*related=http://videosift.com/video/The-Adorkable-Misogyny-of-The-Big-Bang-Theory

Good video. What irritates me is seeing instances where Aspergers is treated like it's the designer diagnosis of the decade. Seeing someone like Jerry Seinfeld or David Byrne comment about how they feel they have a "touch of Aspergers" and are on the "spectrum". Or the legions of Big Bang Theory fans who now "identify" as "Aspies" because Sheldon and what's her name have made it into a fun pop culture caricature. SMH on many levels.

There's a pretty big gap between dumb as a sack of hammers nonsense like Big Bang and 2.5 men (both created by the same guy, I think) and something like It's Always Sunny or Breaking Bad.

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike Breading Bad or It's Always Sunny (I thought BB was great, but It's Always Sunny never really grabbed me), just that they're not really in the same category.

It's just kinda like saying "I don't really like pop music. I don't like Lady Gaga; she's like Katy Perry or Pink Floyd. And I tried to get into Led Zeppelin, but the first album sucked".

I've never watched it, and find it really surprising that it's been on for over 10 years now. Over that time period, I've had a good number of friends and acquaintances ask me, "Do you know The Big Bang Theory?" I've always answered, "Yes, I'm aware of it," usually followed by my wondering if they're some kind of "Young Earther." With this sift I've now realized it's a sitcom. And it's just going into a long queue of "must-see" TV shows, like Two-and-a-Half Men, Always Sunny in BlaBla, etc. Somebody pushed me to watch Breaking Bad, but after just a few episodes...and Jesse the Idiot not dead yet...I had to quit. What a Gilligan! I guess I'll just go back to reading, and wait for Rick and Morty...and maybe, just maybe, they'll finally make a movie of Deadwood.

I think there are aspects of this that fall into the realm of philosophy.

I personally don't think we can ever have "The Truth" in that ultimate sense. Pretend for a minute that the SUVAT equations (the equations of motion) are completely accurate. I can drop a ball from a certain height and you can time it and we'll find to some degree of accuracy that the equations were right.

The ball and the floor didn't need to calculate anything. Whilst me and you sit there with a stopwatch technical manual, assorted tape measures to find the distance, expensive cameras to figure out when i dropped the ball..... Whilst we are tying down an uncertainty, the ball and floor have already done it.

When you get right down to it, we simply cannot know an exact time. We can never know an 'exact' anything, because now we need to discuss where the "ball" ends and where the "floor" begins on a molecular level. And no matter how much we agree, the uncertainty principle gets us in the end - we don't and can't know the exact location of fundamental particles. An "exact" anything ends up being a conceptual thing that we can't ever test.

But where i'm going with this is that we're kind of talking about the nature of understanding. We know the volume of a sphere if we know its radius, but how do we create the same sphere accurately? Our brains don't have a resolution, but the tools we use in reality do - reality itself quite possibly has a resolution. We think of minecraft as a blocky, low resolution simulation of an analogue reality. Similarly, i think maths is an 'analogue' (in that it can be "exact") simulation of a limited resolution reality - reality only looks analogue when you don't look very closely.

All that is to say, we DO understand the ball dropping and hitting the floor, but "exactness" is a thing that only exists in the act itself. The only thing left for us to decide is what we consider accurate enough.

Perhaps "god" wanted to know what would happen if he set off a big bang. He sat down, calculated it all out in the language of the gods (the language of perfection; maths) and realised that due to uncertainty, the only way to know exactly what would happen was for it to actually happen. (Douglas Adams?)

@scheherazade just gave you one.....ask (read) Hawking for more....or this article has a few options....
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/before-big-bang.htm

Actually, matter does appear and disappear from and to nothing. There are energy fields that permeate space, and when their potential gets too high, they collapse and eject a particle. Similarly, particles can be destroyed or decay and upon that event they cause a spike in the background energy fields.

