What I call "good" is acting according to the golden rule...treating others as I would have them treat me. That means always honestly, even when it's uncomfortable. You don't need to know the 'truth' to not lie. It also means thinking before acting of the possible consequence to others as well as myself.
I agree, if thought crime is the same as real crime, I'm a terrible person, but I prefer to judge people's actions as I think it gives better insight to who they are.
If judged by the 10 commandments, I'm still hosed simply by not believing in the unbelievable. I would guess that if thought crime counts on that front, heaven is an empty, lonely place filled only with Asperger's sufferers and other abnormaly brained people, as those requirements are not possible for normal humans.

Heaven is filled with people just like you and me, who absolutely cannot qualify to get into Heaven on account of their own righteousness. When you stand before God you will be judged one of two ways, either by your righteousness or the righteousness of Jesus Christ, which is credited to your account through faith. No one has what it takes..I screw up all the time but God is always there to help me. Through His help I am doing a lot better than I did, but I have a long way to go. I didn't and still don't deserve anything God has done for me. Put your trust and faith in Jesus and you will be prepared for eternity.

Your plane analogy doesn't hold water. Instead of jumping from a plane, I think it's more like being led, blindfolded and deafened, to a doorway, being told by dozens of people the differing things they are CERTAIN are on the other side of the door (but not one of them has ever seen it open) and deciding to trust one line of belief and putting that parachute on because your guy said you're on a cliff and need a parachute, but you might as easily be underwater and need scuba gear instead, then your parachute is a trap, or in space and it's just useless, etc.. Since there's no way to know what's beyond the door, many prefer to go unencumbered by anything, accepting it's likely there's absolutely nothing there, but ready for what may come. In the unlikely event that in the end there is a just god there judging my life, I feel I'll be fine unless ritual is more important than action. It's not a possibility I feel is likely.

Only God can reveal Himself to you. It won't be because you feel the possibility is likely that suddenly you will start to believe. I didn't believe it was likely either; the last thing in the world I imagined would happen was that I would become a Christian. It is only because God gave me personal revelation that He is real and Jesus is His Son that I became a Christian. God is knocking on your door right now, and if you choose to open yourself to what He wants to show you, He will reveal Himself to you as well. That's what happened to me; He didn't just make it clear, He made it crystal clear and He'll do the same for you too. Ask Him to show you what the truth is so that you do not have to deal with possibilities. Pray and ask God to show you whether He is there and Jesus is His Son. Read the gospel of John and pray and ask God to show you whether it is true or not. God isn't hiding from you, it is simply a matter of whether you are willing to repent of your sins and turn to Jesus, or not.

What I call "good" is acting according to the golden rule...treating others as I would have them treat me. That means always honestly, even when it's uncomfortable. You don't need to know the 'truth' to not lie. It also means thinking before acting of the possible consequence to others as well as myself.
I agree, if thought crime is the same as real crime, I'm a terrible person, but I prefer to judge people's actions as I think it gives better insight to who they are.
If judged by the 10 commandments, I'm still hosed simply by not believing in the unbelievable. I would guess that if thought crime counts on that front, heaven is an empty, lonely place filled only with Asperger's sufferers and other abnormaly brained people, as those requirements are not possible for normal humans.
Moral perfection is an impossibility. What's morally perfect from one viewpoint may not be from another.
Your plane analogy doesn't hold water. Instead of jumping from a plane, I think it's more like being led, blindfolded and deafened, to a doorway, being told by dozens of people the differing things they are CERTAIN are on the other side of the door (but not one of them has ever seen it open) and deciding to trust one line of belief and putting that parachute on because your guy said you're on a cliff and need a parachute, but you might as easily be underwater and need scuba gear instead, then your parachute is a trap, or in space and it's just useless, etc.. Since there's no way to know what's beyond the door, many prefer to go unencumbered by anything, accepting it's likely there's absolutely nothing there, but ready for what may come. In the unlikely event that in the end there is a just god there judging my life, I feel I'll be fine unless ritual is more important than action. It's not a possibility I feel is likely.

