"I've got a ten inch frying pan; I use a ten inch frying pan. Some chefs use an eight inch or a seven inch frying pan. I like to use a ten inch pan."

Now you know where those two and a half minutes went.

Lizard = meat. Now you know

In reply to this comment by Fletch:
In reply to this comment by BicycleRepairMan:
I can relate and agree with this whole clip, except where he mentions "octomom", I dont know who that is, but if it is what it sounds like (8-lings??) , I think that serves as a good enough excuse not to know ANYTHING, other than the fact that you have 8 babies to take care of.

She actually has 14 children, all conceived in vitro. So... now you know. :

Thanks All I know is that I have one that takes up like 23,9 hours a day, so how she is going to have time to take care of 13 more and give a fuck about politics the rest of the day.. So.. fuck Bill Maher and his pothead life a little bit..

In reply to this comment by BicycleRepairMan:
I can relate and agree with this whole clip, except where he mentions "octomom", I dont know who that is, but if it is what it sounds like (8-lings??) , I think that serves as a good enough excuse not to know ANYTHING, other than the fact that you have 8 babies to take care of.

She actually has 14 children, all conceived in vitro. So... now you know.

Don't look now but there's a Hidden Mickey in your avatar.

And now you know how it's brainwashing.

>> ^FlowersInHisHair:

I fail to see how hidden Mickeys, having exciting attractions, or expecting customer-facing staff at a theme park to appear enthusiastic and happy constitute brainwashing.

And now you know why they always set up their pranks in malls:

places full of simple, unassuming folks who have loooots of time to stand about waiting for something to happen a.k.a. Human Dodos
>> ^Fletch:

Hey, stranger... would you like to stand here and serve cake to people while I go somewhere else? Great!

Now you know another one. Hello my new friend!

AND THAT is why you get away from the shore after an earthquake. Look at what it did to the pool; now you know what the tsunami is bringing to bear...

I’m going to respond to your last comment in two parts. The first part regards the god argument in which you have mischaracterized me as being closed minded and of having a bias. I can easily show that I am neither and this is my view on the whole god thing so you can at least understand my view if for nothing else. The second part I will address my primary contention against your methods of argument.

I am willing to listen, however, on its face the statement "I don't care about the whole god argument" indicates both bias and closed-mindedness. It also shows an intellectual incuriousity.

I admit that I don’t believe in a god or gods, or even advanced aliens. I just don’t see any reason to believe any of it. This doesn’t mean that I am saying that god doesn’t exist; I’m saying “I don’t know, but I highly doubt it and I don’t buy it.” What do you find confusing about that?

We have no real reason to suppose from direct evidence that a god, or gods, exist. Do all effects have a cause? Do all causes have an effect? If yes, why do you suppose it’s a god who caused all of the effects that you attribute him to such as the “fine tuning” or “the appearance of design”, why can’t it be something else? By resting on a god hypothesis as the answer to mysterious phenomenon, you are precluding all other answers that are just as good as a god, that have the same amount of direct evidence.

Scientific evidence indicates that time, space, matter and energy all had a finite beginning, making the cause of the Universe timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful and transcendent. Those are all attributes of God, and fit an unembodied mind. The fine tuning, information in DNA and appearance of design all point to a creator. Logic itself tells us that the first cause of the Universe must be eternal because nothing comes from nothing and you can't have an infinite regress of causes. Frankly I think it is ridiculous to believe that Universes just happen by themselves, and especially, as the greatest minds of our time are suggesting, out of nothing. Can't you see that when someone says that, it means the emperor has no clothes?

Does the god that you believe in have a cause? If not, how so? By what mechanisms does your god exist but without having had a cause? How can your belief be proven and why should anyone believe it based on rational information? What evidence is there that compels you to believe that your god indeed doesn’t have a cause? These are the kinds of questions that I think you should be asking for yourself. If you resort to “just needing to have faith” as an answer then you are actively avoiding exercising critical thinking faculties.

God is eternal, and He has no beginning or end, so no He doesn't have a cause. A God that was caused by something else wouldn't be God. My evidence is from logic which demands an eternal first cause. Otherwise, you're left explaing how you get something from nothing, which is logically absurd.

Unlike you, I don’t see the appearance of design in the complexity of biological systems or in anything found in nature. I study evolutionary biology, astrophysics, and chemistry for myself because I find it the mechanisms fascinating, not because I’m trying to disprove god.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker p.1

Even hardcore skeptics concede there is an appearance of design.

There is inherent beauty in all of it and it’s a shame that most people are ignorant of what we do actually know. While I’m open to the idea that a god designed the system then put it in motion, there just isn’t direct phenomenological evidence that suggest that’s what happened.

