I think it's a perfect touch to the picture, It seems to me the eyes would first look at the bottom left hand of the frame, then glide up the branches to the bird, then following the horizon to the right side branch, bringing your eyes down and to the left. Completing the circle.

I should also mention this comment on the whole thing: "I think SimCity has reached that software event horizon where the shenanigans between the developer/publisher/hackers have become more entertaining than the game itself. "

I see an "Epic Rap Battle of History" on the horizon...

That was beautiful! I see the KHL branding and East vs West, so I assume it was from an All Star game or something there? (Confirmed via Google, answered my own question)

Gary Bettman and the NHLPA take months to settle a labor dispute for an expiring CBA that has been on the horizon for years, and in the meantime stuff like this is happening in the KHL. Yeah NHL, who's bush league now? I love ya, but this is why you'll never crawl out of last place in the North American "big four" sports race.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/BBC-Horizon-Order-And-Disorder-with-Jim-AI-Khalili-ep-1

BBC Horizon: Order And Disorder with Jim AI-Khalili (ep. 2) has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims on that post.

BBC Horizon: Order And Disorder with Jim AI-Khalili (ep. 1) has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

Sigh. Orbiting earth is also hard, and there are hundreds of problems with it, which is why mankind went thousands of years without doing it. But long before we actually managed to do it, we knew that it should be possible, because we knew the earth was a sphere. I can imagine there was lots of heated discussions on how to do it, that would be little comfort to a flat-earther. "See! You cant put things in orbit, earth must be flat!" Like thats how stupid you sound when you go "Horizon problem! The universe must be 6000 years old!"

Why do you even bother reading about things like the Horizon problem? Are you seriously suggesting that this makes your case?

What I am suggesting is that both Creationists and secular scientists have an imperfect understanding of the problem, but Creationists do have a plausible explanation with evidence to back it up.

Whether the universe is six thousand or 13.72 billion years old is not in scientific dispute, ok? we might have to finetune it give or take a few million years, but there is no doubt about the general size of the number. If everybody has fucked up completely the last 100 years, then perhaps one could imagine the number needs to be trippled or cut in half or whatever (I really doubt it because we now have correlating data from so many fields) but 6000 years? Thats a JOKE. Its complete and utter nonsense, It's balls-out-clownshoes-and-two-fucking-trouts-on-your-head-barking-wackaloony-insane-babble-from-crazyland-wrong to the nth degree.

The correlating data you are looking at is a hall of mirrors. Radiometric data is based on uniformitarian assumptions. The light travel time is based on similar assumptions. Embedded in all of the estimations of an old age are unprovable assumptions that have no empirical evidence to prove they are true. They are in fact unknowable.

It's really not important to me to prove to you how old the Earth is. It's your worldview that the Earth is very old and it's intrinsic to how you view reality, and to try to excise that from your mind would be like trying to separate conjoined twins. All I really want you to know is that there is a God out there who loves you, and His name is Jesus Christ.

me: The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

@shinyblurry Have you ever heard of the horizon problem?

Sigh. Orbiting earth is also hard, and there are hundreds of problems with it, which is why mankind went thousands of years without doing it. But long before we actually managed to do it, we knew that it should be possible, because we knew the earth was a sphere. I can imagine there was lots of heated discussions on how to do it, that would be little comfort to a flat-earther. "See! You cant put things in orbit, earth must be flat!" Like thats how stupid you sound when you go "Horizon problem! The universe must be 6000 years old!"

Why do you even bother reading about things like the Horizon problem? Are you seriously suggesting that this makes your case?

Whether the universe is six thousand or 13.72 billion years old is not in scientific dispute, ok? we might have to finetune it give or take a few million years, but there is no doubt about the general size of the number. If everybody has fucked up completely the last 100 years, then perhaps one could imagine the number needs to be trippled or cut in half or whatever (I really doubt it because we now have correlating data from so many fields) but 6000 years? Thats a JOKE. Its complete and utter nonsense, It's balls-out-clownshoes-and-two-fucking-trouts-on-your-head-barking-wackaloony-insane-babble-from-crazyland-wrong to the nth degree.

At present this concept of design is just castle-in-the-sky nonsense. Empty piffle. A complete non-starter.

This is why the "mere mention" of "design" will get you "banned" from peer-review, because you could just as well have made a "mere mention" of Bigfoot and the loch ness monster in your zoology report, it's a big tell to your peers that you are a nut who fails to understand the nature of evidence and science, and a big sign that you are in for some fuzzy logic and dumb assumptions instead of solid science.

Design is a better hypothesis for the information we find in DNA, and the fine tuning we see in the physical laws. The reason design is a non-starter is because the idea this Universe was created by anyone is anathema to the scientific community:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

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

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

Your error here is conflating micro and macro evolution. Creation scientists believe in micro evolution and speciation. That is part of the creationist model of how the world was repopulated with animals after the flood. Macro evolution, the idea that all life descended from a universal common ancestor, is not proven by immunology, bacterial resistance, adaptation, animal distribution, mutation, seclection, variation, speciation, taxonomy etc. The only way you could prove it is in the fossil record and the evidence isn't there. They've tried to prove it with genetics but it contradicts the fossil record (the way they understand it). So Creationists have no trouble explaining those things..and common genetics points to a common designer.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Have you ever heard of the horizon problem? The big bang model suffers from a light travel time problem of its own, but they solve it by postulating cosmic inflation, which is nothing more than a fudge factor to solve the problem. First, it would have to expand at trillions of times the speed of light, violating the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also no theory compatible with physics that could explain the mechanism for how the Universe would start expanding, and then cease expanding a second later. It's poppycock. See what secular scientists have to say about the current state of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

As far as how light could reach us in a short amount of time, there are many theories. One theory is that the speed of light has not always been constant, and was faster at the beginning of creation. This is backed up by a number of measurements taken since the 1800s showing the speed of light decreasing. You can see the tables here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v4/n1/velocity-of-light

Both sides have both long since breezed past the moral event horizon.

