile strike in the first place.
  11. Its not so much philosophy as lexicography. Eternal, forever, and similar words in the vernacular doubly reference long but finite durations of time as well as the infinite interval. So the answer to his question is "pick a definition from the dictionary and get back to me."
  12. patcalhoun

    Iran

    You seem to be doing well regardless. And how do you handle facilities buried under 20 meters of limestone and granite? Tomahawks don't come equipped with jackhammers and lunchbreaks.
  13. Those would be solutions to Gauss'ls Law for geometries far less trivial than the sphere solution I gave you. But you'll want to get a better handle on calculus and vectors before you tackle that. I don't know how to address this without resorting to vectors, but there are plenty here who probably can. That would require some knowledge of the Divergence Theorem, which is where you'll need some vector calculus to follow. For now, let's just say that [imath]d \Phi \equiv dE \cdot dA[/imath], is defined as first principle. Why, its any surface that we can use to Gauss's Law to calculate the flux through. In short, its gotta be closed, and its gotta be enclosing whatever it is that's "fluxing."
  14. Just so we're clear that the above is simply your point of view and not an expression of legal authority. In that case I don't think we have much more to discuss on this tangent. I hold a different view, obviously, and neither of us is apparantly equipped to say much more than that. I would say the exact same thing, yet we obviously disagree. I'm not sure if this will go into another area where we have no authority beyond our gut feelings and fuzzy notions of how the world works, but let's jump on it. This is a far broader line of discussion than I'm prepared to swallow in this thread, but I'd just point out that US and her allies have articulated a single common, tangible strategic objective: the defeat of a unique Islamist threat centered in the Near East and Central Asia. This enemy is far more shadowy and decentralized in organization and operation than your classic state, but it is identifiable, measurable and presumably assailable in itself and its dependency on failed states, anti-Western autocracy and need for funds, travel documentation, and access to weapons, explosives and other harmful devices. Also, I'm not so sure what value there is in critiquing the "War in Terror" insofar as the phrase itself is concerned.
  15. God, God, Jesus, Evolution is evil, God. Word ta ya Virgin Mary.
  16. It is, and in a court of law it would be used with a lengthy explanation as to why the said act is a violation. Don't sweat it, I'm not offended by anything you said. I'm just looking at your post and wondering how you determined that this act was illegal. You could uniquely reference hypotheticals if you choose to create new case law, and if you actually had some international criminal statute that for all intents and purposes broadly treating the entire spectrum of transboundary acts of violence the same way--in simple enough terms for a jury to decide--you might have a point. In this case, you do not. This is why counsel couches principles advocated in specific case law. This is why motions are not decided in trial phase in most judicial systems and why international law is never ajudicated by a defendant's peers. International case law joining states over Article 2 issues is threadbare compared to non-binding briefs available. It stands to reason that when courts do get involved, they refer to those briefs to develop opinions. That would be a starting point to make the case that the US acted illegally. US intelligence agencies are not "ordinary people," and they have as extensive access to counsel as law enforcement bodies. I think its safe to say we're in a whole new ball game here. Since there are widespread accusations of illegality whenever Western states commit transboundary acts of violence (up to and including the whole concept of international operations in Afghanistan), then what makes this case so pernicious and risky as to outweigh the objective of killing al Qaeda's top leadership? On the other hand, this last point of yours is definitely a more suitable line of discussion. I'm certainly no legal authority. You say you aren't. It'd be nice to get some expert point of view on the issue. Absent that, we'd best stick broader evaluations of air strike and the judgement in areas we better understand.
  17. [imath]\omega=\sum_n dq^i \wedge dp_i[/imath] There you go. Run with it.
  18. "Aggression," "aggressor" or any other variation of the term isn't used in any of the Articles. If by aggression you mean transboundary use of force, then walk us through 1) the injury to Pakistan's territorial integrity or political independence. 2) a framework that would permit a court to find this operation unlawful when it recognizes the legality of similar transboundary acts carried outside UN auspices in Uganda, Grenada, Panama, Syria, Lebanon and Sierre Leone, and 3) any other operative law should your Article 2 arguments fail . In other words, let's not play lawyer when only Jim is apparantly qualified to do so.
  19. What's so excellent about it? Zy's remarks basically pigeonhole the operational thinking of competent professional warfighters as "my soldiers are more valuable than foreign civlians." That's a pretty strong accusation, and yet zy doesn't present a single shred of evidence to make it up beyond an analogy. I could say "it all boils down to silly liberals valuing their self-perceived profundity over genuinely parsing through the facts," although I doubt you'd pat me on the head for it. And even though I'd have posts in evidence--a far cry more than zy has--what would I have to back up such a sweeping generalization other than an obvious prejudice?
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