AL

It would be ideal to separate the politics from the morality, but in practice, it's not so easy to do. I would like, in general, for the government to refrain from legislating morality as well, but only to the extent that the (im)moral acts in question do not result in anyone being harmed or having their rights infringed. This is why I'm ok with government passing laws against murder even though it's a moral issue -- we acknowledge at least an implicit right to life, and murder infringes upon that. In a similar fashion, one could easily assert that a fetus has a right to life, and that abortion infringes upon the rights of the fetus. Whether or not a fetus has a right to life is a moral question. It's not that easy to separate morality from politics.

Something which might support your argument, but this comes from Al Jazeera, so take it with enough salt to buoy the Titanic out of the Atlantic: Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EC3AC145-96B2-4858-AE3D-63FDE0B59D69.htm This declaration comes from "the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claims to act on behalf of al-Qaida." Make of it what you will.

I take issue with the idea of the deficit being unusual, because it's really an ordinary run-of-the-mill deficit America has gotten used to since FDR's Keynesianism. I do agree we don't have much to show for it, and I also believe some of our spending is unjustified and Bush "squandered" our surplus to some extent. But saying "much of Bush's spending is unwarranted" is one thing; to say the deficit is at an all-time high or poses a dire new threat is unintentionally misleading at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.

Highest unadjusted deficit maybe. But as a percentage of GDP, the deficit is not at a historical high. Personally though I think the more meaningful measure would be deficit as a percentage of taxable GDP, as this would to some extent give us some measure of our government's ability to pay it off.

As matt grime already pointed out though, [math]\infty[/math] is not in [math]\Re[/math], so the multiplication is still undefined.

Yeah, I did realize at the time I typed it that it sounded redundant, but I needed a subject to explain the next clause: "...who graffitied my site." I probably could've written "I was hacked by someone who graffitied my site," but same deal.

I ran php-nuke for a while. It was pretty slow and crappy, and then I got hacked by a hacker who graffitied my site with "this is what you get for using crappy php-nuke!" I never bothered to fix it after that. A little searching on the 'net actually yields step-by-step tutorials on how to hack php-nuke. How sad. I hear xoops is a little better, but I have no experience with that so I can't testify. Basically, don't expect too much from free software. EDIT: php-nuke has since been updated several times after my experience, so it wouldn't be fair for me to say it's still bad. Here are the relevant links: http://phpnuke.org/ http://www.xoops.org/

You're more than welcome to not visit that part of the forum if it bothers you that much. I actually enjoy that forum, being an ex-Christian who spent a good number of my teenage years reading religious apologetics, philosophy and science before finally giving up on religion altogether. The debates still interest me however, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who enjoys them. I can respect religion to the extent that it does not defy reason or do harm to others. If you choose to have faith in something which cannot be proven or disproven, that's fine with me (though I prefer to call it hope rather than faith). If you choose to have faith that 2 + 2 = 5, I cannot respect that, no matter how dearly you hold that belief. Likewise, if your faith makes you a better person, I'm all for it. If your faith causes you to blow things up and chop people's heads off or pick on harmless minorities, I cannot respect that, again, no matter how dear this belief is to you*. *I'm using "you" in a general sense. I'm not referring to any of you in particular.

Definitions are arbitrary. You do not "prove" definitions, nor do you "prove" something that has been arbitrarily designated as undefined. The only requirement in math is that a definition be "well-defined," meaning it doesn't lead to some logical inconsistency or absurdity. 0/0 cannot be well-defined, so it is left as undefined. It leads to all sorts of contradictions. Here, have fun with this one: Let 0/0 = 0. Then: -infinity = ln(0) = ln(0/0) = ln(0) - ln(0) = -infinity - -infinity = infinity - infinity

Whoops, sorry. I did a search for Einstein's Puzzle and nothing turned up, so I assumed it had never been posted before. I guess you can delete this thread. Edit: Wait, now I remember I didn't search at all. I usually search before creating a new thread.

Some of you may have seen this before, but for those who haven't this is supposedly a puzzle written by Einstein, and he supposedly predicted that 98% of people wouldn't be able to figure it out. I seriously doubt that Einstein is the actual author of this puzzle, and I expect Snopes.com to debunk this claim someday, but nevertheless the puzzle is a decent one, so here goes:

I would like for people to be responsible enough to use birth-control to avoid pregnancies, and should it fail where a pregnancy is not desired, seek an abortion as early as possible and only as an absolute last resort. Asking people to be responsible however is probably asking too much. I am most definitely opposed to partial-birth abortions -- there are few reasons to wait that long. I think part of the problem of partial-birth abortions though is that young girls who get pregnant are under a lot of social pressure to conceal it, so they wait until the last minute and do crazy things out of desperation. Society frowns on fornication and unwed mothers, and abstinence is still seen as the be-all end-all panacaea. If society were more open about sex, and was honest enough with itself to realize that teenagers and unready young people have always had and will always have sex, we can more appropriately tackle these issues. Several years ago in Southern California, there was a young girl who, unknown to her family and friends, gave birth to a baby in a public toilet and let it drown. When police found her and arrested her, she said she did it because she feared she would be beaten by her father for being an unwed mother. Now of course, I don't believe for a second that a threat of beating justifies drowning a baby, but you can't pretend none of the blame falls on the father either for putting this young and confused girl in this kind of desperate situation. Make condoms and birth control more readily available and don't label young unwed mothers as fornicating "whores" or otherwise put unnecessary pressure on them during what is arguably one of the most difficult times in their life. Social conservatives argue that these things will only encourage more young people to have sex, but I believe it will only cause these young people to be more open about what they're already doing -- having sex.

