>> ^Fletch:

Unfortunately, the memories of roughly half of voting America have proven to be exceptionally short and conveniently selective. Bush got elected twice. The same people who voted for him view Reagan as some sort of conservative Messiah, instead of what he really was... the greatest tax-and-spend "liberal" of the last half century. They're extremely mallable when it comes to the daily perturbations in party dogma. Thinking is hard.


Reagan wasn't a liberal though...the last liberal president was Nixon. Yeah not exactly better.

Unfortunately, the memories of roughly half of voting America have proven to be exceptionally short and conveniently selective. Bush got elected twice. The same people who voted for him view Reagan as some sort of conservative Messiah, instead of what he really was... the greatest tax-and-spend "liberal" of the last half century. They're extremely mallable when it comes to the daily perturbations in party dogma. Thinking is hard.

Looks like something I'd really enjoy, but goodness gracious the title perturbs the heck out of me.

He's INSIDE the source code? SERIOUSLY?

Source code is just plain old text compiled into a executable program (or executed by an interpreter), not something that someone can be inside. Every time they say "You're IN the source code," I'm just picturing him in a pile of paper with programming language all over it or maybe like they shrunk him down and digitized him so he can walk around on a computer screen inside an editor like Notepad++ or an IDE like Eclipse.

Oh well. They title movies for the masses. This was my same issue with the new Karate Kid movie (which is about a boy learning Kung Fu). Crikey. That's Hollywood for you.

Hmmm, I'm annoyed or otherwise perturbed that Mohammad is the most popular name as well and that for the religious aspects-It's a gauge on the backward-thinking majority being kept slaves by a system of disinformation, economic servitude, etc. What's the most popular aristocratic European name? Hindi? Dutch? Who gives a damn but to know that the fact that Mohammad is popular is due to lack of knowledge regarding the origins of world religions and the grip those that know the truth have over masses of people.

People have used the race card with me as well when cogent, reasonable discourse eluded them-I usually end up telling them to go fuck themselves and shove their pompous, self-righteous bullshit, firmly in their assholes.

@lampishthing

Regarding the balance of evidence for or against religion, I've previously written:

We might have faith in the esential spiritual hypothesis, that there's an invisible spiritual material (soul, spirit, universal consciouss etc.) that invisibly perturbs neural circuits to make it look as if the brain is self-contained, but 1. modern history is a relentless chipping away of magical thinking like that, and 2. science will finish reverse engineering the human brain in 20-50 years, so I humbly don't recommend betting too much money on that hypothesis.
...
The neuroscience of religion basically shows mystical feelings are just turning off some neural circuits and over-activating others. For example, 'oneness with the universe' is just turning off the neural circuits we develop in infancy that allow us to distinguish between self and world, between where my hand stops and the table starts (one is "me" .. the other is not).

(Originally from: http://blog.videosift.com/dag/On-Atheism?loadcomm=1#comment-910402 )

omg some water came into the dining area. ITS A FUCKIN BOAT ON THE OCEAN . asshats, fuckin asshats. (P#*$& i am perturbed by other similar videos. perturbed I say.

I'm a bit surprised Mel thinks we're stupid enough to believe he was calling his producer the asshole, when clearly he was quite perturbed over the question he had just received from the interviewer. Don't lie to me, asshole.

I've met him too (honest), shook his hand. It was behind the scenes at a BattleBots event when they used to televise them (remember those?). A) He's shorter then you'd think. B) He looked pretty perturbed at having people around him shaking his hand. But who knows, everyone has bad days.

Same event I got to meet Bill Nye the science guy. I'll just say I got to sit down and have a short conversation with him. THAT guy is awesome.

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Chilaxe: "As a side-note, we might have faith in the esential spiritual hypothesis, that there's an invisible spiritual material (soul, spirit, universal consciouss etc.) that invisibly perturbs neural circuits to make it look as if the brain is self-contained, but 1. modern history is a relentless chipping away of magical thinking like that, and 2. science will finish reverse engineering the human brain in 20-50 years, so I humbly don't recommend betting too much money on that hypothesis."
---------

I'm no proponent of this widespread religious assumption Chilaxe has identified. That said, there's some room for clarification.

