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imatfaal

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Posts posted by imatfaal

  1. Many of the contradictory details I described are accounts of material events, not miraculous events. Various accounts of Jesus visiting different towns and making various speeches are rearranged chronologically or altered entirely in the different Gospels.

     

    None of the Gospel authors were first-hand witnesses anyway.

     

     

    Surely Matthew the Apostle and Matthew the Evangelist are one and the same person! How much of what is in the gospel of Matthew was written by Matthew/Levi the tax collector is, of course, unknown; but they are meant to be the same person - and the later portions are a supposed first hand account (even if not written in the first person)

  2. My flying experiences began in small planes (Pipers, Cessnas, etc), and it impressed me that I could tell the exact moment the plane disconnected with the ground. Years later, when I began flying on airliners, I thought they'd be too big to feel the "floating" sensation. Not! And to this day, every time I experience "lift off", this smirk appears on my face because it's the coolest part of the flight. :D

     

    I know the smirky feeling entirely - but for me it's that mad rush when the plane starts to accelerate, cos it's always harder than I remember.

  3. Rigney - you talk about not understanding another's concept of justice and juxtapose it with an image of 'blade coming down to ...' How does a slightly sinister "I hope nothing nasty happens to you" type comment tie in with your ideas of justice? Do you think that muggers take a quick survey and only attack those who deny the morality, efficacy, and legality of the death penalty in a modern state?

     

    Also what makes you equate life imprisonment with exoneration? Even without a full life term (ie it is not mandated that the prisoner will live out their entire lives incarcerated) then a life prisoner is never exonerated or even able to "repay the debt to society" - the life prisoner may be allowed out of prison, but he/she remains on licence and subject to recall for the rest of their natural.

     

    Yes, an innocent life may be lost from time to time due to human error

    i respectfully disagree - I would go with Blackstone (who wrote the book on Criminal Law) echoed by Ben Franklin "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

  4. Im not a big fan of airports however i have quite a funny story in relation, Long story short i was hunting on a weekend used my main suitcase etc... Got home my wife cleaned out my bag washed clothes etc... Well that following week i had to fly in to NJ for my wifes 80 yr great aunts birthday. Well first i get to Tampa international forgot my wallet on the night stand due to our flight being at 5am and i worked all night and just forgot so 21.0 miles back home then back now im running late i look like a madman sprinting through the airport with my bag. As i approch the security officer to check me and my luggage he stops me tells me to put my hands behind my back and face the wall, Well im by no means a criminal so im freaking out asking why. Well the lady behind the desk pulls out my hunting hatchet and starts to accuse me of being a criminal etc.. n ow i have a huge crowd around me a ton of police and my flights almost done boarding. End result was a very understanding police officer that hunts and has a dingy wife so he takes the axe and tells me to hall A** to the plane. So i made my flight and had a very interesting story to tell. plus got back to hear that my name made the local paper. Never found the article tho. :o

     

     

    Great attitude to women - you take an hatchet to the airport and it's your wife's fault for not cleaning your suitcase out properly -what century is this?

     

     

  5. Lemur, it sounds like you are describing the post modernists version of history and historical texts. Sorry mate but that is the biggest load of crock I've ever had the misfortune to meet. It defies all logic and sense. It denies all fact and substitutes opinion and interpretation instead. Post modernist history is to Archaeology and History as Astrology is to Astronomy. One is science, the other is mumbo jumbo.

     

     

    Presume you have read about the Sokal Affair .

     

    I do think that the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the other direction - ie against post-modern readings of history; there is value in analysing critically the assumptions that are held to be true and form the underpinnings of our knowledge (but only in moderation and with a huge pinch of salt)

  6. So far so good,...

     

    a little patronising perhaps

     

     

    though I would question how far minorities should be able to take the logic of protection because that can lead to authoritarian-type mandates. I see the critical factor in democracy checking and balancing of power through other power. Minorities check majority and vice versa, and groupism ultimately gets checked by individualism, though the reverse wouldn't seem too democratic to me. I suppose if you had individuals worshiping certain individuals for their individuality, groupism could function as a check/balance for such people's authoritarian worship of individual heads of state, celebrities, etc.