When I was young, I was told that caffeine stunts your growth. I've always been skeptical of this claim, since there's no way for most caffeine consuming adults to determine what their height would've been if they hadn't consumed so much. One easy study that would control entirely for genetics and partially for environmental factors would be to get identical twins and have one drink lots of caffeine and the other avoid it. I'm currently unaware of any studies that have attempted this.

Remember not to confuse positivism with normativism. The theory of evolution describes what happens; it does not make a value judgement about what happens. If an animal goes extinct, evolution will describe that. But evolution does not say "animals should go extinct." That is a value judgement. After all, if a doomsday meteor were headed for our planet, I doubt you'd argue "well, if the meteor wipes us out, that's natural selection, so the world community should do nothing to try to stop this meteor." Yes, if it wipes us out, it would be natural selection, but that does not mean we should desire it.

That's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. Banshees are in a totally different game, one where armies are much smaller and stealing an enemy unit has a much greater impact. Also, Dark Archons are pretty useless against a skilled terran player who knows how to micromanage his Science Vessels. EMP = the scourge of Protoss (and particularly Archons) everywhere, and it is too easy to use. Tough resources really depends on what map you're playing on. Blizzard made it a point to combat money maps on the Warcraft 3 ladder because a) it kind of defeats the point of economic management if you have nearly unlimited supplies of resources, and b) it unnecessarily prolongs the game. Big Game Hunters was the epitome of money map madness in Starcraft, and games on that map could last several hours trying to wear your opponent down through attrition. You'll notice that Big Game Hunters and other money maps are not used in Starcraft tournaments.

It got moved to pseudoscience, I believe.

I recently traded my TI-89 which got me through my undergrad studies for a TI-89 Titanium. It's basically the same thing, but with more memory, a GUI, USB support and a bunch of free programs. My numerical analysis professor at UC Berkeley told me TI calculators are a load of crap and that HP is the way to go. But then he also bragged about how some of the top engineers at HP were former students of his, so I think there's a bit of an HP fanboy in him. A stock TI doesn't support RPN, but you can easily get a small program off the net that will add support. TI has a huge support community, which is one reason I prefer it. I'm not averse to programming my own stuff, but I strongly disbelieve in re-inventing the wheel if there are already wheels out there ready for use.

That's a rather shaky premise. Can you prove that? It may be weakly empirically true, but it certainly isn't a priori conclusive.

The inverse you are thinking of is the "multiplicative inverse," which is the same thing as reciprocal. For a nonzero number x, its multiplicative inverse is 1/x. This is different from an inverse function. For a function f(x), its inverse is a function g(x) such that f(g(x)) = 1 for all x.

In the particular case of [math]x=\pi[/math], the i gets multiplied by zero, so the imaginary term disappears and you end up with a real number: -1. However, for other values of x, the i stays in there. Try out other values. And yes, the formula works for degrees, provided you make the proper adjustment from radians first. Radians, though, are more useful for theoretical math.

You can get OpenOffice for Linux, it should open .doc files. I have no experience with Windows emulators on Linux, but I've seen Windows emulators on Mac and they're reasonably fast.

Well libertarians are generally considered to be "conservative" or "right-leaning" on fiscal/economic issues, so if this article was talking about fiscal or economic policy, it wouldn't be off the mark to say Cato leans right. If the article was talking about, say, gay marriage, then yes, it makes no sense to refer to Cato as right-leaning with regard to that issue.

Well, most obviously the square root of 2 squared is an irrational number taken to a power to make itself rational, so that example should do away with anything counterintuitive. As for e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0, Euler's Equation says e^ix = cos(x) + i*sin(x). So naturally, e^i*pi = -1 (just plug pi in for x). As for the proof of the equation, you use Taylor series expansions for e^x, cos(x) and sin(x), which are: e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + x^4/4! +... cos(x) = 1 - x^2/2! + x^4/4! - x^6/6! + ... sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7! + ... If you expand the formula for e^xi, you get: e^xi = 1 + xi -x^2/2! - ix^3/3! + x^4/4!+... = cos(x) + isin(x)

I wouldn't characterize Rand's position as "survival of one's self before the survival of another." It's more like "it is most rational to pursue that which makes you happy," which could entail putting your own survival above that of others, but not necessarily so. Here's what she had to say on the ethics of emergencies in The Virtue of Selfishness: If you'd be unhappy with someone's demise, then it is perfectly in keeping with her philosophy to attempt to save that someone at a great expense (even perhaps, at the risk of your own survival). It's just that Rand takes issue with calling it a sacrifice, since, as she argues, you are receiving a net beneficial gain of sorts.

If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he sired your parent, what would happen?