^Dear GeeSussFreek,

you call yourself a scientist. That is fine. However, I will warn you right away that many on this website would question your devotion to scientific method based on your username alone - tell me, is it a coincidence that it's pronounced exactly like "Jesus-Freak"? I'm asking this (rather rhetorical) question because religious fanatics claiming to be scientists are often proponents of Intelligent Design, which is (I'll be frank here) a load of steaming bull excrement. I hope you are not one of this fold, because I've had my share of "dialogue" with these folks, and it has never, ever resembled anything close to a reasoned, structured discourse.

With my worries laid before you, my response is this:
there are many fields of science and from your short stay on the Sift you would apparently style yourself as a jack-of-all-trades (economics, military, political science, theoretical and quantum physics, chemistry, just to name a few of which you've shared your opinion). Yet, it would also appear that you may be master of nothing.

A scientist (especially one talking about science and scientific method) would not ever, under any circumstances, attempt to draw their own definitions of FACT. Or any concept previously and universally known, for that matter. Me, I was taught what general as well as specific definitions of 'fact' are in secondary school. It would appear your "science diploma studies" have taught you nothing of this. Scientific fact feeds directly back from scientific method, which includes fancy notions such as peer review, one which has unfortunately so far eluded the scope of ID proponents. In science, fact may at times not be the absolute truth, it's what's agreed upon by the informed public. Our knowledge in most advanced fields of study can never be perfect and complete, but the ones most often making this claim are religious folks, saying that scripture "has all the answers".

Now, mass. My oh my.
Mass, assuming we're talking about gravitational mass, not inertial-7th-grade-physics-mass here, is the interaction of gravitational fields. In other words, yes, gravity. The same concept you differentiated, indicating exactly how much you understand of this and that I have no need to go into supergravity, supersymmetry and duality and start actually looking things up. Thanks for that. Oh, and by the way - mass is not created. Neither is matter, for that matter.

Continuing on-
regarding your nonplussed ideas about quantum theories, I have to disappoint you a little bit - it's still discernible, natural science; it hasn't obliterated all previous theories in physics; in fact, I dare you name three it has. Yes, the math involved is a 'bit' harder, the conjectures deeper and at times wilder, but scientific method is still applied.

You also said: "The fact is, that science doesn't deal with facts and has no method of proving things true, only methods of proving them false."
First of all, I LOVE your use of "fact" in this sentence, just love it. Anyway, hypocrisy aside, all we need is a scientist performing a YES/NO or a TRUE/FALSE experiment. Their initial assumption will either be true, and they will prove something to be true, or it will be wrong, and they will prove that it is wrong. Works both ways, just like logic's supposed to, in your brain.

In conclusion, I have come full circle and return to my initial lines:
"You call yourself a scientist. That is most definitely not fine."

Actually a very nice song eluding to fundamental views on psychology and our awareness.

Are we crazy or delusional for recognizing our self-awareness/continuity and moreover, why are we able to possible grasp this thought?

Saying my argument is the same one as used for the space program is diversionary, because exploration of space is the discovery of new knowledge that have resulted in alot of new technologically discoveries, however it is not a program to solve a problem that has eluded the international community for the last 40 years in its bid to help Africa out of poverty. The two issues are unrelated.

In one arguement people don't know what money could be spent on, while on the other arguement they do. I don't think the blame is only to be placed at the feet of initiatives like this but the general attitude towards aid provision to Africa which almost always stems from some kind of pervert pity towards a populace people think can't help themselves.

All Africa needs is direct foreign investment, not piece meal solutions that have not worked for the last 40 years with a price tag of close to a trillion dollars. Laptops for kids is a piece meal solution I believe, yes it could be great in the long term but you are forgetting that again its a technical based solution, most of these laptops will be sold, most of them will be broken, most of all it will not be a handy resource because there is no one to really explain how it can be useful to ordinary people. Yes of course there will be a positive effect but marginal and not as large as it's supporters like to voice.

>> ^thinker247:
"Really? 4 dollars a gallon? I hadn't heard that rumor." (counting his money, hundred by hundred)


That, and/or he's trying to set himself up as an innocent puppet to elude persecution.

1) The "Well, jackass, that's good for Happy GilmOH-MY-GOD!" part from Happy Gilmore.

2) The Dirk Diggler Story (the short film that PT Anderson made as a teen, which later formed the basis for Boogie Nights).

3) The Little Women sketch from SNL with Chris Farley going apeshit in the icy water.

4) A Daily Show segment in which the correspondent (I can't remember which one) talks about movies with chimps in them and makes them seem sinister, somehow. I remember they showed a clip from Dunston Checks In, along with a few other chimp movies. All searches at the Daily Show website have been fruitless, unfortunately.

There are a few others which have also eluded me, but those are the only ones that come to mind at the moment.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^bamdrew:
yeah... news has it now that Obama's camp is considering holding a series of public town-hall talks with McCain on the issues, an idea McCain's side proposed... which would really be throwing McCain a bone... because if its down to who can give the best speech and who comes out the best after 3 debates, Obama has it in the bag.

They've been talking about 10 of these town-hall debates, I presume that's in addition to the already scheduled 3 official presidential debates in the fall.
I'd love to see it happen, and I can't fathom the rationale behind it at the McCain campaign. The worst thing they could do is give people a chance to compare Obama and McCain side by side.
It'll be YouTube vs. Feeding Tube.


