iNow

I'm asserting that government can't compete with private business on things that lend themselves to a free market - most goods and services. I can use the failed american education system to support that - private schools run circles around government facilities.

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The american healthcare system is not a free market system - it is polluted with junk regulation mixed with good regulation, as well as unfair tax laws that keep insurance as a benefit from employers rather than allowing individuals to shop. It's a socialist system in terms of function - it's only private in terms of who walks away with the money. The private sector is enjoying this lobsided profit dump...I am not.

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I want an example of a socialist healthcare system that provides quality - choice, talent and etc - and is efficient.

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School vouchers were defeated much to the delight of the Teacher's Union. So, my money continues to be stolen from me and spent on other people's kids to get a psuedo education. And because I don't have any money left for my kids, I have to send them to the same shitty facility.

 

Thank you socialism. No choice. No freedom.

 

You should watch John Stossel's "Stupid in America" on Youtube. It's about 45 minutes and they cover the whole private school, charter school, public school subject. It's truly sad...

Brilliant post, Paranoia. I could not agree with you more. How does offering up a government run monopoly help anyone but those having their pockets lined by it? We need to improve the regulation based on the needs of the masses, not the needs of the corporation or political power voting on said regulation.

Again, your post was passionate and on point, and I thank you for it. Also, thank you for the head's up on the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA

Here's another rather interesting film for those so inclined as to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87

How long must we do things wrong before we change as a culture and stop repeating the same mistakes?

I believe Paralith is arguing that men are attracted to control, and visible weakness in the female allows one method of achieving this control. He has used anorexia as an example (I think due to a female professor he had once suggesting this to him).

I tend more to Lance's stance on this, that this "attraction to weakness so we may control" is the exception, not the rule. We have evolved to be attracted to cues of health and fertility, and the potential that the mate will allow herself to become a vehicle for our offspring. That's about it.

It tends to be more "spectacular" than pure "science" journals (like Nature, or the Journal Science). If you want "reliable," I would stick to the peer reviewed journals, not the "Entertainment Tonight" of science speculation.

However, to be clear, I enjoy reading it because it's exciting and is VERY thought provoking.

How do you define "teacher?" Also, why would this be useful? If you post a question, somebody will respond if they know the answer, regardless if they get paid by a school or institution and have the title "teacher."

What saves us is the uncertainty principle which says that there are no experiments one can perform in which the position of the electron, this being the particle aspect, and the momentum of the electron, this being the wave aspect, can be simultaneously measured to arbitrarly high precision.

 

Thus the deeper meaning of the uncertainty principle is that it is the condition that ensures the logical consistency of quantum mechanics.

Thank you, Vincent. Your knowledge of the topic is admittedly beyond my own. However, I personally think there must still be a better explanation than that which has been offered, as this is a bit like saying the bible exists because religion would not have any central tenets without it. There is something inherent in the universe that makes the outcome of events non-absolute. The principle of uncertainty is a description of this.

The only thing that is absolute is change itself.

In an article in "Popular Science" I read a theory of how light speed could be acheived and the article said something about a bubble of electrons that the vehicle stays in which keeps the space inside of it a normal while the vehicle compresses the space in front of it and expands the space behind it and apparently using this method it's possible to "travel time".

I believe you are referring to this article:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/d1e527098dcda010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

 

 

 

Does anyone care to explain to me how this is even remotly possible?

It's not... yet. It is an idea based on some serious speculation, and there are lot of really big "ifs" still to be sorted out. From the link above:

The Warp Drive To-Do List

A few not-so-minor challenges you’ll need to tackle before takeoff

 

• Discover Negative Energy: There are no known particles with negative mass. The closest scientists have come is a phenomenon called the Casimir effect, wherein empty space between two conducting plates behaves as if it contains negative energy.
   
  
• Devise a Way To Manipulate It: Even if scientists could transform matter into negative energy, they would still have to find a way to focus it and create an infinitesimally thin, yet extraordinarily stable, bubble of the stuff around the spaceship.
   
  
• Harness Dark Energy: In recent years, cosmologists have been studying a mysterious force called dark energy that they think is accelerating the expansion of the universe. If scientists could generate it at the back of the bubble, it might move, or expand, space.
   
  
• Build Bubble Brakes: Because the spacetime carrying the ship would be completely cut off from the outside of the bubble, there would be no way to send a signal to turn off the warp drive. The signal would never get there, and the ship would never stop
  

.

By the way, this is a forum, not a chatroom. Sometimes it will take days to get a single response to a question, and it has nothing to do with people being lazy or inattentive. There are people of all ages here, and many work full time jobs, logging in here just to relax and explore. Good luck on your float for school.