But first a quibble: the error behind the belief that there is some tangible animating spirit somewhere offstage from human affairs is based not on an assumption of brain isolation but rather the contrary. In fact, the assumption is that the brain, specifically in its capacity to generate interiority, is somehow profoundly *involved* with the "unseen."

In other words, spiritualists always presuppose an intrinsic bridge between some common "essence" -- that is, "human essence" -- and their particular oceanic-hidden-premise (OHP). Gary Zukov's quantum Woo-Woo and this "Secret" come to mind.

Contrast this view with Buddhism (Theravadin Buddhism) which asserts that all phenomena can arise only when the necessary preconditions are present. So, for example, as far as brains are concerned, emotional experience is contingent upon a functioning limbic system. (Compare the behavior of your dog to, say, a gecko.)

Science has greatly advanced our understanding of how the brain functions, and how it is able to integrate the various complex physiological processes. But there still remains the difficult problem of just how the brain gives rise to conscious experience.

That's the hard question, *ahem* AI people...

^As a side-note, we might have faith in the esential spiritual hypothesis, that there's an invisible spiritual material (soul, spirit, universal consciouss etc.) that invisibly perturbs neural circuits to make it look as if the brain is self-contained, but 1. modern history is a relentless chipping away of magical thinking like that, and 2. science will finish reverse engineering the human brain in 20-50 years, so I humbly don't recommend betting too much money on that hypothesis.

It perturbs me that a cat in a hat has to tell it like it is.

But hey! America!

Smile and show some leg!

At least you're not sowing rice. Yet.

(I want to see that vid of Colbert ramming it down Bush's throat!)

(I shall hence, seek)

What do you call a boomerang that doesn't come back?

(SPOILER ALERT)

A stick.

-------------------------------------------
Little boy walks into a whore house dragging a dead flat frog on a leash behind him. He walks up to the Mistress who's eying him curiously, "Uhm.. yes little boy? Can I help you?". The boy looks up and replies, "I want a lady right now, and she better have active herpes.".

"WHAT? I think you better just leave..", to this the boy slams a large set of bills down on the counter in front of him. The lady shrugs noticing the considerable amount of money before her, "Alright, one dirty whore coming up.". With that she sends the boy upstairs.

Later the boy comes walking down the stairs looking rather relieved and begins heading for the door. The lady pipes up, "Kid.. come over here. Now, I can understand wanting to come into this establishment looking for your first time, but.. why on god's earth where you looking to catch disease?".

"Well", the boy replied, "now that I've caught herpes I'm gonna go home back to the baby sitter and she'll catch herpes.". The lady blinks, "W-what?". The boy's eyes narrow looking somewhat perturbed at having to explain further, "Later, my parents will come back and my dad will drive the baby sitter home, and then he'll have herpes.". Once again the lady is shocked at what she's hearing. "By morning my mom will have herpes.", the boy continued. "B-but why? Why would you?", the boy shook his head, "After dad goes to work the mailman will come and that's the son of a bitch who ran over my frog!".