The information in DNA is direct evidence that a higher intelligence designed the system.

There is enough information that we do know about speciation to suggest that evolution through natural selection does happen, is happening, and will continue to happen. The genetic code is enough to suggest common ancestry between all living things in a tree like family lineage.

natural selection can weed out some of the complexity and so slow down the information decay that results in speciation. it may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. it is not a creative force as many people have suggested.

Roger Lewin Science magazine 1982

The genetic code also suggests a common designer. As far as your tree claim, you need to research the cambrian explosion. It is quite a let down for gradualists, unfortunately. All the major body types, including the phylum Chordata (thats our phylum), were there from the beginning. We actually have less diversity today, not more.

(on the cambrian explosion)
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker 1986 p.229

Certainly, we do not know yet exactly how the whole process of DNA or RNA reproduction started, but if we postulate that a god started the process without sufficient evidence, only on the basis that there is no better answer, then we can also postulate that it was an advanced inter-dimensional race of ancients who populate planets with the seed of genetic mechanisms. If we don’t have the answer to how the mechanism got the whole thing started, what’s the difference between those two different origin hypotheses?

I don't postulate that God 'started the process'. I postulate that God spontaneously created everything. You rule out God apriori and thus you accept this just-so story about how life got here. In your eyes, it must have happened. Interpreting the evidence to fit the conclusion isn't very scientific, is it?

Also unlike you, I don’t see what you call “fine tuning” and I also study all sorts of physics, my favorite being astrophysics personally. The term “fine tuning” implies that something above the system changed some dials to a perfect goldilocks range to support what we have right now. This is an interesting idea however I find it to be more prudent to see it the other way around; that what has formed, has only formed because the conditions allow for it, that the environment dictates what can exist. Wherever you look at an environment and find life, you find life that fits into that environment and we also see that when environments change, so to do species change to adapt to the new conditions. We never see an environment change to fit the species.

I don't think you're understanding the fine tuning argument. Many of those finely tuned values, if even moved an inch, would make life impossible in this Universe. Not just improbable, but impossible. The fine tuning is extremely fortuitous to an incomprehensible degree. The odds of these values randomly converging is virtually impossible. For instance, for physical life to exist, the mass density of the Universe must be fine tuned to better than one part in 10 to the 60th power. For space-energy density, it is 10 to the 120th power. That's just two out of dozens of values.

You claim that we haven’t seen macro-evolution taking place? Are you sure about that, how exactly do you know this is true, where did you read this? How do you know that what you are calling macro-evolution is the same thing as what evolutionary biologists call macro-evolution? The fact of the matter is that the fossil record has nothing to say about the most recent research on macro-evolution. It’s a fascinating material and I would suggest that you get out there and find it for yourself. Talk Origins has as list of the studies done on macro-evolution, you can start there if you like.

Yes, evolutionists are trying to dump the fossil record in favor of genetic evidence because the fossil record is actually evidence against their theories. As I've said, common genetics also indicate common designer.

Darwin made a great discovery, that creatures can adapt to environmental conditions. That's something that has hard scientific evidence. What didn't have any evidence was his extrapolation from that to the theory of all life having a common ancestor. He was counting on the fossil record to prove his case but it didn't, which is why he said this:

innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? ..why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geologoy assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Charles Darwin
Origin of the Species

Here we are 150 years later with billions of fossils and there still isn't any evidence. If Darwin was right, we should have indisputable proof that one species changed into another, but we don't. All we have is a smattering of highly contested transitionals which are all "more or less" closely related, but no true ancestors. When the facts don't match the theory it is time to throw that theory away, but the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of the secular worldview, and it isn't going to die without a fight, no matter how loudly the facts cry out against it.

The question becomes, if there was/is a designer, what was designed first, the creature or the environment? To me, you are suggesting that humans were designed first in the mind of god, and then the environment was finely tuned in order to sustain the idea that god already had for us. Don’t you think this is a little bit too egotistical of a view? If that’s true, what makes everything else necessary? I don’t know if you study astrophysics or astronomy at all but there is a massive amount of stuff out there that has nothing to do with us and if we’re a part of god’s plan, he sure did create a lot of waste.