You might check these pages:

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm'>http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/voice1.htm'>http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/voice1.htm

...from this site:

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/

I believe that the existence of the classical "path" can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it.

--Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927

Additionally, I'd suggest that personality and "inner beauties" are what keep two people together, not necessarily what attract them initially. We don't go to strip clubs because we think there are a lot of happy, warm, compassionate girls there with whom we'd like to pair bond for life.

Look at all of the pretty feathers on that peacock. My goodness, he must be strong and fertile if he is able to survive with a lush, vibrant plume like that.

Cut the tape in half... down the center... to get twice as much.

She has served as a target for the unfocussed frustration and disappointment in the populace. For good reason, great percentages of people are disgusted with how education and knowledge in our society seems so lacking. The focus seems entirely on instant gratification and physical beauty, social bling and political fling.

This girl from South Carolina is not the source of the problem, she is a symptom of it, and she is not worthy of continued attack, but a better role model.

Treat the cause, not the symptom.

To say skinny women are low in fertility, you must define 'skinny.'

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Random fact: Did you know that Dev Singh has a bunch of naked Barbie dolls in his office? Strange place to go for office hours.

On a much deeper level, uncertainty describes the probabilities. If you did not have uncertainty as a fundamental part of the measured system, then one could predict the outcome of each eventuality with 100% accuracy.

Uncertainty and unitarity are coupled. I think...

I don't honestly understand what V or W mean... Can you guys like... make a picture or describe more?

Think of them not as letters, but as shapes. It has been mentioned that the triangle is a very strong shape, so you can come close to making a triangle by making a "V." If you want to make the "V" stronger, you would double it, and instead make a "W."

Sounds like you have a cool teacher if you're doing a project like this. I'm sure they'll talk about the various approaches once the project is done, and I'd love to hear what others in your class tried.

Half the fun is being creative. You don't have to build a solution which is perfect, but you do need to try creating a solution.

SkepticLance, you are absolutely correct. A woman carrying child tends to be less appealing because she cannot conceive. Any resources devoted to her would be to assist with the already gestating child. I do understand this, and appreciate you calling it out in case others did not. However, my reference was to the comment specifically about "fertility." A woman being skinny is actually counter to fertility, and it is the fertile ones who get pregnant. Perhaps I could have chosen my words more carefully, and I thank you again for clarifying.

To the OPs point, youth tends to be more attractive due to the number of children a younger woman is still able to have. As she ages, she cannot birth as many children, so technically males are programmed to be attracted to a female who is just old enough to conceive. In today's society, this is strongly counter to accepted norms, but in archaic times, it was the 12 to 15 year olds that the men went for.

To borrow from SkepticLance's point, all of this is rather disgusting in context of pair bonds and social connections which go beyond coitus, but the evolved circumstances of attraction described above are valid all the same.

I offer the following speculation based on some real information. In other words, what follows is an educated guess based loosely on what I know of neuroanatomy, development, and cogntion, but I am not planning on supporting it with citation or searching to see if it's fully accurate (take it with a grain of salt)...

As we develop and learn new things, the neural pathways associated with those learned concepts get richer, and more neural connections are formed. Generally, the more neural connections there are, the stronger the concept, and the more rooted in our being it is. Through repetition and importance, these pathways are continually pruned and trimmed, and those that remain have greater impact and importance in our concepts and thoughts. The more it's activated, the more it grows and the number of connections (neural web) increases.

I like the analogy of erosion. If you have a hill, and it rains often on this hill, soon little trenches will form where the water runs down it. As more rain falls, the waters will begin going into the trench more frequently, making it wider and deeper. The wider and deeper the trench becomes, the more it becomes the primary path of the falling water. If you think of nerval pathways as the trench, and the perceived stimulus or thought as the rain, you see that the more it's used the greater neural branching and strength.

As we proceed through the world, especially as we age and become less neural plastic (connections tend more to be attached to the existing pathways instead of generating completely new pathways as they would when young, and all information was novel), incoming information is more quickly associated onto these baseline, or foundation, pathways... simply becoming another branch on the existing structure.

So, when you show someone that something was false, it activates this existing pathway (making it stronger), but also the pathway for "concept is false." However, chances are that the "concept is false" pathway is not as robust (since they believed the concept to be true prior to the new information coming in). Until the "concept is false" pathway becomes stronger than the "concept is true" pathway, little or no change will occur. So, in this case, the information proving the myth false can actually serve to strengthen the old (false) idea since there was activation of the existing pathway, and the "concept is false" pathway is still relatively weak.

