[redacted]

I can't tell what it is but if you watch it step by step, that object doesn't behave in a human fashion, it also goes incredibly flat for a human. I think it just landed to appear like arms and legs. My best guess is it's just some clothing that was propped up on the back windshield.>> ^dracoirs:

Is that another kid flying into the ditch in a red shirt and green pants?

Step forward.
Step forward.
**Gorilla finishes eating cabbage**
Step forward.
Makes scary stranger face.
**Gorilla runs up and rips Sigourney Weavers arm from its socket**
OK,that's what we want to see.

He was essentially building his faction's defensive cannons INSIDE (what he thought was) the opponent's base. This is extremely irritating, as the cannons are very strong, and once you've built enough of them along with the pylons they need to run, there's little chance the troops his opponent had amassed by this point could have taken them out. And after that, it's just a matter of advancing your cannon wall step by step into his buildings, until you're taking out his core buildings.

It's extremely cheesy, but a huge gamble as well. All his money was sunk into it, and once he realized his opponent wasn't even there, he left. You even see in the video, he had nothing else in his base to fight back with, when the marines eventually got around to attacking him.

Absolutely fascinating. Although i think ethics really won't matter in this area, unfortunately. I guess it'll be a step-by-step process: no one will sit down and say "hey, i'll make a four-armed glow in the dark human superbaby" but in many little steps we'll get there. countries will soften their laws bit by bit to gain technological supremacy, individual scientits will "bend" the laws little by little and over the years we'll get to the designer baby stuff.

Yes, sounds pessimistic but IMHO men always has done everything technology provided him (and used most of it as a weapon to kill his fellow men).

Thank you. That was a really nice thing to say.

In reply to this comment by Offsajdh:
Magnificent, and utterly captivating. Those who find the early bits too dreary, just skip ahead and follow his step by step deconversion and its effects on the mind. Although, by doing so you will to some extent skip the "character investment" part of the story.

Best thing dystopianfuturetoday ever sifted? Yes. And that's saying something.

Magnificent, and utterly captivating. Those who find the early bits too dreary, just skip ahead and follow his step by step deconversion and its effects on the mind. Although, by doing so you will to some extent skip the "character investment" part of the story.

Best thing dystopianfuturetoday ever sifted? Yes. And that's saying something.

Yeah, an Atmega32. They have a step-by-step guide for building it if you go to the You Tube link, but its at Instructables so you have to pay. You get the parts list for free though, and that answered all the questions I had about it.

It probably wouldn't be that big a deal to make it react to the music.


>> ^deathcow:

This thing was made with AVR microcontrollers right? I've been using ALL my sleep time for the last two weeks figuring out how to program these microcontrollers... my demo is not quite as whiz bang though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M54H_MziGWo&fmt=22

The combination of the heat of the hair dryer (first) with the extreme cold of the compressed air (second & turned upside down) causes the dent to expand and contract quickly enough that it pops back to its original shape.

Payback is correct, only works on light metal of a flat surface.

Step by step process...
Basic vid, heaps out there to chose from.

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>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

No, he is nearly making the subtle, but logical distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. Have had this conversation here a lot on the sift. The experience of blue is a very different one than the wavelength of 475 nm (which corresponds to blue for most people). "Light" is a subjective experience not related to real properties of photons. Photons appear bright because through the course of a billion years of evolution, interrupting photons as light, and their corresponding wavelengths as colors has better aided that animal that interrupting them as something else. But that says nothing about photons themselves, only the way in which minds are translating reality.
It is the distinction between Empiricism and Intellectualism. One believing that it takes senses to understand truth, the other, that only the power of pure reason can lead knowledge. I, for one, am mostly under the school of intellectualism as it pertains to epistemology. I trust the power of reason and logic to find truth, not eyeballs and olfactories.

No, the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon would more properly apply to colours than to light itself, which was proven by Newton to be a particle (or at least particule-like, and then later a dual particle-wave thingy of course). His conclusions were accepted by Kant, who redefined the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon to not contradict Newton's findings. Goethe disagreed with Kant and Newton, but he was a fool. He thought light and colour were the same thing thus he failed. Schopenhauer rectified Goethe's theory to apply only to the perception of colour but Goethe wouldn't have it thus he failed again and it was up to psychologists to prove Schopenhauer was actually right in a limited sense.