McCain simply may have no other choice. He's crippled by public financing and the media limelight has effectively eluded him during the over-extended Democratic primary season. This may be his only way to take center stage again. But yeah I agree, it's a fool's errand, Obama is unanimously the superior speaker and orator, he was arguably a weaker debater to Clinton but just reminiscing back to the Republican debates, McCain hardly stood out either. If nothing else, this will give Obama a chance to highlight his utter hypocrisy embodying his image as a 'maverick' and accentuate his recent about-turns on countless social and economic issues. Not to mention, for a party heavily reliant on 'values' voters, rational and meticulous policy issues are hardly going to galvanise support.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
quality topic. Hopefully something will be done soon about the unsupervised channels (AHEM, admins).

To what do you elude, Mr. Poseidon? Have you a proposition you reckon's worth voicing?

I think the only option is to turn control over to members who want them, which I'm personally all for, but I haven't heard about any requests as of yet.

missed phoenix and sabertooth the pink hair dude and a few others elude me.

^ Yeah I did a dilligent search for it as well before I upvoted, it also eluded my Sifting Search Capabilities.

Please tell me why.

I liked the bigfoot analogy on the surface, but, unless this caller is from a family with deeply held belief in bigfoot, the analogy does not recognize the difficulty sometimes encountered in following logic that challenges strongly ingrained beliefs.

In reply to this comment by BenjaminFranklin2u:
bamdrew
Your ignorance of logic eludes me, your example has nothing to do with what he is referring too. Watch it again.

bamdrew
Your ignorance of logic eludes me, your example has nothing to do with what he is referring too. Watch it again.

>> ^BenjaminFranklin2u:
^ ^ ^
Church leaders are not out to make a profit? Are you kidding me?
Do you know how wealthy the Vatican is? Gimme a break, not out to make a profit my ass. I agree that most Priests/Rabbis/etc themselves do not wish to make money, but the Architecture of churches alone eludes to its wealth.
Then theres scientology, and no Im not going to capitalize it. Which as it's goal is to make money, Hubbard himself has admitted to his son that his goal was to create a religion entirely for profit.
and
Majortomyorke
I do not chose to acquire knowledge from videos on VideoSift, I already know where I stand when it comes to scientology. This is where I chose to come for entertainment... This maybe your classroom, but it is not mine.


I wasn't talking about "The Church" - I was talking about churches. Small, independently run churches that answer to no higher organization.

^*^*^
Church leaders are not out to make a profit? Are you kidding me?
Do you know how wealthy the Vatican is? Gimme a break, not out to make a profit my ass. I agree that most Priests/Rabbis/etc themselves do not wish to make money, but the Architecture of churches alone eludes to its wealth.
Then theres scientology, and no Im not going to capitalize it. Which as it's goal is to make money, Hubbard himself has admitted to his son that his goal was to create a religion entirely for profit.
and
**Majortomyorke
I do not chose to acquire knowledge from videos on VideoSift, I already know where I stand when it comes to scientology. This is where I chose to come for entertainment... This maybe your classroom, but it is not mine.

This is explicitly sexual. The rest of the movie may be great (I tried to watch it once, and I was just bored). This clip was posted in protest of the stating that sexually explicit material isn't appropriate on Videosift. It has no point other than that. Sure, it's beautiful, but it's nothing but sex, and that isn't the videosift we had until this: this is sexually explicit.

Did other clips discuss sex? Did other clips elude to sex? they did. Almost without exception, the other clips would have been legally hostable on youtube. This video is not hostable on youtube (apart from the issue of copyright). This is an inappropriate clip.

Think about this. Do you really want tons of clips of naked beautiful people here? Do you want the sex scenes from every single movie showing up here as art? I've seen objections to clips because of bare breasts. This isn't just bare breasts: this is sex. Is that what you want people coming to videosift for? You want people to make videos like the famous WoW one where people film some poor guy jerking off to videosift? I don't.

Until now, I could watch every single video on videosift without being forced to watch a video that had no point but to turn the viewer on.

Don't kid yourself: if this video stays, it makes a statement. As Sarzy said above, he wouldn't normally submit this. The whole reason he submitted it was to make a statement: let it stand and it CHANGES VideoSift.

I'm not against sex. I'm not against depections of sex. I'm not against sex on the web. This place was designed to not be about explicit sex, and it's one of the things I liked about it. I'm not going to let it change without kicking up a fuss. This is the fuss.

Now Dag and Lucky and I don't know who else will decide what's to be done here, and I am pretty sure they will pay attention to what people say. As far as I can tell, I'm pretty much alone in objecting to this video, so perhaps you will all get the change in videosift that this video represents. If you do, I believe the sift will be irreparably harmed; from your point of view, it may change for the better, but in either case, it has changed.

I think what RP is eluding to is that it's ok for a politician to have faith in God. But to then use that faith in God to get other Christians to have faith in him as a politician is a dangerous thing. I believe part of the reason Bush has gotten away with so much is because of his huge evangelical following that does not question his actions because they have faith in him as a man who has faith in God.

Also talk about pandering to the religious right...he's just feeding into the myth of how "Christmas is under attack" in this country and how he's one of the good ones that knows that "Jesus is the reason for the season". If you think it was just about saying "Merry Christmas" your being naive.