Delta1212

Wow. So many specious shallow arguments. I guess there are lots of sheep. Some sheep dogs. A few wolves. And only very few wolf hunters. There are doers and there are freeloaders. We know who we are. Enough said here.

I'm betting you think the people arguing with you here are freeloaders, and that you're either a wolf or a "wolf hunter."

Are you conscious of how your food got to your plate?

 

Perdue factory farm:

https://www.treehugg...ally-going.html

 

Tyson factory farm:

http://www.nbcnews.c...deo-f2D11627571

As has been pointed out, a good deal of land is only suitable for producing meat.

 

If everyone switched to a vegan diet, you would reduce the total land area required to feed everyone, but also reduce the total land area available for producing food.

 

You are making some decent arguments for reducing meat consumption, but have not yet made a good argument for a totally vegan diet.

There's a reason Bernie was so popular, and it wasn't just his policy on healthcare and education and minimum wage. There's a reason Trump received so many millions of votes, and it wasn't just that streaks of racism and jingoism run deeper in the US than we thought.

 

It was the fact that they showed passion. It wasn't a mask. They appeared genuine. Democrats, however, too often come across as reading from a script instead of speaking from the heart and gut.

 

They'll obtain more votes once they stop acting so milquetoast. Less LOLs, more balls... Less snark, more bark... Less whine, more spine.

 

Nobody wants to spend/waste their vote on someone unwilling or incapable of fighting for what's important and doing what it takes to drive the ball across the finish line.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. -Yeats

 

Thus has it ever been, and thus shall it ever be.

You have to arrange the mirrors so that they were reflecting something other than the interior of the box itself, like a second stage area above or below the interior, similar to a Pepper's ghost set-up without the ghost.

 

I'm not entirely sure how to get that to work with the given constraints, but it seems like that might be the only way that could potentially be feasible if you want a similar effect without just invoking digital displays or, as above, 3D glasses or some such that "gives away" the illusion more easily.

 

 

Just goes to show how unaware you are of government services that you've relied on your entire life. Unless you never used roads, got mail, went to a public school, used a mortgage deduction, used GPS or dozens upon dozens of other niceties that our collective tax dollars provide.

The Bootstrap Guide to Independence and Success:

 

1. Take for granted all help that is given to you

2. Deny that any help has ever been given to you

3. Refuse to help anyone else

Phi for All: ... Now not sure if I like Cherry pie at all. I did. Try working for a living. In the mean time get out of my pocket. I worked hard my entire life. Nothing was given to me. I had to earn it the old fashioned way. This post and thread is again devolving into a paddy cake may pole sing along.

 

As a former emergency room RN one of my many jobs was getting the automobile accident victim to sign the permission slip. Had to have somebody from legal to witness. If the gork, (patient) could not sign, statute law at that time permitted us legally to do what was needed. They hardly bled out.

 

When my cracked tooth gets bad enough I will have it fixed. Pretty darn soon also! Yikes!

 

Now for those who are going down in flames trying non successfully to defend socialism, (small s) on any level, including the silly notion that we are all deserving of something FREE from our Gubmt and are now resorting to hateful personal attacks, let's keep this civil please. Some name calling is OK. Do not loose it.

 

The United States Constitution is our law of the land. It is who we are, where we came from and where we are going. The USA is not Europe. Fortunately. But ... unfortunately we do seem to be pestered with bad ELECTED politicians who seem to be into it for only their self aggrandizement.

 

swansont: ...If somebody does not make more money, earn more. Very simple and doable today. For everybody here who wants freebies from Uncle Sam, (which means out of MY POCKET) would you like some biscuits or hand cakes with your cheap whine? Finally .... why is a Science Forum so socialist?

 

Dunno fur sures. Not enough evidence. Correlation does not support causality. Twenty five degrees F. below normal right now. Global warming. About 42.4N, about 123W. Kinda. I would like some more pie please.

I'm really impressed. Not many first graders are able to go to school full time while also holding down a job that allows them to pay private school tuition, let alone continue doing that all the way through the end of high school.

 

My hat is off to you.

Phi for All: I do believe I never called myself a Capitalist. Perhaps you are mistaken. Many doable family financial plans exist to address individual health care costs. It is called a savings program. A novel idea today. Easy to eliminate any and all government interference. It gives the individual the freedom of choice. That plus our USA Constitution specifically delegates such to the States or the Individual.

 

Our extended nuclear family may or may not have such a savings program. Perhaps a conservatively oriented diversified investment program geared to long term stability. Housing. Education. Retirement. Even recreational vacations. Medical. Also it is a sense of family honor and responsibility. We try to negotiate medical costs beforehand. Payment in full with a deep cash discount. Or ... a payment schedule paid in full.