Your distinction of empiricism and intellectualism is also very naive. As far as we know, the only way you can prove the factuality of your knowledge is through experience. That's why modern science works and idle speculation (like most Ancient Greeks did) does not. Being an empiricist doesn't mean you "trust your eyeballs", quite the contrary in fact. That's why David Hume talks a lot of the required skepticism needed to know nature from one's senses. If we could see things as they are (as noumenon), then we would not need our senses nor our reason to interpret what they sense (the phenomenon). That's in fact the basic premise of Kant's whole Critic of Pure Reason. His solution, in a word, was to view reason as recreating it's own idea, in the original Greek sense of "form", of the original noumenon (the thing-in-itself) by interpreting the filtered sense data of phenomenon that passed through the categories of understanding (like substance, causality, etc.). Some call his solution a form psychologism and I think they are right, but Kant certainly didn't think so. In fact, I think it's not psychologistic enough, though one must be wary of going as far as to try founding everything on psychology, a circular dead end if there was one.

Ultimately, it comes to the question of what kind of knowledge you want: absolute knowledge or human knowledge? I purport absolute knowledge is unknowable (irreducible) to human knowledge in the same way the noumenon is irreducible to the phenomenon, not only by its own definition but by the very way knowledge works (at least for us, meaning in a subject-object duality where the subject cannot simply copy the object it wants to know but must make an inherently reduced image of it, i.e. an idea). I think this problem to be related to the P=NP conundrum. Only if P=NP can we ever hope to achieve absolute knowledge and then that is not even guaranteed (we would need to evolve somehow to transcend the P and NP divide which factually exists in our present human knowledge). As Scott Aaronson of the MIT puts it, "If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett. It’s possible to put the point in Darwinian terms: if this is the sort of universe we inhabited, why wouldn’t we already have evolved to take advantage of it?" (from his blog).

>> ^GDGD:

The stomper is believed to be a Tim Proffitt, and the guy who forced her down is believed to be Mike Pezzano.

Step 1: Stomp a helpless lady.

Step 2: ?
Step 3: Proffitt.

Sorry, I had to...

Your video, Dawkins - Eye evolution step by step (with living examples), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

@xxovercastxx

I apologize for my tardiness. I'll try to slice my way through your response while the aftertaste of this thread still lingers. It's rapidly fading from memory.

1. Relating to the proposition that prioritizing issues is invalid

This seems to be an argument that arises logically and naturally. Starting from the top, the quantity of world resources exceeds the requirements of any given problem at any given time. The idea that lesser issues ought to be sidelined until we have resolved the greater ones, amongst which we might consider genocides, global warming, poverty and disease, strikes me as both bizarre and having no logical foundation to stand on.

I share, completely, the concerns and convictions that relate to those greater problems, and they are indeed deserving of all of our collective attention. However, the human species, and its capacity for problem solving, are not analogous to a single-core CPU; we are capable of confronting more than one thing at one time. We need not be exclusivist, dealing with issues in a step-by-step manner until we've worked our way down the chain of strife, and to contend that lesser issues are not even worth our time while greater evils remain is daft and short-sighted.

2. Consent

You mention Yogi's point about the voluntary nature of joining and participating in the Church of Scientology. Many of the techniques that Scientology employs to keep people in the church, to keep them isolated from information and criticism of the church, and to disconnect people from those outside the church are outlined in the very video to which this thread belongs. I do not believe that consent makes legitimate the manipulation of people in the church to stay in the church. I do not believe that consent granted by someone of compromised judgement is legitimate. I don't believe that these premises give me a legitimate moral basis for acting contrary to people's wishes, when their judgement is compromised and consent is ill-given, but I do think it must negate the idea that these people are acting autonomously, sensibly, intelligently and with their best interests in mind.

Basically, I say that their choices are sometimes invalid in cases where their independence has been compromised, but I also say that I have no right to intervene and contradict whatever free will they're exerting. Manipulation, propaganda and indoctrination are they key words, and they're techniques being used to enormous effect in the CoS, as the documentary above illustrates quite well.