One of the essential functions of a collier is to compress a bunch of crap into a tiny spot, so that when enough decays in that specific spot it will cause such a local spike in energy that new particles must subsequently be ejected (particles that are produced at some calculated energy level - different energy levels producing different ejections).

*This is at the subatomic level. Large collections of matter don't just convert to energy.

I know plenty of people roll eyes at that, but the math upon which those machines are built are using the same math that makes things like modern lithography machines work (they manipulate tiny patterns of molecules). You basically prove the math every time you use a cell phone (thing with modern micro chips).

...

But that's beside the point. If there ever was 'nothing', the question isn't "whether or not god exists to have made things" - it's "why do things exist". God could be an answer. As could infinite other possibilities.

...

Personally, eternity is the answer I assume is most likely to be correct. Because you don't have to prove anything. The universe need not be static - but if something was always there (even just energy fields), then there is an eternity in one form or anther.

Background energy and quantum tunneling are a neat concept (referring to metastability). Because you can have a big-bang like event if the background energy level tunnels to a lower state, expanding a new space starting at that point, re-writing the laws of physics in its area of existence. Meaning that our universe as we know it can simply be one of many bubbles of expanding tunneling events - created at the time of the event, and due to be overwritten by another at some point. Essentially a non-permanent local what-we-percieve-as-a-universe, among many. (I'm avoiding the concept that time and space are relative to each bubble, and there is no concept of an overarching time and place outside of any one event).

(All this comes from taking formulas that model measurements of reality, globing them into larger models, and then exploring the limits of those models at extreme values/limits. ... with a much lagging experimental base slowly proving and disproving elements of the model (and forcing model refinement upon a disproval, so that the model encompasses the new test data))

-scheherazade

I still think saying something like "the beginning of everything" is a little presumptuous for us recently technological monkeys to say. I feel like there is an awful amount of knowledge that we don't know or understand, yet. I love thinking about it though - kinda like that Sun Ra song - "There are other worlds (they have not told you of)" A Big Bang might just be a small aspect, that happens all the time all over a vast multiverse, outside multiverses, inside multiverses, folded into trillions of dimensions that exist as free flowing holographic data, that really just exists inside a super-technological golden egg, on the table of a very wise alien and your life was just you dreaming and then you wake up as the wise alien and you say "How the hell did I forget about this strange ass egg?!"

I'll agree with everyone on TYT. I like the message, but the delivery needs work.

Captain Disillusion. I enjoy debunking, but the persona and gimmick makes it hard to watch most of the time.

Thunderf00t. I enjoyed him for awhile, especially his Creationist debunking era, but then something happened and I just can't do his videos most of the time. Partly it was his stance on elevator gate, which he just pushed and pushed endlessly, but he seemed to just go off after that whole incident. I don't mind the opinion, I disagree, but he just wouldn't let it go... and never got back to what he originally was doing.

Oh and yeah, Angry Videogame Nerd I agree with. Way too much fluff...

Markplier. My kids love him, so my suggestion box is full of him for a few days after every other weekend. I love Twitch and stuff like that, but I don't find his personality at all enjoyable. He's a Pew De Pie wannabe and I can't stand Pew either.

Earthling Cinema... no. Just no. Another annoying personality, I just don't get the appeal.

Speaking of cinema related ones, Cinema Sins. They give 50 or 60, and really only a third or so actually count, even on movies I hated. I appreciate critique but I don't know, I normally can't watch a full episode.

I'll agree with others about mean spirited pranks. Truth distorters, especially when it is for financial, political or religious gain, which I guess is most of those types.

Joshua Feuerstein is a perfect example of the above.

People doing videos in cars, even if parked... there are exceptions to that, like the guy who does carpool karaoke, but most others...

Guy on the street type videos. It's been a format around for too long. How many people did you have to edit out to get a few idiots? Occasionally they'll show one person who knows among 8 others.