 

Personal note. I have a cracked lower molar. Hurts sometimes. No ice water for me! I have been deferring that required Crown so my grandkids can go to summer adventure boot camp. Eventually I will pull out the bucks to fix my tooth. Cheaper for us to just set money aside for years then occasionally spend it on necessary medical fixes. My friend dentist accepts cash. Novel in itself. We will negotiate a price.

 

Socialist government mandated medical insurance has already been tried. Soviet Union. We pretty much know how that worked out. Medical insurance is something the government needs not to become involved in. Keep it in the private corporate "capitalist" sector. Give the individual the freedom of choice. But ... this also requires financial discipline: sometime also novel to the socialist commie sheeple or snow flakes?

 

Dunno fur sures. Respectfully. Cherrie Pie is my favourite!

How did it work out in every country in Europe?

No, it just isn't science.

 

Science is a particular methodology for acquiring knowledge, and also refers to any knowledge acquired via that methodology.

 

The methodology is as follows: Make an observation about the world. Come up with an idea that explains that observation. Develop a test you can do such that your idea would predict the outcome of that test and, if the test does not give the predicted result, it proves your idea wrong. Observe the result of the test. Repeat.

 

Scriptural knowledge does not follow this pattern. Regardless of whether or not any of it is true, it is not science. To qualify as science requires making use of the scientific method. It is not enough to merely make reference to some aspect of the natural world that has also been described using science.

The cube , the electro magnetism , The mosquito like propulsion of electro magnetic waves , the spectrum , the seven colors .Looks a bit like science to me .

There are not actually seven colors. This division was created by Newton because he thought the number seven was mystical.

 

In reality, electromagnetic radiation forms a, more or less, continuous spectrum, and even biologically the colors we perceive don't fit neatly into seven categories in any meaningful or objective way.

All of the evidence we have in the fields of biology, genetics, medicine, botany, zoology, paleontology, environmental science, anatomy, etc, etc, etc point towards evolution being correct, and the majority of our knowledge across pretty much all life sciences only makes sense in the context of evolutionary theory.

 

The question is, at this stage, a bit like asking an astrophysicist if there are any scientific models of the universe where the Earth does not orbit the Sun.

 

There are lots of models, and there are variances in details and unknown areas open to be expanded upon, but though there are a huge variety of models that compete in the details and some models are developed to challenge prevailing theories and explore alternative avenues, none of them fails to include that aspect as a basic part of it because no one has found a way to develop a model without it that makes any sense at all in light of the total body of present evidence.

Theory of God ,IMHO i think god was always trying to say something .But if i post something from the holy books , everybody is going to think its stupid even for internet standards

 

So i am not going to post it .

 

I think it fits a nice alternative theory or a way of thinking

 

 

Not going to down vote you, because I don't think you actually said anything that is wrong, per se. However, the OP asked for alternative scientific theories to evolution. You have prevented an alternative theory/way of thinking, but it is not a scientific one.

 

You are free to debate whether science gets at the real truth of the matter, but you can't reclassify things that are not science as science just because you believe them to be true and science is popularly seen by many people as a way of getting at the truth. Science places specific requirements on the types of evidence and explanatory power that must be provided by any models or theories about the world, and at present God doesn't meet the requirements to be a scientific theory.

 

That doesn't mean it is a false perspective, necessarily, but it does mean that it isn't a scientific one, and so doesn't actually answer the question that was asked.

Actually, anything above 5 billion years, and the sun would be a red giant and most likely consume Earth.

 

Wait. Stop. I KNOW THERE ARE OTHER POSSIBILITIES! But the most likely one, is that earth is consumed. I'm not turning this into a debate about what will happen to earth.

 

In the event that earth is consumed, no life will form.

So you have a 5 billion year window if life were to die off right now.

All life. Including bacteria.

If it happens every 50 billion years, then the likely hood of life happening ever again on earth is really slim.

I still stand on the idea that abiogenesis never happened. Just letting you know. But ignoring that for now.

 

 

 

I would frankly agree with you, that life happening in 5 billion years is something I would consider rare. Given the idea that a random organism managing to show up would probably die off unless it just happened to have the right conditions. Even if those conditions were that it only needed one carbon atom a day to survive.

Abiogenesis suggests the chemicals and other things created the life form. Doesn't mean that that life form will form directly ready to live in the environment it's created in. The chemicals, I'd assume, would be pretty random on what they create so I doubt they'll specifically create a single celled organism with DNA adapted to it's environment. Unless I'm completely wrong and it does create it based on it's environment. I don't really know. And frankly nobody does.