Something does not have to be illegal for it to be suspicious. If you are found to be carrying a hammer and a towel down a residential street at night, you will be stopped and checked out to be sure you aren't using them to steal from cars or homes. That doesn't make hammers illegal, it makes someone carrying one at night suspicious.
A gun on your hip on a public street is more suspicious than a hammer, and at the least should give the officer the ability to stop and identify the person carrying it. In most jurisdictions, you must identify yourself to an officer when asked, (but nothing more) and they can 'hold' you until your identity is known.
As mentioned before, he could be a felon, therefore committing another felony by carrying a gun...therefore it's legally suspicious. Or you might be a known suspect in another crime...suspicious. Or you might be about to use that gun for a crime...suspicious. Or you might be selling crack and using the visible gun as a deterrent other crack dealers....also suspicious. So yes, anyone intentionally visibly carrying a gun on main street (where there's no need for a gun to protect yourself from anything) is suspicious, just as anyone carrying 15 legal knives would be, or someone with a samurai sword, or handcuffs, a blindfold, and a stun gun might be...none of them illegal but totally suspicious.
His actions were suspicious, more so when he won't identify himself. The officer could have said he 'met the description of a suspect at large', which he (and nearly everyone else on earth) does, there's lots of suspects at large of every description, and as I understand it he could have held him until they identified him. (really I would see that as harassment, but as I understand the law it would be allowed, I was held for 'meeting the description' of a vandal once, and the person eventually arrested turned out to be a 25 year old 6 foot black man, while at the time I was a 13 year old, 5 foot tall white boy).
Yes, people who act in a way that 'freaks normal people out' will likely be stopped and inspected if they're reported. We have all tacitly agreed to that long ago.

Neat room.

I'm surprised the wireless-HDMI transmitter didn't introduce an unacceptable level of lag. I remember an early Oculus presentation that mentioned the reason they use DVI was because HDMI introduced too much latency.

I like the idea of tricking the participant into walking in circles. Reminds me of Mythbusters episode where they tested "impossible to walk in a straight line while blindfolded".

Next step is to build a room where rods can rise out of the floor to create real life analogs to virtual objects (even stairs). Participant would have to wear some soundproof earbuds/headphones so they wouldn't hear the room "reconfiguring".

I'm sorry mate, but i'm going to have to refute a bunch of this. And i hope i can do it without coming across as religious in my approach.

"Your "facts" are nothing but easily manipulated simulations based on theories," Excerpt from your full quote below.

-- The facts and science are not in contention and they are not "easily manipulated simulations". What we have are conclusions made by studious people based on data collected by electronic instruments world wide. The data is statistically analysed to find trends and patterns and then those trends and patterns are separately analysed to see how likely they are. When hundreds of those studies are done, consensus is formed and that is how humans come to all the theories that you adhere to every day; such as gravity, conservation of energy and momentum, etc. We then construct simulations that adhere to those theories and pass different parameters into the simulation to see what the results would be in a certain amount of time. Those parameters are the things you can change, a typical parameter might be the fractional amount of greenhouse gases per cubic metre or something like that, change in volume of polar ice per day perhaps. Thousands of studies analyse thousands of different parameter values and conclusions are drawn from the whole. That is why so many scientists now believe in climate change - because over thousands of scientific studies, the conclusions have pointed overwhelmingly and convincingly to bad news for humans.

I can't dispute your accusation that they are "based on theories". I have yet to meet a person that preferred to have their facts based on anything other than theories. A theory is a collection of ideas relating to a certain topic that are based on independent principles. The alternative is to pin words to a dartboard and throw blindfolded to construct facts. Or perhaps have a floor covered with words and let sacred chickens run round shitting our facts out for us. I'd prefer to use independent principles and the best logic we have available to us.

