Haha. That's in Boston, it's not far from MIT where Chomsky is a professor. That's actually a public sailing club, anyone in the general public can join, and it's pretty affordable. (www.community-boating.org)

>> ^doogle:

what a weird background to place Chomsky in front of.
Looks like he's inconveniently disturbed from this vacationing in the Hampton's.

>> ^SlipperyPete:

piano intro
Vomit rain!
Lay your lunch all o-ver the terrain.
Vo-mit rain!!
I turn my head here to avoid puking on myself
Cover your heads or you will feel the pain!


HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Retro meme win!

*piano intro*

Vomit rain!

Lay your lunch all o-ver the terrain.

Vo-mit rain!!

**I turn my head here to avoid puking on myself**

Cover your heads or you will feel the pain!

Beim ersten Clip hatte ich keine 100 Sekunden nach'm Reinstellen schon zugeschlagen, aber vom zweiten halte ich gepflegten Abstand -- wie von allem, was mit LOTR zu tun hat.

In reply to this comment by DerHasisttot:
http://videosift.com/video/Blind-Guardian-Mirror-Mirror-1



and furthermore: http://videosift.com/video/Blind-Guardian-Wacken-Lord-Of-The-Rings-Live
:

@marinara, friend, I'm not shouting

You are indeed against R&D. I am in high tech with many years, projects, and products under my belt. One thing I will tell you: even the best, well-thought-out ideas can fail. Risk is part and parcel of effective and innovative R&D. You want to take an example of one failure, and say we shouldn't have taken the risk. If the investors who put $1B into Solyndra shared that attitude, we'd never have a Silicon Valley.

http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2011/09/01/manufacturing-a-recovery/
decline in high tech is due to lack of manufacturing and exports. Read above.

So, then you agree with me? This article is nothing if not a case for investing in Solyndra. Did you read the article? Hockfield makes a case that directly contradicts your main points. And she even points to examples of the US government subsidizing high tech companies.

Are $288 billion in tax cuts worth going into debt for?
What exactly does $275 billion in contracts, grants and loans buy?

If you go to the website, there are links which give a detailed account of what has been spent. To answer your first question, if the tax cuts can help to stimulate the economy, then they would be worth the debt.

You asked why this video was relevant. Well it is. After some lobbyist in our government gives out billions of dollars, all we have is some bad loans, and construction workers now on unemployment.

So this one example invalidates the stimulus? Then, if I can point to a success story will you change your mind?

Rather than cut into corporate profits making profits on exploited Chinese workers, we've build a lead zeppelin of an empty factory. Throwing money at a problem doesn't fix anything. Don't construe this to say that I'm against funding for R&D.



Why can't we both tax corporations that manufacture overseas and invest in innovative companies that manufacture here? The two are not mutually exclusive.

http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2011/09/01/manufacturing-a-recovery/
decline in high tech is due to lack of manufacturing and exports. Read above.

>> ^longde:
quoting longde:
http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/The_Act.aspx
The Recovery Act intends to achieve those goals by:
•Providing $288 billion in tax cuts and benefits for millions of working families and businesses
•Increasing federal funds for education and health care as well as entitlement programs (such as extending unemployment benefits) by $224 billion
•Making $275 billion available for federal contracts, grants and loans


Are $288 billion in tax cuts worth going into debt for?
What exactly does $275 billion in contracts, grants and loans buy?

I feel like we're shouting at each other. For me to win this argument, I have to convince you that the "Recovery Act" is worthless and ineffective; For you to win, you have to convince me that the "Recovery Act" actually helps the economy more than it hurts us in interest payments on the national debt.

You asked why this video was relevant. Well it is. After some lobbyist in our government gives out billions of dollars, all we have is some bad loans, and construction workers now on unemployment. Rather than cut into corporate profits making profits on exploited Chinese workers, we've build a lead zeppelin of an empty factory. Throwing money at a problem doesn't fix anything. Don't construe this to say that I'm against funding for R&D.

I'm used to cheating shows that involve a group of MIT students or some savant breaking an unbreakable system.

This was like watching a student cheating on a geometry test. The culprit is generally no better at cheating than they are at math. A smarter person would have done a much better job running this scam.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

That sounds like a book I want to read - and yeah - totally validates what I was trying to say above.>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

@berticus turned me on to a great book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational, which is about behavioral economics. Ariely's research comes to the conclusion that we behave differently based on whether we view a situation as a business or social interaction. Business transactions are governed by greed and self interest; social interactions are governed by empathy and compassion. It's not a political book, per se, but it does seem to explain a lot about the psychology behind the political divide.
In one of the more simple experiments in the book, he sets out a table of chocolates at MIT with a sign that says free chocolates. Because money is not involved, the students operate under social norms and only take one or two chocolates, leaving plenty of free chocolates for other students. When the experiment is repeated with a 1 cent price tag attached to the chocolate, the students operate under market norms and are much more greedy.
It's a fun and interesting read that pretty much makes the same point you make above.... but with science. Worth a look.
(on a side note, I finally have internet at the place I'm staying! YAY! I've gone without for over a month. I've also started playing Minecraft which is strangely addictive for a game about hitting pixelated blocks with an Axe.)