Which lowers the rate of life showing up to extremely small chances.

Unless, it's happened often(1 million years maybe?) except the organism was rarely adapted to it's environment.

Abiogenesis, is a theory that's extremely hard to test. All we know, is that life showed up. Studying Abiogenesis and the likely hood of it happening, is hard to do.

 

 

You're jumping way too far ahead. You don't get a single-celled organism spontaneously assembling in the primordial soup. All you need is a molecule that makes more of itself, which does not need to be nearly as complicated as cellular life.

 

Once it starts replicating, you get imperfect replications. That leads to differences in the copies. Some of the differences will mean that the copies can't replicate. Some will mean they replicate more poorly. And some will mean they replicate better. The better replicators will grow to outnumber the others because they are better at replicating and the same process will take effect with each round of copying.

 

 

The primary focus of life is not survival. It is that replication. The early precursors wouldn't need to maintain homeostasis (i.e. "live"). They'd just need to be in an environment that allowed them to replicate themselves. And they wouldn't crop up in the first place except in such an environment pretty much by definition. (A self replicating molecule isn't a self replicating molecule if it can't replicate itself). The rest of the stuff life does gets picked up along the way from lucky accidents in the way of replication errors that get selected for because they allow the replicating molecules to: replicate more accurately, maintain their own environmental bubbles that are suitable for replicating (i.e. cells), gather more raw materials and energy for fueling the replicating process and so on.

 

I don't think this process is necessarily being Anglicized, to be honest, it was part of the development of German orthography. The vowel difference was notated with a small e above the vowel, which became either the umlaut or an e behind the vowel. This is visible in a lot of German surnames, Goebbels and Goethe being the most obvious (my ex-wife's maiden name also). With the invention of the typewriter, it became increasingly common to write oe instead of ö because of the limited number of characters available.

 

Some Anglicised German names just dropped the umlaut, e.g. Schroder.

Yeah, Anglicization would be bringing the name more in line with the rules of English spelling and/or pronunciation. Vowel + e is an accepted alternative in German spelling for when an umlaut is unavailable, and doesn't have any particular or corresponding meaning in English.

 

Similarly, merely transcribing a name from another language into the Latin script would be Romanization rather than Anglicization, as English is obviously not the only language that uses that alphabet or some variation of it.

 

Yeah, I think swansont has made it very clear we are not discussing any sort of consciousness other than that which potentially emerges from physical structure. Destroy the structure - you've destroyed the consciousness. And in that context if you argue for the existent of duplicate structures, I don't think there's any way to claim that the two (separate) structures house the same consciousness. You'd be talking about two consciousnesses that behaved in very similar ways, but they'd still be distinct.

Of course, by the same token, I'm not entirely convinced that there is a "same consciousness" that exists throughout a person's life or possibly even, at the extreme end, from one moment to the next.

 

I have a sense of continuity with my "previous selves" but that seems like it's more down to memory than because it's actually true. A perfect duplicate of me would feel that same sense of continuity and believe himself to be me, unless given reason to think otherwise, for just the same reason.

 

If consciousness is an emergent process then what's to say it isn't somewhat like, say, a fire. The tongue of flame rising from a candle is not "the same" fire from one moment to the next. It's a continual process of new atoms oxidizing to release heat and light. And that heat is what drives the process for new atoms so it maintains a semblance of consistency that way. But there is no thing there to have a tangible continued existence. You can split the flame by dividing up the fuel source, or "transfer" it to another fuel source by holding something flammable near it. Then you can merge it all back together again in a joint heap up fuel if you want.

 

Unless you do want to talk about some kind of real, physical soul, I don't see how consciousness is much different in this respect. If consciousness arises from the brain, then it is the pattern, and more specifically the way the pattern continuously changes, that gives rise to consciousness. And that pattern is constantly changing. The physical material that makes up the substrate that the pattern is embedded in and that fuels the changes to the pattern is constantly changing.

 

If someone duplicated your brain down to the sub-atomic level, there'd be no way to distinguish between the two. True, any consciousness would be separate from your own, but then, you're separate from who you were a few minutes previous before the copy was made, too. What's to say that the you with "the same" brain is the real inheritor of the older consciousness while the "copy" is a new entity? What if you are, in fact, both new entities kicked off from the process that gave rise to the older one the same way that the heat from a flame continually gives birth to a newer version of itself?

 

What if we took your brain and the duplicate's brain and bisected each at the corpus collosum and then reattached them to the opposite hemisphere of the other brain? You have, again, two identical brains, but now one half of each is original and one half duplicate. Which does "original you" continue to reside in? Either? Neither? Both?