    in a modern society we look to checks, balances, and the division of power - but to rename this democracy is not essentially true

     

    The second part, regarding intrinsic power, is more of a statement of fact than an ideal. No form of social power can function without consent of the governed. Even forceful coercion works by demanding consent by threat. Yes, you can physically manipulate people in certain ways but none of them have a broad spectrum of effects. You can lead a horse to water (by force) but you can't make it drink, for example. Consent of the governed also must not be treated as an absolute criteria because that would facilitate authoritarian abuses of freedom. E.g. if someone refuses to stand trial for killing, for example, they have to be tried and jailed by force if necessary to prevent them from exercising authoritarian power over life and death.

    interesting use of consent - I would prefer to deny the possibility of consent by duress or force

     

    Regarding the OP: democracy is a concept that can be appropriated for authoritarian purposes like any other. Using democracy as an impetus to pursue authoritarian power is as easy as using the idea of freedom to manipulate people into indenturing themselves to others. Still, when people unconditionally reject the idea of struggling/fighting/warring for democracy, that also facilitates a form of pacifist authoritarianism. In other words, when anything is an unconditional imperative, it results in totalitarian policy. E.g. if war is an absolute taboo, any and all provocations and ethical abuses can be procured without response because the response would entail breaking the taboo. It would be like if there was freedom of speech but the death penalty for battery, people could harass and provoke each other to no end if only to seduce a violent response from their victim, which in turn would result in the death-penalty for that person. So you have to have some check/balance for every form of power, including war and terrorism. Without it, unchecked/unbalanced exercises of power would become authoritarian, I think.

    I think redefining totalitarian and authoritarian as synonyms for absolute and non-contingent (especially in describing a rejection of violence) is both misleading and fairly insulting to those who have lived under totalitarian/authoritarian regimes. Absences of sufficient checks to power is a recipe for problems but not necessarily authoritarian rule - for example it can lead to runaway corruption and break down of effective rule

     

     

  7. not because Einstein says so - but because it explains the known facts better than anything else.

     

    few physicists wouldn't jump at the chance of expanding upon or even overturning einstein (the nobel prize money would be nice for a start) - the trouble with that plan is that einstein's conceptions tally remarkably well with a myriad of experimental data. To challenge einstein's work requires more than a general disquiet and unease about the possibly counter-intuitive conclusions - one would need either to show a situation in which predictions fail, or a complete new theory that not only explains everything as well as einstein's work it must also go beyond and explain other stuff.

     

    it is a common fallacy that science sticks with theory through some outdated adherence to dogma and over-respect for the status-quo - perhaps this was once true but in modern science as soon as a theory stops making provable predictions there are a pack of new ideas ready to replace it

  8. Positron were initially conceived of as gaps in the dirac sea - this is a long way from being just simple vacuum.

     

    it was thought that for every positive energy state that a corresponding negative state should exist - but what stopped an electron shedding energy, emitting a photon, and dropping to a lower energy state to below zero and onwards. the dirac sea is the model/conception in which all negative energy states are filled - this theoretical model stops an electron from being able to drop down a state because it is already filled and the pauli exckusion forbids more than one electron in the same state.

     

    in some interactions one of these theoretical electrons in a negative energy state is removed - leaving a "hole" in the dirac sea. but a missing negative energy particle can be seen as a present positive energy particle. This present positive energy particle must have same mass and opposite charge to the missing negative energy particle - it is now thought of as the positron.

  9. Paranoia - but we are the government, we exist as members of the state, our human identity is as part of the polis; to differentiate between the people and the government is make-believe. When a system of governance loses the support of the people it changes; sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, but it always changes. There is no 'us' and 'them'! You can set a "federal government" up as some sort of folk devil whom we can all hate and talk against, but at the end of the day we exist within the state, we are the state, the state is us.

  10. I am presuming you are American - forget Lamy - get a Cross fountain pen. Fountain pens are lovely to write with unless. like me you tend to scratch your ears, put them in your mouth/pocket and gesticulate with them - in which case it can become very messy. Cheap biro or expensive fountain - both are great to write with, but other people tend to judge you on your penmanship and the fountain pen trumps everything.