3. 9/11 conspiracy comparison / straw-man assessment

"Look I get you want to be up in arms about this, it's something you've put a lot of stock into. It's pretty much like 9/11 conspiracy theories. You can talk and post and tell people they're full of shit when they question why this is such a big deal but you've missed the point. You've been completely neutralized, we don't have to worry about you actually bringing about any sort of change that's meaningful since you're going after this silly Religion."

I still don't think I overplayed it. I understand what you're getting at, but I believe my interpretation is closer to what he meant.

> Look I get you want to be up in arms about this, it's something you've put a lot of stock into. It's pretty much like 9/11 conspiracy theories.

This statement stands by itself. It's not connected to the following except by proximity, which is :

> You can talk and post and tell people they're full of shit when they question why this is such a big deal but you've missed the point.

In the second portion of this, Yogi is referring to the current discussion, and both my and Genji's disagreement with the idea that the CoS is no big deal. Thus the second sentence is self-contained and the 9/11 conspiracy statement is concluded immediately after it's mentioned. Logically, this must mean that a connection, even if vague, is being made between two very different positions : he's saying that our, or mine, or Genji's objectivity is compromised to the extent that we are almost fanatical. That is the comparison being made, and the comparison to which I have been referring.

When I say that Yogi was suggesting our objectivity was compromised, several things give it away. The biggest is "want to be up in arms about this". "Want to" implies a personal investment that we'd not be willing to surrender and that the participation goes beyond a moral assessment, and into the realm of the irrational. "It's something you've put a lot of stock into" suggests, again, a personal investment that mandates never surrendering in argument, and having an irrational attachment to your position. Thirdly, "it's pretty much like 9/11 conspiracy theories". There are several ways you can interpret this, but it suggests to me that he thinks the opposition is fundamentally irrational, disconnected from reality and deeply biased to a particular outcome, irregardless of the actual conditions from which you draw your moral conclusion about the CoS. Thus, he seemed to think that the sentiment was immovable and the argument was only doing the bidding of an invulnerable bias.

I disagree with you. I don't think it was a straw man that I installed, I think it was a valid and accurate interpretation of what he was saying. I will concede, though, that it's easy to misread me as misreading him, based on what mention I made of the 9/11 thing. If that makes sense.

4. Genji suggesting Yogi was an irrational, thick-skulled, sick fuck who might kill kittens

I wasn't shocked. I thought it was in bad taste at the time, and I still do. I'm not used to the dynamics of debates that aren't 1-on-1, and I make no apology for it.

5. The Genji-won't-do-nothin'; the twisting of a statement

> "You've been completely neutralized, we don't have to worry about you actually bringing about any sort of change that's meaningful since you're going after this silly Religion.

You won't help anyone, you won't effect anything, you'll just stamp your feet and get all pissed off over the internet about things that simply aren't important. Now run along and keep doing that, I'm going over here to feed these homeless people some sammiches"

This comment, to me, suggests and suggested that Yogi was implying the following, and forgive my shoddy paraphrasing:

"You are absorbed by a non-issue. You could be investing your time in an actual problem, and perhaps be contributing to a resolution. You will have no effect on anything important, because you are involved in something that is a waste of your time; an irrelevant problem."

"You won't help anyone, you won't effect anything" needs no interpretation or translation of any kind. Surely this statement is unambiguous. Was I really twisting his statement? Perhaps I could've articulated myself better, but was I wrong? I say not, and I think as I did then.

6. My First Hypocrisy : An adventure in target management, Drive-by commenting, etc.

You're right that I should've commented on what GK actually said. It's not hypocrisy, but it was unfair and unbalanced.

I was referring to you with the drive-by assessment comment. I felt as if you had installed yourself into the discussion and had promptly left it, when there seemed to be no need for moderation. I think, in light of the scope of the post I'm responding to, I'd be happy to apologize for that.

I didn't realize you meant GK. Now I do. Woo.

I think that's it. Thanks.

Step 1: Nuke the Sahara desert, turn it into one giant pane of glass
Step 2: No more hurricanes
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT