transcript:

Dear Benny, hi, how are ya? Love the hat by the way.

You may not have noticed but I've been absent for awhile,
I wanted to tell you why and how I've been finding my own style.
A new way of looking at the world beyond the errors of the past.
You see I've read all of your teachings and cant see how they'll last.
Where angels feared to tread has now become the beaten track
but for every step that we took forward, the church took two steps back.

It took you four hundred years just to pardon Galileo,
while the murderer of Hypatia still enjoys his saintly halo.
It was these hypocrisies of the church, that drove me from the flock
though I still clung to the ideas and kept some belief in stock
that Jesus really loved me and god was close at hand
and the day was fast approaching when we'd find the promised land.

When people could stand together and colour wouldn't mean a thing
but i slowly began to realise, thats not the message that god brings.
He constantly plays favourites setting nations against each other
tearing apart families, pitting brother against brother.
The jew and the gentile, the muslim and infidel,
the terrorist gaining heaven while their victims go to hell.

This god isn't worth my worship or the thanks that he demands,
and things have gotten so much better now the powers in our own hands.
Life expectancy has tripled, smallpox has been made extinct.
Our eyes pierced the veil of heaven and what was hazy is now distinct.
A cacophony of symphonies all composed in mathematics,
a ballet of matter and energy performing cosmic acrobatics.

Why didn't your book tell me I was born of a supernova.
Instead demanding belief in what an ancient madman told ya.
Houses can't catch leprosy, epilepsy's not possession
and when it comes to sex what the fucks with your obsession
with what grown men and women do in the privacy of their own home.
Why do you care where they put it? You've got problems of your own.

You let suffer the little children while the paedophiles protected,
the people wanted a shepard but its a wolf that was elected.
You spread disease and misery with every denial of tested science
so people remain upon their knees out of terror and compliance
so please excuse my harshness after breaking religions spell,
and if by chance your god is real, I'll save you a seat in hell.

Can't say I've ever walked out of a theater before the movie was over but, I have fallen asleep during a few (Inglorious Bastards was one). A couple movies I have not liked enough to stop watching are Breakfast of Champions and The Road to Wellville.
As I'm writing this I remembered a movie I saw in the theater and hated (but watched in it's entirety) was Supernova.

I normally watch movies at home but, on my rare visits to a theater, I tend to steer clear of hollywood blockbusters. And most of the movies I watch at home are either independent, low budget or foreign. Or all of the above.

thanks!

In reply to this comment by residue:
*promote

What astounds me is how those guys are trying to find a common answer to an uncommon event. It's like if Tycho Brahe, when observing his first supernova, just said "It must be fireworks in space!" and then tried replicating the supernova by launching fireworks with the right combination of colors. I'm sure he'd be able to do something that looks like SN 1572 eventually, but it would have been all for naught because supernovae are not fireworks in space.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Oasis - Champagne Supernova. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

My interpretation of the movie is that tom's contemporary wife was writing her book based on memories of a past life. Current day Tom discovered the tree of life and used it to "cure" death, becoming immortal himself, but too late to save his wife. He planted a seed from the tree on her grave, and hundreds of years later I guess he's become rich enough to pay for an Alcubierre bubble ship to take himself and the tree, which now houses her soul, out to the supernova for a reunion. The conquistador's unique death, after ingesting the tree of life's nectar, created some kind of open tunnel for his soul to move between lifetimes. That's the only explanation for the most confusing part of the movie for me: when space-Tom appears to the mayan guard. I know it's not supposed to be literal but part of me wonders if immortal Tom has not truly re-incarnated 1,000 years back in time, and now has a chance to cherish every moment with the next incarnation of his true love.

I wonder how many years in earth time passed during his journey? Could be millions. Who's to say what's happening to the passage of time inside tha bubble?

Ya, the 'faster than light' bit at the end was a bit unclear, but they didn't say it traveled at 30c, they said it traveled at 30/28c i.e. 1.0714285714285714285714285714286 times 'the speed of light'. This means a pattern in the game can travel slightly faster than one square per 'turn' which is otherwise 'the speed limit'.

If you stared at this really closely you would probably find that when the "ship" passed through the "Stargate", it jumped 2 extra squares, and so on average the "ship" traveled 30 squares in 28 time steps. V = Dist/Time so 30 squares / 28 time steps = 30/28c where c = 1square/time step. But I didn't state at it long enough to check.

To me, the 'Primer' example was the coolest. It's certainly surprising to see prime numbers pop out of two simple rules.

I wonder what would happen if a hexagonal grid was used instead. *Asks Google*

Oh, someone thought of that... check it out:

http://www.cse.sc.edu/~bays/h6h6h6/

Select the 'pattern' button and checkout what's been found. My favorite: Supernova

Touching sentiment. This is what it means to be human and alive.

But the reality of life is that we are all dieing. Try as we might we will all die. For all the greatest technological feats of making we have no bested death.

The earth was here before us, the earth will probably be here after us. The Universe does not bat an eye when a galaxy is lost to a supernova.