Let us put in a correct perspective quantum string theory for TOE. Firstly it is important to remark that a full understanding of what is really Quantum Mechanics is far to be completely understood in its foundational aspects ,althougth its huge operational-quantitative success.For instance, even in the usual non relativistic quantum mechanics , certainly the notion of electronic orbitals in N-electron atomic physics appears to be a mathematical suitable approximation for the full N-electron atomic wave function.On the other hand in Quantum Field Theory , this ad-hoc choice of what is free and what is interaction is not so "ad-hoc", at least in the QFT (perturbative) scattering sector: free in and out fields are primary objects producing physically observables free N-particles (lorentz invariant!) wave functions-so perturbation is building around them and carrying with the formalism all notions of renormalizations , dispersions relations etc.. .Now quantum strings : Strings are supossedly observable for us mainly through scattering among its excitations by means of an already fixed sigma-model two-dimensional quantum dynamics taking place in the somewhat ficticious purely two dimensional string parameter space-time, where are operating two scales of interaction : one is entirely ruled by the intrinsic string topological genera and other governed by the extrinsic space-time coupling constant , namely : The Regge Slope parameter. So string theory for TOE is a proposal for pure S-Matrix "Heisenbergnian" on-shell "theory" for all particles scattering in Nature (including gravitons). Now the theory's "granus salis" (points not completely grasped-at least for this reader !): Back ground fields are fixed extrinsic classical field configurations fully determined by the imposition of conformal invariance for any genera (which certainly does not affects the intrinsic 2d UV-theories'behavior,but affects its IR intrinsic behavior as a 2d QFT) and at any order in the Regge Slope coupling (all these conformal invariance phenomena quite specific to Polyakov's action proposal , possibly not for a Nambu-Goto string action reformulation of TOE).And at the same time , they are expected to be Schwinger sources (even quite non linear) for the string excitations and to be functionally differentiated in the string path-integral later .Another point is related to Kaluza-Klein Theories -It appears that quantum geometrical theories appear to be trivial QFT theories when used to describe scattering in space-time extrinsic manifolds of higher dimensionality (lambda four scalar QFT is expected to be trivial for D strictly greater than four!). As a conclusion : at most Strings are useful theoretical labs for a fully understanding of what really is Quantum Mechanics (SchrodingerX HeisenbergXEinsteinXNelson) , if there are no experimental tests for its predictions .By the way,space-time supersymmetry still remains solely as a theoretical lab in Particle Physics, nothing more!.

Well , it appears to me that string theory is a interesting attempt to "quantize" the space-time manifold (added with suitable supersymmetric structures ).Everything in higher dimensions become reduced to two-dimensional quantum field path integral models "living"on the string chart manifold (the intrinsic two-dimensional "string space-time").However , people impose dipheomorffism invariance on this intrinsic string parameter "space-time" which unfortunatelly get mixed with 2D conformal invariance , when one uses the sigma model Polyakov' action to assign "energy" for these "quantum -fluctuating extrinsic /observable higher dimension space-time process (quite different from the more geometrical Nambu-Goto string action ).In order to solve this problem one thus impose full sigma model conformal invariance by restricting that all strings Schwinger sources (the string higher dimensional field back grounds-including the own extrinsic space time manifold dimension!)to lead to a vanishing beta function for the sigma model Polyakov action at any perturbative order of the new universal coupling constant-the String length scale/Regge parameter.This produces an apparently well defined (?,and about the infrared 2D cut-off remotion on the perturbative Feynman calculationson the intrinsic string space-time ?) 2D Field theory for the extrinsic space-time quantum energy action, besides of fixing the string Schwinger sources to satisfy the usual Einstein-Maxwell-etc field equations at one loop and the extrinsic space-time dimension and the classical manifold topology of the extrinsic space-time to be fixed, when one has supersymmetry (Spin manifold space time structures,etc..).At this point , one has an apparently well defined quantum -mechanical framework to evaluate numerically scattering amplitudes (including quantum gravity!-the old dream ) to compare with the experimental results.That is the problem on this new quantum-mechanical framework : as far as I know nothing has been matched with the usual qed,qcd,etc results!(anomalous particle magnetic momentum, deduction of the asymptotic freedom in QCD ,The Higgs mechanism on the weak sector ,etc.

Ah, well I was just making a stupid joke. Don't put too much into that.

In reply to this comment by JiggaJonson:
well im not a confrontational person by nature so to be honest i promoted to make myself feel better (they were decent sifts though). What confrontation you might ask? I was perturbed when i read your post here http://www.videosift.com/video/Frank-Mccourt-Dies-at-78


In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Thanks mate!

In reply to this comment by JiggaJonson:
*promote

In reply to this comment by JiggaJonson:
*promote