I'm saying He created all of it at the same time, in six days as Genesis describes. Why is the Universe so large? It could be for a number of reasons, such as that it gives us room to grow. If we were just hitting some sort of wall in space, it would also be a wall in knowledge that we could acquire. If it wasn't as large and complex as it is, we wouldn't be where we are today. Why are solid objects actually mostly composed of empty space? Isn't God wasting all of that space? Or is it integral to His design? Does the fact that almost everything is made up of empty space reduce the significance of solid objects? The size of the Universe doesn't say anything about our importance relative to it. The Heavens also declare the glory of God:

Psalm 19:1-2

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

To me, if the Christian beliefs are the most accurate representation of reality, god isn’t a very good designer. There millions of ways that he could have done a better job if he is all powerful. Of course, you can revert back to, “we can’t know the mind of god”, or “god works in mysterious ways”, but those aren’t answers, they are just ways of maintaining a pre-existing belief by silencing further inquisition.

Have you ever created a Universe? If not, how then would you know what a superior design would look like?

“Unless you can demonstrate a purely naturalistic origin of the Universe, you have no case against Agency.“

Agency needs to prove itself and so far it isn’t doing a very good job. Science as a whole isn’t making a case against agency and neither am I by suggesting that there are likely to be naturalistic causes. Agency simply isn’t necessary. That is what I think that you don’t understand. It’s that I don’t accept the case for agency until agency can be proven. A suspended judgment is better than an accepted unverifiable and untestable claim.

You can rule out the necessity of Agency when you can explain origins. To say that it is not necessary when you don't know what caused the Universe is not something you can determine.

If you are in any way the kind of person who culturally relates to Christianity then there is nothing that anyone can do for you. It is very difficult to have an intellectually honest conversation with someone whose basis for belief is deeply tied to a sense of culture or social belonging. Challenging your beliefs is synonymous to asking you to become someone else if your beliefs are tightly woven into your identity. The only thing I can ask of you is to ask yourself if what you believe determines how you will process new information that comes to you.

I'll give you a little background on me. I grew up without any religion, and until a few years ago, I was an agnostic materialist who didn't see any evidence for God or spirit. Growing up, I hoped to become an astronomer. I have studied all the things you have mentioned, and although I am just a layman, I know quite a bit about biology, astronomy, physics, etc. Like you, I assumed because of my indoctrination in school and society, that the theory of evolution and other metaphysical theories were well supported by hard evidence. When I became a Christian, I was willing to incorporate these theories into my worldview. It is only upon investigation of the actual facts that I was shocked to find there not only is there no real evidence, but that much of what I had been taught in school was either grossly inaccurate, intentionally misleading, or outright fradulent.

So, you're not dealing with someone who grew up outside of your worldview, who feels threatened by it and is trying to tear it down. You're talking with someone who was heavily invested in it, and even willing to compromise with it, and has turned away from it because of my research, not in spite of it. If it was true, I would want to know about it. Since it isn't, I don't believe in it.

At the very least, you can see now that I am not diametrically opposed to the idea of a creator or agency behind everything. The notion is interesting but I don’t believe that there is enough real credible information to suggest that it’s true.

You are more openminded than I originally gave you credit for, but you definitely have a huge evidence filter made out of your presuppositions.

There are enough logical arguments against the idea of a god or gods existing that the whole notion is worth dismissing.

The only logical argument of any value that the atheists have is the argument from evil, and that has been soundly debunked by plantigas free will defense. Feel free to bring one up though, because I have never seen an atheist offer any positive evidence for his position. "Worth dismissing" = close minded and biased, btw.

If there is as god or gods, they aren’t doing a very good job of making themselves known or knowable.

Do you think that is why 93 percent of the world believes that God exists?

The simple fact is that naturalistic explanations are more useful ideas than any god concept because they provide both predictions that we can verify and help us make decisions about where to study next. No god hypothesis has ever provided either, therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge; the idea of god is useless.

Did you know that the idea that we can suss out laws by investigating their secondary causes is a Christian idea, based on the premise that God created an orderly universe governed by laws? Did you know that modern science got its start in Christian europe? Doesn't seem so useless to me. Science now must assume a little thing called "uniformity in nature" to even do science without the belief that there is a Creator upholding these laws. How do you get absolute laws in an ever changing Universe? What is the evidence the future will be like the past? Can you explain it?

Now you see why naturalistic explanations are predominate in science as the default standard.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

I have faith and belief myself... I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed. I have no evidence for this. It is simply what I have faith in and what I believe.

Isaac Asimov

I see why you say that, and now you know why you believe that, because those who teach you these ideas are doing exactly what I have been saying all along. Suppressing the truth.


>> ^IAmTheBlurr:

I thought I'd chime in too. Great work on the sift lucky, I hardly recognize it from nigh six years ago when I found it, then months later I made an actual account to get slightly involved. But, mostly I joined so that I could support VideoSift as it was a unique site and something I visited daily; I basically stopped going to youtube and various other video sites because the sift, voted on, and decided what were the videos to be seen. This process is still working great and helps us sort out the mediocre on the Internet and allow people that visit to find the best of the best in videos.