@berticus turned me on to a great book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational, which is about behavioral economics. Ariely's research comes to the conclusion that we behave differently based on whether we view a situation as a business or social interaction. Business transactions are governed by greed and self interest; social interactions are governed by empathy and compassion. It's not a political book, per se, but it does seem to explain a lot about the psychology behind the political divide.

In one of the more simple experiments in the book, he sets out a table of chocolates at MIT with a sign that says free chocolates. Because money is not involved, the students operate under social norms and only take one or two chocolates, leaving plenty of free chocolates for other students. When the experiment is repeated with a 1 cent price tag attached to the chocolate, the students operate under market norms and are much more greedy.

It's a fun and interesting read that pretty much makes the same point you make above.... but with science. Worth a look.

(on a side note, I finally have internet at the place I'm staying! YAY! I've gone without for over a month. I've also started playing Minecraft which is strangely addictive for a game about hitting pixelated blocks with an Axe.)

Being all into numbers, I put the numbers in the video into my own spreadsheet and discovered that the graph for the number of words/SAT score is of course not linear. They appear very much correlated, but not linear like the graphic showed. That's the fault of the video editor, not the MIT professor, because he never says anything about linear correlation.

As long as at least one of the factors doesn't correlate linearly (and I think we know that neither do), it's possible there is still a correlation between income and length of essay, but not necessarily a causative relationship. It's more likely that buried in the income statistic is the level of the student's English -- the poorer you are, the more likely it is your first language isn't English, so the more likely you are to write a shorter essay, and drag your economic demographic down.

@chilaxe let me tell you a story....

I grew up hearing the n word from my father all the time. It always enraged me -- even as a little kid, I knew it was wrong. The way he said it, too -- it was like he was saying "shit", the word just dripped in hatred.

Four years ago, he had to move into a nursing home in Oklahoma. Many many black people were nurses, nurses aides, doctors. He knew he couldn't use the n word, but he would say "that nurse is black, everyone is black" and you could hear in his voice that he was using the n word.

Now, he doesn't. All those folks giving him such good care, he doesn't see them as the n word anymore.

But this last trip, I was telling him about how horrible my uncle had been during my visit. Immediately, he said "I grew up with them, and they smelled. They all smelled bad." And the vitriol was back in his voice. It's been over 70 years, and he still drips with it. "Dad, they were all poor. It was the depression. They likely didn't have running water." I could see on his face that that possibility had never occurred to him.

My father is an educated man -- masters degree in Engineering from MIT. But he never made that connection.

So when this woman with a Southern accent acted so irrationally, I thought she might be fueled by something deeper and darker than just being mad about three cases of beer.

I could be wrong. I don't know. It is, however, a distinct possibility.

Sorry if that offends anyone. But pretending it doesn't exist can be equally offensive.

@berticus @rottenseed

I guess most people not only achieve nothing meaningful in their own lives but don't even know from where the innovations they live off of derive.

Cambridge is regarded as one of the foremost innovation clusters because of the presence of Harvard (world's largest university endowment), MIT, and a number of smaller elite universities nearby.

Your refutations were (in order)

"This guy believes in evolution"

"We can never prove anything about the fossil record"

"this quote is old"

"this guy is crazy"

"this quote is old"

"this guy is a probable creationist"

Yeah, amazing refutations..which you got from a website, while calling me out on doing the same thing. Evolutionists, biologists, palentologists etc DO dispute the theory of evolution..you were right though..the ones I provided were kind of weak. You'll have an infinitely harder time refuting these:

"With the failure of these many efforts [to explain the origin of life] science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate.

After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past."

Loren C. Eiseley,
Ph.D. Anthropology. "The Immense Journey". Random House, NY, p. 199

"We have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain:

I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason only; not because it's good, we know it is bad, but because there isn't any other.

Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is known to be inexact, which is a first approximation."

Professor Jerome Lejeune,
Internationally recognised geneticist at a lecture given in Paris

"Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory ... a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth."

Michael Denton,
Molecular Biologist. "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis". Adler and Adler, p. 358

"The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory - is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation-both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof."

L.Harrison Matthews,
British biologist

"[The theory of evolution] forms a satisfactory faith on which to base our interpretation of nature."


L. Harrison Matthews,
Introduction to 'Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life', p. xxii (1977 edition).


"I reject evolution because I deem it obsolete, because the knowledge, hard won since 1830, of anatomy, histology, cytology, and embryology, cannot be made to accord with its basic idea. The foundationless, fantastic edifice of the evolution doctrine would long ago have met with its long deserved fate were it not that the love of fairy tales is so deep-rooted in the hearts of man."