Please read this bit in particular
Scientists are not tricking or fooling anyone, there is no money in it for a scientist. If they try to lie, they are ridiculed by the rest of the scientists. If you spend 3 years at any decent university doing any science then you will discover that the scientific method is pretty sacred to scientists because it's the only way the field progresses.

BUT BUT BUT politicians get hold of the studies and lie to you about what they mean or how best to solve the problems they illuminate. They want your money, and they manipulate the science to get your money. They can do that because most people are not scientists, and need someone to explain it to them. So my advice is that you do not choose politicians to do that job, but instead use independent adherents to the scientific method who choose to dedicate their lives to scientific study - like Neil de Grasse Tyson who speaks as a scientist... and if he did not, his reputation within the scientific community would be in tatters, and other budding scientists like myself (and others) in this community would be highlighting just how full of shit he is.

So, are scientists lying to us, or are politicians lying to us? What seems more likely?

Well, if that sounds starts happening, my blindfold would come right off.. WTF? I've never heard anything like that and it surely is not erotic.. Sounds like a honeybadger to me..

If you're used to vanilla sex, a blindfold is very freaky. It's a serious jump in trust level.

What happens when you stop watching advertising all-together? Try it for a week. Wearing a blindfold and earplugs when you leave the house might help. Better yet, stay home and smash your television.

True but the Atheist also holds the "belief" that there is not GOD. So which belief is more correct? For me to get into a biblical debate with you and the atheist sift community would be pointless. It's like the saying you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. So this makes me search the web for other ways to argue the point. Here is 1 of them.

Mathematically speaking evolution falls flat on it face..
Lifted from site: http://www.freewebs.com/proofofgod/whataretheodds.htm



Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing number 1 is 1 to 10.
Your chance of drawing 1 & 2 in succession is 1 in 100.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2 & 3 in succession would be one in a thousand.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3 & 4 in succession would be one in 10,000.

And so on, until your chance of drawing from number 1 to number 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion. The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

Sir Fred Hoyle similarly dismisses the notion that life could have started by random processes:

Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The chance against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body's 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly, by chance.

Now, just imagine, if life as we know it had come into existence by a stroke of chance, how much time would it have taken? To quote the biophysicist, Frank Allen:

Proteins are the essential constituents of all living cells, and they consist of the five elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur, with possibly 40,000 atoms in the ponderous molecule. As there are 92 chemical elements in nature, all distributed at random, the chance that these five elements may come together to form the molecule, the quantity of matter that must be continually shaken up, and the length of time necessary to finish the task, can all be calculated. A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, has made the computation and finds that the odds against such an occurrence are 10^160, that is 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number far too large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than the whole universe. For it to occur on the earth alone would require many, almost endless billions (10^243) of years.

Proteins are made from long chains called amino-acids. The way those are put together matters enormously. If in the wrong way, they will not sustain life and may be poisons. Professor J.B. Leathes (England) has calculated that the links in the chain of quite a simple protein could be put together in millions of ways (10^48). It is impossible for all these chances to have coincided to build one molecule of protein.

But proteins, as chemicals, are without life. It is only when the mysterious life comes into them that they live. Only the infinite mind of God could have foreseen that such a molecule could be the abode of life, could have constructed it, and made it live.

Science, in attempt to calculate the age of the whole universe, has placed the figure at 50 billion years. Even such a prolonged duration is too short for the necessary proteinous molecule to have come into existence in a random fashion. When one applies the laws of chance to the probability of an event occurring in nature, such as the formation of a single protein molecule from the elements, even if we allow three billion years for the age of the Earth or more, there isn't enough time for the event to occur.

There are several ways in which the age of the Earth may be calculated from the point in time which at which it solidified. The best of all these methods is based on the physical changes in radioactive elements. Because of the steady emission or decay of their electric particles, they are gradually transformed into radio-inactive elements, the transformation of uranium into lead being of special interest to us. It has been established that this rate of transformation remains constant irrespective of extremely high temperatures or intense pressures. In this way we can calculate for how long the process of uranium disintegration has been at work beneath any given rock by examining the lead formed from it. And since uranium has existed beneath the layers of rock on the Earth's surface right from the time of its solidification, we can calculate from its disintegration rate the exact point in time the rock solidified.