Thanks, good call

In reply to this comment by NicoleBee:
*promote

In reference to what i am getting from this thread is there is no God and this is all just one big cosmic coincidence? Now how much belief does that take?

2 points here, firstly, How much belief it takes? well, to me, its not really a matter of belief or "faith", its a matter of evidence. Scientists have studied the universe for a long time and concluded, based on EVIDENCE, that the universe is expanding at an exponential rate. By comparing stars at various distances, we can look back in time, literally, and see how the early universe looked and behaved. Which brings me to point number 2: "cosmic accident" is a gross oversimplification of our current understanding of the universe.

We have deduced, based on evidence that the early universe was much denser and hotter and simpler than it is now. Brian Cox used a snowflake as a metaphor, this old, "frozen" universe is complex and interesting, where as the early universe, like a melted snowflake, would just be a dense , hot gass of sorts, ultimately with only hydrogen in it. As Carl Sagan said: This (meaning us humans, earth and every living creature on it) is what you get when you give Hydrogen atoms 14 billion years to evolve.

Right now, our Sun with its immense gravitational pressure fuses 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium, EVERY SECOND. 5 Million tons of pure energy is released, equaling something like 200 million Hiroshima bombs EVERY SECOND. Yet these extreme numbers are peanuts compared to the events that shaped our universe. Our sun simply isnt powerful enough to fuse helium and create heavier elements. For that, we need bigger "Weapons of Cosmic Destruction Creation" Supernovae, red giants, galactic collisions and supermassive black holes, nebulae and gas clouds beyond all imaginations. From cosmic events like this, all the ingredients we take for granted here on earth, (like carbon etc) were originally created. Again when talking about grand stuff like this that I know little about, it is best to qoute Carl Sagan again:

We are the Stuff Of Stars.

I love that quote because it is literally true.

So thats the "accident" before life arose. The exact chemical reactions that gave rise to the first self-replicating molecule is not fully understood, but once that first barrier was crossed (achieving high-fidelity replication) Evolution by natural selection is INEVITABLE.It still took a good 2 billion years before cells start grouping into multi-cellular organisms, but when that revolution happened, we went from flatworm to primates in a measly 700 million years.

That account of the Cosmic accident is a far to brief, incomplete and rough draft of what happened, of course, I only mean to point out that this isnt some mad scientists guesswork. The processes and events above have been predicted, discovered, tested and examined and calculated and peer-reviewed and-- you get the point. They are our current best shot at understanding the universe, based on the available evidence. Naturally, much is left to discover, and thats what makes science interesting.

Well, there is one small caveat.

The size of the closed system. If the closed system includes the entire solar system, the second law of thermodynamics does apply. Without massive amounts of hydrogen being added to the sun, it will eventually disappate all of it's energy and either supernova or fade and die. Energy will be disappated and eventually all will fall to decay.

Of course, this is so many billion years in the future that it isn't really relevant to us, but the law still applies.

>> ^EDD:
^whoa, dft you've completely missed the point of this episode. It was no random piano player. It was in fact a figment of Kara's imagination - her 'dad', if there ever was one. The realization I mentioned in the description is the one of her having memory (imprints) of the song (Hera's notes merely provided cues for her to follow), which quite clearly leads to conclude that Kara IS Daniel, number 7, THE 13th Cylon model (who was artistic (piano, paintings, remind you of anyone?) and whose DNA had been radically altered, as we learned in the previous episode).

Umm... Occam's Razor? Isn't it far more likely that Kara Thrace is, in fact, the first Hybrid, and that Daniel was her father? I mean, she does stuff that Hera does (drawing the supernova over and over as a child). Look--we see him. We see the silly rituals they did when she was little. Starbuck's mom sure thought he was a real dude, and Kara even has a cassette tape of one of his performances. Admittedly, we've never "seen" him before, but he has loomed rather large in her life.

What I really like about this is that they've really drawn out the whole Greek Mythology angle, with the 'final five' (in fact, the FIRST five) lusting after their children and grand-children, unaware that in this, there is only sterility.

I've always thought Kara was a hybrid, but I thought that perhaps Saul Tigh was her real father, and that he had no idea. Rewatching the first season, I see that it puts a whole new spin on their relationship.

Oh, and I couldn't be happier about how all this is resolving. They had me at "naked singularity".

Tags for this video have been changed from 'andromeda, bbc, supernova, simulation' to 'andromeda, bbc, supernova, simulation, black hole' - edited by Fusionaut

>> ^mefa:
>> ^Chaucer:
that's a big ass star. Amazing it can stay together being as massive as it is. I'd be willing to say if that start were to go supernova in our life time, we would be able to see it regardless of what galaxy its in.

Why would we be able to do that? If it goes supernova three million light years away, why would we be able to see it?


Beat me to it.

>> ^Chaucer:
that's a big ass star. Amazing it can stay together being as massive as it is. I'd be willing to say if that start were to go supernova in our life time, we would be able to see it regardless of what galaxy its in.


Why would we be able to do that? If it goes supernova three million light years away, why would we be able to see it?