You of course lucky have made great strides in the interface and inner workings of the sift since those early days. Now, whether I use the sift on my PC, my cell, or my iPad--it works seamlessly and well. If it happens to be your birthday, then happy birthday as well!!!

To VideoSift and its future success and to @lucky760 !

P.S.- I don't know if you're responsible for setting it up or helping, but the "Dark" mode (which of course changes the background to black and makes it in general easier to see in different conditions) is an option that was created that I use all the time and if you created it, I want you to know how much I appreciate it--and I appreciate it in a way that you may not even suspect! I suffer from debilitating migraines that at one time were only present a few time in a week (easy enough to handle). Along with this I also have Cluster headaches (at that time I had them maybe once a month), which are...essentially extremely bad headaches (if anyone reading is interested, when they start they fire of in the brain and give the same indications that a seizure would give--neuroscientists literally have no idea what causes them), the Clusters can play games with your nervous system causing odd symptoms, like uncontrolled tearing of the eyes usually accompanied by a runny nose or up to the extreme of losing all the feeling on the left side of your body (I've seen both and many other things in between)--the Cluster headache is strong enough that it's even difficult to think while it's fully active, sometimes time is the only cure--narcotics tend to be like a drop of water in a well, they do nothing (the best relief comes from high-flow oxygen at around 12-14 LPM O₂). I ended up getting the Swine Flu (or Influenza Type A) back in 2006. It unfortunately got to my nervous system and beyond the other damage that it did that i now have problems with, it changed the nature of the headaches. The migraines became daily, sometimes they are unrelenting--they never leave, for days. Worse of all the Clusters became much more prevalent hitting twice a week on average.

Then VideoSift changed their setup, allowing for a "darkroom" environment. The headaches and their intensity are related by light in a room; for example if I want to help myself out going to a dark room with some cool air helps the most. To tell you the truth a small change, like the one VideoSift made, and it may not have been completely all your doing, but either way I wanted you to know this IN DETAIL so that when I thank you it means just that much more! So now you know just how much a small change to the environment and viewing area has had a profound change on me and my web-surfing experience. I can view VideoSift much easier now, as the previous pure white scheme literally hurt to look at. If you've ever wondered if the smaller features are worth it, this is a testimonial that explains why it is. So, once again @lucky760 thanks for everything you have done here at VideoSift and continue to do!

//I know that was a bit long and involved, but I hope it makes you realize how appreciated you are here!

>> ^kceaton1:

>> ^ant:
>> ^kceaton1:
The random @ant downvote is a sure sign that manflu is still spreading it's terrible maladies and curses upon us in ways we haven't even imagined yet. Such a shame!

Time to spread it!


How do I change my vote!?!


Now, you know why we need undo/vote change.

>> ^dag:

I've always wondered.


now you know. schooled

>> ^zombieater:

>> ^ghark:
I just completed a first aid training certificate and the trainer advised that these are the only spiders that we actually consider deadly (which was a bit surprising). The other spiders like the red back etc are not really known to kill people. So now you know - if you die from any spider other than a funnel web your doin' it wrong!

Gah! No! This is not that taxon! Your trainer is thinking of the Australian funnel web spider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_funnel-web_spider), not this one. There are many different types of funnel web spider (and this isn't even one!), most (99%) of which are harmless.
N00bs...


oh! cheers for that, so which type is this?

>> ^ghark:

I just completed a first aid training certificate and the trainer advised that these are the only spiders that we actually consider deadly (which was a bit surprising). The other spiders like the red back etc are not really known to kill people. So now you know - if you die from any spider other than a funnel web your doin' it wrong!


Good on you doing a first aid course - not enough people do it.

The red back is still deadly, it's just a very rare occurrence. The last death was way back before the anti-venene was developed. Even then it was not common to die from it (but it was a possibility).

The Sydney funnel web on the other hand is shit your pants deadly in regards to their venom but still account for half of all spider related deaths in Australia (the other half are red back spider deaths). So it's just as rare an occurrence.

I'd be much more worried about eastern brown snake bites - which are super mega shit your pants deadly. And they are much more common.

>> ^ghark:

I just completed a first aid training certificate and the trainer advised that these are the only spiders that we actually consider deadly (which was a bit surprising). The other spiders like the red back etc are not really known to kill people. So now you know - if you die from any spider other than a funnel web your doin' it wrong!


Gah! No! This is not that taxon! Your trainer is thinking of the Australian funnel web spider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_funnel-web_spider), not this one. There are many different types of funnel web spider (and this isn't even one!), most (99%) of which are harmless.

N00bs...