 

How does brain damage affect the continuity of a consciousness? If it does, what constitutes "brain damage" versus a more "natural" change in the brain? Do we have one consciousness as a child that dies at puberty and is replaced by a different one? Does a concussion "kill" us and replace us with someone else?

 

 

The only way I can, at present, reconcile a coherent answer to all of these questions is if consciousness arises fresh and new each moment of subjective experience and there is no continuity except that which is provided by the pattern itself. And, if that is the case, then it would seem to me that any replication of that pattern would have equal standing as a continuation of that earlier pattern.

 

So while a coincidental copy of you in some far-flung region of the universe would obviously not be the older version of "you" even if it has the same memories, I would contend that this doesn't much matter because you already aren't the older you, anyway, and neither will the future you that is going to exist on Earth be the current you, either.

Seems more like you're a servant to the fish.

I don't think any of this is true in really any sense, let alone objectively true.

I don't know if that's entirely fair - studying computer science does require you to think rigorously and logically. I think it does involve an "intellectual mindset" similar to that you bring to bear studying science and mathematics. The key difference, that makes it math in my eyes rather than science, is that you don't apply the scientific method to make new discoveries. You start with axioms and you build a logically correct structure on that foundation. That's more akin to math than science.

Not trying to knock the profession. A significant part of my major in college was based in computer science.

 

It just isn't science.

According to the dictionary definition of science, computer science is a science, so it's a science. Seems a bit pointless to debate the meaning of well defined words.

Which dictionary, and how does it fit?

 

Studying computer science makes you a scientist in the same way being a custodial engineer makes you an engineer.

I think several of you are confusing "computer science" (which is really about things like Turing machine theory and computational complexity and is a type of mathematics) with "computer architecture" (which is a branch of engineering and studies the architecture, design, fabrication, and operation of real computers and is a branch of engineering).

 

Quite a bit of science is relevant in computer architecture, including EM theory (transmission line effects on circuit boards), semiconductor physics, and so on.

 

But "computer science" as it's generally used in the US is in the math arena.

Your typical CS graduate couldn't tell you very much at all about how computers are built, in terms of things like transistor circuits and so on. Many of them couldn't even design a simple hardware state machine out of gates and flip flops. That's studied in electrical engineering. Of course, some CS majors learn some engineering, and some EEs (like me) learn some computer science. But you can make it through the graduation line in either case without doing so.

 

 

By that definition history and literature are science as well.

 

Yes, and I do say that. Computer science teaches you how to use computers (including how to program them). That doesn't mean just knowing a nice variety of languages, it also means understanding which one is fit for various purposes, understanding various algorithms for solving the classic problems that show up over and over again (searching, sorting, etc.), and knowing which algorithm to pick for which application and why, and so forth.

 

But like I touched on above, CS doesn't talk about how computers work in terms of circuitry and so forth. The capabilities of the computer are presented in much the same way the behavior of numbers and algebraic structures are presented in math, and you prove logically how to do various things. Compiler design, for instance, is very much an exercise in the mathematical theory of rigorous language structure.

 

An IRC friend of mine and I often lament the fact that there is not more "crossover training" between the CS of computers and the EE of computers.

This is also something that has concerned me coming from the other direction. It puts me in the mind of cars.

 

Electrical Engineering teaches you how to build the car. Computer Science teaches you how to drive it. For most day to day applications, general design principles and rules of thumb will suffice. The person designing the car need never have driven one before, and the person driving doesn't need to understand all the intricacies of how it is actually built.

 

But as you move towards the cutting edge of high performance, the person designing the machine needs to know exactly how it is going to be driven and the person driving it needs to know exactly how it works, or you aren't going to be able to get the optimal results from it.

I want to start by saying something I've noticed about myself. Maybe this isn't relevant to you at all, but it's a personal thing I do. There will be times when someone challenges me on a firmly held belief. Something I know to be true. And I will find myself inexplicably at a loss for articulable specifics as to why this obviously true thing is so.

 

When that happens, I generally notice myself challenging the other person on why it is they seemingly don't agree with something so obvious. This is a bad habit, and often I will catch myself doing it as I'm in the middle of it, but I do it anyway. And generally that's how I then leave things.

 

But after the conversation, I make it a point to go back and take a closer look at that particular belief because there's a gap that's been exposed. Either I had very good reasons for holding that position and have forgotten them or grown a little fuzzy on the details, or else I've been putting more weight on that particular belief that it deserves without having given it a proper examination.

 

And so I go back and look, not for sources to back up my position, because that's fairly easy to do for any position under sun given five minutes and an Internet connection, but for the reasons why I picked up that belief in the first place. Where, exactly, did it come from?