  11. If you have 3 possibilities in a random number generator or lets say as an analogy, 3 balls in a bag, the odds of any particular ball coming out is 3/1, yet the odds of 2 coming out 5 times in a row is 3x3x3x3x3 = 243, so the odds of that occurring is 243/1, so lets say we did our random picking, and 2 came out 4 times in a row, then the odds of it continuing would be extremely unlikely, at 243/1 for it to come out a 5th time, so it shows that 2 coming out a fifth time is unlikely, yet at the same time there is only 3 options so then you conclusively speaking can realize that the odds of 2 coming out is both 243/1 and 3/1 at the same time? how can this be?

     

    Paradox?

     

    PS: apologies for spelling error, I meant of course probability paradox.

     

     

     

     

    Dean

     

    Normally we would say probability of any one ball is 1/3 or 1:3 not 3/1. Ie with a fair dice the probability of throwing a 5 is 1 in 6 - 1/6. your second proposition is strangely phrased - " the odds of 2 coming out 5 times in a row". Is that two different results coming five times on the trot or the result #2 coming solely five times... from your calcs I guess it is the second.

     

    The next part of your post is the mistake - once you have got four "2"s on the trot the random generator DOES NOT remember this fact and still produces the same odds for each option. You have already got the four "2"s - and the next throw is as random as any other; the dice, the cards, the ball etc do not remember what has got before!! This is vital in gambling - unless you are working on a restricted deck then there is no memory of the previous event. to be explicit - if you have just rolled 2,2,2,2 on a fair die, you are just as likely to roll another 2 than any other number.

     

    the high chance of 1 in 243 is for 5 times a certain number - but that is only applicable before the first ball is chosen. If the first ball is "1" then the chances of five "2"s is zero, ditto if a "3" is chosen . If you know the first ball is a "2" then the chances of 5 "2"s on the trot is simply the probability of the next four balls being a "2".

     

    In essence, basis a fair game (and if it is not a fair game then walk away) probabilities only work forwards and remember the dice/cards have no memory

  12. Your first link seems to tell the story of a situation in which the police will charge him with any possible outstanding murder charge and he will plead guilty. There is no downside to him pleading guilty - but if he denies it and gets found guilty he can suffer death penalty. Some police forces would have already charged him with every outstanding case just to improve their clear up rate.

  13. If you are at the star it moves away from you at light speed - but the gap between me (on earth) and you (at the aforementioned star) gets bigger so rapidly that the light will never reach me if the universe keeps expanding. Light travels at light speed - but the space it must cross does not remain constant

  14. A change to large tax-free allowance with a highish flat rate above that allowance from a progressive system tends to benefit the poorest and the richest, but those in the middle ground lose out. As floating voters tend to be those in the middle we tend not to see this pushed by many political parties who actually want to get elected.

  15. Do we have a right to drive - I would have phrased it that we are licensed by the law of the land to drive under certain circumstances. Some rights can be seen as absolute (life, not to be tortured etc), others are contingent (freedom of speech, association) - yet other notions are thought of as rights, but in fact are just generally applicable and accepted practices. There is a convention of the rights of the child - UNCRC - I haven't checked but I don't think driving is one of them.

  16. I'm not convinced that it does. But, can you confirm, with absolute crushing certainty, that anti-matter (anti-mass) does not repel matter (mass) ? If mass & anti-mass really did repel each other, what human experiments would have been able to notice the fact, swamped by 42 O-o-M, by the EM charge interaction ?

     

    As SwansonT said the experiments on antihydrogen at cern indicate this is not the case. The anti-hydrogen (ie anti-matter that was not electrically charged) created at CERN had to be maintained within a huge magnetic field - if matter repelled anti-matter it could have been easily constrained within any system made of normal matter. the link to the nature article that describes the containment of anti-hydrogen is here. Anti-matter is opposite charge - not opposite mass.

  17. Widdekind - but why? in my limited knowledge, so far as we have discovered everything has that has mass has positive mass (energy - positive energy) - we have no basis to think about repulsive gravity or spacetime distortion in the opposite direction (if that can even happen).

     

    For there to be a repulsive gravitational force then we must first acknowledge the possibility of negative mass/energy. Rather than jumping straight out to the long scale interaction of gravity we should first try to understand how we could accommodate negative mass into our small scale world.

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