I feel sorry for the innocents involved, the kids, the moderates on both sides, but frankly, neither of them have any kind of moral credibility left.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Horizon: Science Under Attack. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

>> ^jmzero:

As for jmzero... I dont think hes even played it.

Well, uh, you're wrong. I've played about an hour, which was a half hour more than I needed to see this wasn't the game for me. I played the first game really quite a lot.
There are many things you can say about GW2, both good and bad, but "slightly different flavor of WoW" isnt one of them.

I don't think YOU'VE played it. Ha! See how annoying that is?
Anyways, it's a hell of a lot more like WoW than Guild Wars 1, though I suppose MMO connoisseurs probably see all sorts of distinguishing characteristics. I played through the storyline of Guild Wars 1 and only played with other people once or twice (using the AI mercenary things as required). In Guild Wars, I didn't even get to fight the "boss" thing at the end of the tutorial - someone killed it before I got close. That's not the same kind of game.
And they've futzed with the multi-player (which to me was the actual game). I can't just pick the skills I want. I can't just jump into a reasonably balanced (and levelled) PvP character (or, if I can, they didn't present that option very well). In the first game, I made a PvP monk with a bunch of heals, and was doing multiplayer (and having fun) immediately - like, within 10 minutes of installing the game. I have no idea how far off the horizon that is in Guild Wars II, but even when it comes I'm quite sure I don't want to play it. It plays completely different - far more action-RPG focus instead of the old focus on skill-selection and tactics. If I want an action-y game, I'll play a game style that supports that - like DotA.
Guild Wars 1 was a really appealing game for me. Guild Wars II is nothing of the sort - and to me it goes in the same trash-heap as every other "kill 10 rats", "grind equipment and levels" MMO that came before it.
Oh, but yeah, I didn't realize that it's set in the same painfully, painfully generic fantasy universe (I really didn't). Thanks for straightening me out on that.


1. Basing any game on an hours play is stupid.
2. You talk about how you loved GW1s story, yet you ignored the story in GW2 which said wait for the NPC.... this was there so you didnt miss out on killing the boss.... perhaps you should pay attention next time.
3. In GW1 most people picked the same 3 or so skills for weapons every time, AN simply locked the skills in place to make sure people who didnt understand wouldnt be caught out with a build which was useless. All the other skills can be picked by the player, tho again with more limitations. The GW1 system was powerful, but impossible to balance. The new system is able to be managed by AN, but it sactually more indepth than it seems, tho it is simpler.
4. You can jump into pvp right away actually. Just make a charater (such as a guardian) and goto the pvp lobby. Done, lvl 80 with access to all items, skills and access to the jump in, and tournament play. Again, if you'd bothered to play the game you would have known this. All this information was in the manuel linked right from the launcher.
5. You dont grind equipment and levels. You'll get both by doing whatever you want, be it spvp, wvw, story content or jump roaming around.

Its not perfect, but dear lord play it first to find out for yourself.

As for jmzero... I dont think hes even played it.



Well, uh, you're wrong. I've played about an hour, which was a half hour more than I needed to see this wasn't the game for me. I played the first game really quite a lot.

There are many things you can say about GW2, both good and bad, but "slightly different flavor of WoW" isnt one of them.



I don't think YOU'VE played it. Ha! See how annoying that is?

Anyways, it's a hell of a lot more like WoW than Guild Wars 1, though I suppose MMO connoisseurs probably see all sorts of distinguishing characteristics. I played through the storyline of Guild Wars 1 and only played with other people once or twice (using the AI mercenary things as required). In Guild Wars, I didn't even get to fight the "boss" thing at the end of the tutorial - someone killed it before I got close. That's not the same kind of game.

And they've futzed with the multi-player (which to me was the actual game). I can't just pick the skills I want. I can't just jump into a reasonably balanced (and levelled) PvP character (or, if I can, they didn't present that option very well). In the first game, I made a PvP monk with a bunch of heals, and was doing multiplayer (and having fun) immediately - like, within 10 minutes of installing the game. I have no idea how far off the horizon that is in Guild Wars II, but even when it comes I'm quite sure I don't want to play it. It plays completely different - far more action-RPG focus instead of the old focus on skill-selection and tactics. If I want an action-y game, I'll play a game style that supports that - like DotA.

Guild Wars 1 was a really appealing game for me. Guild Wars II is nothing of the sort - and to me it goes in the same trash-heap as every other "kill 10 rats", "grind equipment and levels" MMO that came before it.

Oh, but yeah, I didn't realize that it's set in the same painfully, painfully generic fantasy universe (I really didn't). Thanks for straightening me out on that.

@maestro156, Ya, the new understanding of the event horizon is that of annihilation, so once you hit that edge, your basically dead to everything outside the edge. That isn't certain...there is still a lot that we don't understand about BHs and singularities. With that said, scooping off high energy plasma near a black hole would be lots of energy