When otherwise smart science channels like SciShow and the like use the word "theory" in the common sense of the term and not the scientific use. It continues to distort the public image of the word. They come to a science channel, see it used where they should be using hypothesis. If they want to keep it simple and use guess or ideas. Just don't use the word theory until it's a more accepted theory. This way people don't keep saying "it's just a theory" on actual facts like the big bang, evolution, human accelerated climate change, etc.

A math joke on a TV show in America... I don't think Big Bang Theory even has those. What audience could appreciate it today?

Eh, we'll all be atomic garbage and either sucked back in as the universe prepares for the next big bang, or forever frozen, floating in a graveyard that spans all of existence.

Either way, I'm comfortable with the concept that there will still be parts of me around.

It almost sounds like he is suggesting to keep an open mind and learn about other cultures, religions & mythology in order to understand those perspectives; and overall to be humble to the mystery: that we do not know.

In my opinion some of his opinions were a little contradictory - he doesn't believe in any sort of god or gods, but it seems that a wiser statement would be that he doesn't know, which would correspond with the "I don't believe in atheists" theme.

Furthermore, I honestly don't think that those who (in Hedges' words), "do not explore the religious impulse" are inhuman. Even if someone never explores it in their lifetime. In my opinion - the late bloomers who have disconnected themselves from all inclination of organized religion or spirituality, to find it on their own later in life might have a few more advantages than those that did not disconnect themselves from it at some point.

My personal preference is that I do believe in god because I want to believe in god. Whether it's a metaphor, completely abstract energy, a point in spacetime, a massive intelligent energy field that existed long before the big-bang, a life-force found only on Earth or the Milky Way or a fucking super mega alien technological consciousness program experiment or even a microscopic white dude flying on a microscopic magic carpet or all of the above and none of the above. I just believe even though my version of whatever creation/god is, is completely unidentifiable, it's everything and it's nothing.

Reminds me of the Big Bang Theory reference in tonight's Simpsons - Much Apu About Something.

"Wolowitz? Worthless!"

I'm just realizing that the forced laugh track on this show is just as bad as The Big Bang Theory.

To more directly respond to the video though, the answer, as they already talked about is the media's fault. Bernie, despite his open socialism, is not very controversial. He's nuanced, shown that he can give complex answers to complex problems and actually seems to be interested in governance.

THOSE THINGS ARE BORING! Doing your job well is often boring. Media doesn't like boring. The media has their profits to think about, so they're going to generate controversy.

This is not groundbreaking at all. I call it the Cartman effect. South Park episodes usually focus on what crazy thing Cartman is going to do next. The show revolves around it. He does completely insane, amoral, disgusting things that no one should ever do...but the audience laps it up. Similar thing occurs with Sheldon of The Big Bang Theory. As I've already compared it to, Reality shows do the exact same thing. The contestant who everyone hates is kept on as long as possible, who otherwise would have been eliminated long ago. People love to hate that person. They keep watching to see what they'll do next.

This perfectly describes Trump. People who will never vote for him in a million years still follow what he does just to see what happens next. This also describes Fox "News" It recently just got ranked the highest in viewership for 2015 again. The right loves to pretend that means that their views are popular. No, that just means everyone wants to watch the trainwreck.

This is also why the Republican debates got more press than the Democratic ones. All the Republican candidates were fighting each other tooth and nail. All were going after Trump. There were a lot of catfights and lots of drama. Meanwhile, in the Democrat debates, everyone gets along. Even when they disagree, they do so in a constructive manner and everyone gets along. No drama, therefore no press. Being serious is boring and that doesn't generate ad revenue for media.

Having an outrageous, controversial candidate is still not enough to get elected though, in fact it cuts both ways. When you put forth a "Cartman" candidate, sure it rallies lots of supporters. But it also rallies lots of opponents (or more) against the candidate. This is exactly what happened with Palin.

Elections have turned into being more about voting against the person you don't want than voting for the person that should be in office. "Anybody but X"