 

 

On this particular issue, I will say the following: The United States, for the last 15-20 years, has been on a near continuous march of deregulation of guns, this despite some of the worst gun related tragedies in our history as a nation taking place during that time period. I say this not as a comment on what I think should be happening or why, but rather as a comment on state of political environment of the US as pertains to gun control.

 

I personally believe we would be well served by some responsible regulations surrounding the sale and possession of firearms, but I am not by any means supportive of general bans, even, frankly, on many things that bans are often talked about as part of gun control regulations.

 

I have family on both "sides" of the issue living in different places around the country. The thing I always find most striking when discussing the issue with any of them individually, is how close together many their answers are as to what their ideal situation would be in terms of gun control laws.

 

I know vanishingly few people who actively want to see a total gun ban in this country, and know similarly few people who prefer a complete lack of any regulations around the use of firearms. Some of the suggestions I've heard from opposite ends are near identical.

 

And yet most of them are sure that "compromise" to get things to that point is completely impossible.

 

I'm put in mind of two people at opposite ends of a rope in a game of tug of war. Interview them individually, and they'll both say that they'd personally really rather be standing closer to the middle, but if they don't pull from all the way on the end, the other person will just drag the rope farther in the opposite direction.

 

To circle back around, it really does make me wonder where, exactly, this frankly very widespread meme came from that a person should absolutely not, under any circumstances, even talk to the other side about this issue because they can't be trusted to come to any agreement.

 

Are you telling me I'm mistaken? If so, what led you to that conclusion?

I'm not making a claim about how things stand one way or the other. I'm asking what led you to the position that you espoused above.

 

Do you want to know the reason that I'm averse to such "defined and reasonable" changes? There's one reason: I don't trust you to stop. If I really thought we could sit down and make a single, permanent, reasonable compromise about gun control, I'd be totally open to it. But the truth is that as soon as gun control advocates get that in the bag, they will start planning the next step, and then the next step. Maybe that doesn't describe you, but it describes enough of the people in that camp to make it a problem.

 

So, how do you defend against an adversary that will never stop until they've achieved total victory? You do your best not to give them one single inch.

 

I think there are a ton of things that make good sense in terms of placing some limitations on gun ownership. But because of what I just described, I'm really not even interested in sitting down at the negotiating table. I don't think I'd be dealing with people who would negotiate in good faith.

And what has led you to that conclusion?

I absolutely think he's right. I don't think it ever even crossed the minds of the Founders that anyone would question the use of firearms for hunting. The entire Constitutional point of the "right to bear arms" revolves around the potential need to overthrow a government gone bad. We can debate about whether they meant individual people or state militias (in those days the context of discussion was much more about the relationship between the states and the union). But the reason for the whole discussion was about the maintenance of freedom under dire circumstances.

 

Keep in mind that these men had just lived through the overthrow of a tyrannical government. It was fresh on their minds.

A lot of the Bill of Rights was a direct and obvious reaction against things that the British had done in the lead up to the war that the colonies didn't like. Quartered soldiers in the homes of civilians? Make that unconstitutional. Banned colonists from meeting in an attempt to insurrection? Guarantee a right to free assembly. Attempted to seize weapons in order to undercut the stirring rebellion? Guarantee a right to bear arms.

 

There's a tendency to mythologize a lot about America's founding, including the reasoning behind many of the things that went into creating the system of government that we currently have.

 

I'd be interested in doing some research into any primary sources that give more direct insight into what the framers were actually thinking at the time it was passed.

Yeah, it's hard to see how that could happen. Casinos are supposed to be automatic money machines, given how probability and statistics work. But I guess they're still in competition with other casinos, and competition tends to drive profit margins down. Even though your games are sure money makers, you still have to pay for the facilities and the perks that make people want to pick your casino over others.

 

It looks like he funded his casinos with unsustainable debt and used them as something of a piggy bank for himself, withdrawing money from the business even as it struggled under the burden of the aforementioned debt.

 

[source]

 

I've decided over the years that rich people are far more likely to be underhanded and unethical than "smart." I think only a small fraction of the wealthy get that way by playing 100% within the rules.

There are three avenues to the heights of wealth: cheating, knowing people, getting lucky.

 

It helps to be smart or a hard worker in addition to one or all of the above, but you need at least one of them.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DONALD!

 

You are now under criminal investigation for obstruction of justice.

 

Have an extra piece of birthday cake. You deserve it.

 

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532985377/report-trump-under-investigation-for-possible-obstruction-of-justice

You know, it's a rare person who would be able to say that he personally sank the nominees of both major parties from the same election and directly prevented them from being President.