In his book, Human Destiny, Le Comte Du nuoy has made an excellent, detailed analysis of this problem:

It is impossible because of the tremendous complexity of the question to lay down the basis for a calculation which would enable one to establish the probability of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth.

The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability to take place is beyond all imagination. It would that of a sphere with a radius so great that light would take 10^82 years to cover this distance. The volume is incomparably greater than that of the whole universe including the farthest galaxies, whose light takes only 2x10^6 (two million) years to reach us. In brief, we would have to imagine a volume more than one sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe.

The probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance and normal thermic agitation remains practically nill. Indeed, if we suppose 500 trillion shakings per second (5x10^14), which corresponds to the order of magnitude of light frequency (wave lengths comprised between 0.4 and 0.8 microns), we find that the time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule (degree of dissymmetry 0.9) in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe (Earth) is about 10^243 billions of years (1 followed by 243 zeros)

But we must not forget that the Earth has only existed for two billion years and that life appeared about one billion years ago, as soon as the Earth had cooled.

Life itself is not even in question but merely one of the substances which constitute living beings. Now, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. We would need much greater figures to "explain" the appearance of a series of similar molecules, the improbability increasing considerably, as we have seen for each new molecule (compound probability), and for each series of identical throws.

If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the previous figures would seem negligible. The problem was deliberately simplified in order to increase the probabilities.

Events which, even when we admit very numerous experiments, reactions or shakings per second, need an almost-infinitely longer time than the estimated duration of the Earth in order to have one chance, on an average to manifest themselves can, it would seem, be considered as impossible in the human sense.

It is totally impossible to account scientifically for all phenomena pertaining to life, its development and progressive evolution, and that, unless the foundations of modern science are overthrown, they are unexplainable.

We are faced by a hiatus in our knowledge. There is a gap between living and non-living matter which we have not been able to bridge.

The laws of chance cannot take into account or explain the fact that the properties of a cell are born out of the coordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous coordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Rare fluctuations do not explain qualitative facts; they only enable us to conceive that they are not impossible qualitatively.

Evolution is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10^50. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10^50 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."
I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

Chopping vegetables fast isn't difficult. You control the knife with the fingers on the hand holding the thing being cut. Doing this blindfolded makes virtually no difference.

Those only belong in "fashion" if you include "BDSM."

I wish I could use the sarcasm tag here but alas... there's a certain segment of the BDSM crowd who thinks those are awesome.

If she just saw those and thought they were funny and she should make a video, it's a bit like saying "this is a great blindfold to help me sleep, but why is there a lock on the back? Makes no sense."

That thing makes so much noise rattling around inside the cup that the cat could have found it blindfolded!

I love the irony. ALL that space....and he hits the lamppost. You could put 10 people in there blindfolded and they wouldn't have hit it.

I'd love to see a similar video where the 'attackers' are blindfolded. They could just walk forward throwing punches, or swinging a baseball bat. Maybe they would fly backwards at just the right time... maybe not.

These still all involve priming people to be prepared to expect one thing or another. Blindfold a bunch of people. Arrange a bunch of reds and whites. Have people taste them in random orders. Can we get consistent descriptors? Do people in general rate particular wines as better than others? As more enjoyable (not the same thing)? Do individuals consistently rate certain types of wine higher?

The perception of price definitely influences what people expect. No doubt. Expecting to taste a red will make a white taste more like a red, no doubt. But if there's no prompting, can people distinguish? I've never seen something like that.

The little 'gotcha' trick studies mostly just prove that the differences are/can be small enough that people can convince themselves to ignore them--which is fine, fair, and reasonable, but shouldn't be the end.

I pretty exclusively buy random $8 bottles of red wine with no preconceptions about how they'll taste, and there are some I like way better than others.