I suppose it's the same with the silence. The pathway is activated, so it becomes stronger, but there is no evidence counter to it to grow more connections in the "concept is false" pathway.

In essence, it really depends on how one has learned about the world around them. If their "foundation pathway" is that "nothing is certain, and concepts must be discarded when proven false," then they likely accepted the new information and did not mistakenly think the false myth was true when tested a few days later. However, if their "foundation pathway" is more basic, and more absolute, such as "this concept is true," then it's much harder to let go of the previous concept, and these people are more likely to test a few days later about the false myth remaining true. It depends on where your "foundation" is, and how it's laid. If it's built on the concept of information malleability, then no worries. If it's built on an absolute "set of truths" instead of a flexible "method of approach," then maybe Dawkin's has a point when he raises the alarm bells.

Sorry if this isn't making any sense. I usually describe neuroanatomy in laymens terms much better, but I am pretty tired after a day of hanging drywall and reframing a wall.

What the heck were these parents thinking?

I'd suggest, "Thank God somebody is willing to take this crazy monkey child of mine out of my hair for a few days without me needing to pay THEM. Pour me another glass of wine and put in a movie that's not a cartoon I've seen 63 times."

I used to teach kung fu to kids in summer camp. Despite the fact that they loved them very much, most parents couldn't wait for the brief break we offered them from their children...

That, or it's like the Lohan parents, and they think their kids are going to help THEM get rich.

However, we all take things on faith every day. If we have inconclusive data concerning some decision that must be made, we do not (usually) dither about unable to make up our minds what to believe - we make a choice. We put our faith in one possibility being correct and make our decision accordingly. To deny faith is to deny the proper functioning of a human being on a daily basis.

It seems that you may have missed Glider's point. Inconclusive data is not "no data." We make logical and intuitive leaps from the evidence at hand, despite the fact that this evidence may be limited.

Faith in God is done with zero evidence. There is a difference, at least in my mind.

Proper functioning of a human being requires faith? Come on, it requires food, water, and air, that's about it.

Do I detect a pattern in your affections? After all Bettina and Miss Teen South Carolina do share certain similarities...

Neither one of them would ever have sex with you?

Why is there anything in the first place? Why do things exist, rather than there being no reality, and no universe - nothing at all?

These are major questions, and have no clear, easy, consistent answer. Millenia of philosophers have attempted to describe and explain these issues. If you're truly curious, you might try a few books on existential philosophy. Look for author names like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, De Beuvoir, and Tillich.

Life is what you make of it, quite literally.

Beside being slimmer while we are young, a pregnant female will put on weight. If a male was even a dumb animal, this bigger looking woman would be a dead end, with respect to possible procreation at that time. Slimmer also means she is not pregnant and more likely to be fertile.

Errmmm... Isn't the pregnant woman likely to be more fertile?

Physical beauty? Cues to fertility and health. That's it. Often measured with bilateral symmetry, waist-to-hip ratio, facial proportion, and radiance in skin and hair.

Hahaha... Twiggy is more fertile because she's not preggers. Brilliant.

Edit: Oh yea i remember what else i wanted to say. I believe you can never disprove something you can only prove its something else.

I've heard something like this before, but believe it only applies in certain contexts (and I apologize, but I'm drawing a blank on what those are at the moment).

Let's say you state, "All dogs are white." Well, once I walk by you with a brown dog I've disproven your statement. Make sense?

If he's sleeping there's something wrong with him.

You mean, you don't fall asleep when you're done? Strange.

Anyway, I shouldn't have said "can't." Would have been more accurate to say, "it's just not too likely."

prosto ?

With an "e," not an "o," but still, my bad. No vowel at the end. Should have been "prost."

http://www.awa.dk/glosary/slainte.htm

I can't build a rocket ship by myself, yet we still send people to outer space via this mode of transport. I can't see atoms, yet they are there. I can't sleep with a Victoria's Secret model, but that doesn't mean nobody can.

On a philosophical level, I believe you are right, though, that nothing is impossible. However, I contend that some things are clearly more probable than others, and that this probability more closely matches reality than my fantasies about unicorns and leprechauns.

How did I do?

I'm pretty sure you just said that creationists aren't conscious. I love it!

Proste.

If I have "trouble understanding?" Teehehe.

Well, in sum, the sales of a book are more indicative of the claritiy and approachability provided by it's author, and the marketing capicity of their publishing representative, but you'll get no disagreement from me (and I'd presume most who devote time and effort to the study of string theory) that the lack of falsifiable predictions is an issue worthy of further discussion.

I guess it’s too bad that sales of Harry Potter has no impact on my ability to ride around on a broom stick whilst playing quidditch.