Dr Albert Fleischmann. Recorded in Scott M. Huse, "The Collapse of Evolution", Baker Book House: Grand Rapids (USA), 1983 p:120

"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent."


William B. Provine,
Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University, 'Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life', Abstract of Will Provine's 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.


"The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers ? [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance."


Hubert Yockey,
"Information Theory and Molecular Biology", Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 257


"As I said, we shall all be embarrassed, in the fullness of time, by the naivete of our present evolutionary arguments. But some will be vastly more embarrassed than others."


Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Principal Research Associate of the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT, "Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds," John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1994, p195)


"In 10 million years, a human-like species could substitute no more than 25,000 expressed neutral mutations and this is merely 0.0007% of the genome ?nowhere near enough to account for human evolution. This is the trade secret of evolutionary geneticists."

Walter James ReMine,
The Biotic Message : Evolution versus Message Theory


"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. ... The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say. We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists."


Wolfgang Smith,
Mathematician and Physicist. Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University. Former math instructor at MIT. Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of de Chardin. Tan Books & Publishers, pp. 1-2


"If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals.
How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon.......In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth."


Sir Fred Hoyle,
British physicist and astronomer, The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph, London, pp. 20-21, 23.


"...(I)t should be apparent that the errors, overstatements and omissions that we have noted in these biology texts, all tend to enhance the plausibility of hypotheses that are presented. More importantly, the inclusion of outdated material and erroneous discussions is not trivial. The items noted mislead students and impede their acquisition of critical thinking skills. If we fail to teach students to examine data critically, looking for points both favoring and opposing hypotheses, we are selling our youth short and mortgaging the future of scientific inquiry itself."


Mills, Lancaster, Bradley,
'Origin of Life Evolution in Biology Textbooks - A Critique', The American Biology Teacher, Volume 55, No. 2, February, 1993, p. 83


"The salient fact is this: if by evolution we mean macroevolution (as we henceforth shall), then it can be said with the utmost rigor that the doctrine is totally bereft of scientific sanction. Now, to be sure, given the multitude of extravagant claims about evolution promulgated by evolutionists with an air of scientific infallibility, this may indeed sound strange. And yet the fact remains that there exists to this day not a shred of bona fide scientific evidence in support of the thesis that macroevolutionary transformations have ever occurred."


Wolfgang Smith,
Ph.D Mathematics , MS Physics Teilardism and the New Religion. Tan Books and Publishers, Inc.


"... as Darwinists and neo-Darwinists have become ever more adept at finding possible selective advantages for any trait one cares to mention, explanation in terms of the all-powerful force of natural selection has come more and more to resemble explanation in terms of the conscious design of the omnipotent Creator."


Mae-Wan Ho & Peter T. Saunders,
Biologist at The Open University, UK and Mathematician at University of London respectively


"In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be 'wrong'. A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn't it?"


Tom S. Kemp,
'A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record', New Scientist, vol. 108, 1985, pp. 66-67


"We have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not."


Niles Eldredge,
Chairman and Curator of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History, "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1985, p144)


... by the fossil record and we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much.
The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."


David M. Raup,
Curator of Geology. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology". Field Museum of Natural History. Vol. 50, No. 1, p. 25


"Thus all Darwin's premises are defective: there is no unlimited population growth in natural populations, no competition between individuals, and no new species producible by selecting for varietal differences. And if Darwin's premises are faulty, then his conclusion does not follow. This, of itself, does not mean that natural selection is false. It simply means that we cannot use Darwin's argument brilliant though it was, to establish natural selection as a means of explaining the origin of species."


Robert Augros & George Stanciu,
"The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom in Nature", New Science Library, Shambhala: Boston, MA, 1987, p.160).







>> ^MaxWilder:
What the hell are you talking about? I refuted every one of your quotes point by point! I provided links to further information. The whole point was that your "evidence" of paleontologists speaking out against evolution was utter bullshit!
The only one where I discredited the source was from some no-name Swedish biologist that nobody takes seriously. Every other source was either out of context (meaning you are not understanding the words properly), or out of date (meaning that science has progressed a little since the '70s).
You have got your head so far up your ass that you are not even coherent now.
But you know what might change my mind? If you cut&paste some more out of context, out of date quotes. You got hendreds of 'em! </sarcasm>
>> ^shinyblurry:
So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source.

Thats an interesting point about caloric restriction, as someone who tends not to be able to eat or sleep I also have massive mood swings, related?

I also feel bad about this video, the angle of fat people even being afraid to go out for fear of ridicule made me think...

>> ^bmacs27:

There is also mounting evidence that dieting in general won't make some people lose weight (half-assed citation). Really, the best way is to get into the habit of regular exercise. Caloric restriction will do little but make you depressed.

There is also mounting evidence that dieting in general won't make some people lose weight (half-assed citation). Really, the best way is to get into the habit of regular exercise. Caloric restriction will do little but make you depressed.