You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Oscar Peterson Quintet Montreux (1977). Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

>> ^dag:
The fact that the top 3 all broke the world record says A LOT about the new Speedo suits.


I hope that was tongue-in-cheek. Speedo has been making "sharkskin" and "aquablade" suits for years with the same goal of less water resistance and better muscle compression. If you watch more of the races you will see plenty of events where the athletes only wear jammers (knee length) or legs. If the new suit material offered a distinct advantage, you'd see body suits in every event.

It all comes down to what will make the athlete "feel" fastest in the water. (This is the same reason why swimmers shave. Removing the layer of dead skin cells makes you feel much faster through the water, and is as important as removing the resistance causing hairs.) Claiming that these suits somehow enabled such great swims is akin to attributing Adrian Peterson's NFL single-game rushing record last season to the plastic pads and helmet he wears that athletes 50 years ago didn't have access to.

After all, those suits aren't the ones in the water for 6 hours a day for the past 4 years.

Check out: Gilles Peterson - Worldwide Exclusives

I have never seen a crazy raven before.


In reply to this comment by raven:
crazy like a fox crazy.

In reply to this comment by ant:
Crazy?

In reply to this comment by raven:
I do! Especially big black crazy intelligent ones... why do you think I picked Raven in the very first place?

In reply to this comment by ant:
Hmmph, I thought you loved the birds.


In reply to this comment by raven:
'Raven' as been my avatar/nickname on the internet for many years now, I've also used a longer version, 'Raven Wilde' as an alias for some small art-related projects I've been involved in. My avatar is out of a Peterson field guide I've had since I was a kid.

We had another similar discussion about this some time ago, Avatar Stories and Favorites, some of the older members probably remember it.

crazy like a fox crazy.

In reply to this comment by ant:
Crazy?

In reply to this comment by raven:
I do! Especially big black crazy intelligent ones... why do you think I picked Raven in the very first place?

In reply to this comment by ant:
Hmmph, I thought you loved the birds.


In reply to this comment by raven:
'Raven' as been my avatar/nickname on the internet for many years now, I've also used a longer version, 'Raven Wilde' as an alias for some small art-related projects I've been involved in. My avatar is out of a Peterson field guide I've had since I was a kid.

We had another similar discussion about this some time ago, Avatar Stories and Favorites, some of the older members probably remember it.

Crazy?

In reply to this comment by raven:
I do! Especially big black crazy intelligent ones... why do you think I picked Raven in the very first place?

In reply to this comment by ant:
Hmmph, I thought you loved the birds.


In reply to this comment by raven:
'Raven' as been my avatar/nickname on the internet for many years now, I've also used a longer version, 'Raven Wilde' as an alias for some small art-related projects I've been involved in. My avatar is out of a Peterson field guide I've had since I was a kid.

We had another similar discussion about this some time ago, Avatar Stories and Favorites, some of the older members probably remember it.

I do! Especially big black crazy intelligent ones... why do you think I picked Raven in the very first place?

In reply to this comment by ant:
Hmmph, I thought you loved the birds.


In reply to this comment by raven:
'Raven' as been my avatar/nickname on the internet for many years now, I've also used a longer version, 'Raven Wilde' as an alias for some small art-related projects I've been involved in. My avatar is out of a Peterson field guide I've had since I was a kid.

We had another similar discussion about this some time ago, Avatar Stories and Favorites, some of the older members probably remember it.

Hmmph, I thought you loved the birds.


In reply to this comment by raven:
'Raven' as been my avatar/nickname on the internet for many years now, I've also used a longer version, 'Raven Wilde' as an alias for some small art-related projects I've been involved in. My avatar is out of a Peterson field guide I've had since I was a kid.

We had another similar discussion about this some time ago, Avatar Stories and Favorites, some of the older members probably remember it.

Are you kidding? Remains of toxic bullets litter Iraq (By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor )

"...Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by - and contaminated with - controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road."

"No one has warned [Ms. Hamid] to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout."

This stuff (DU) remains around long after it is used. Please educate yourself about it. I don't know for certain which weapons use DU, but a lot of it has been fired in Iraq during both wars.

"Also, since when were the living conditions great before we got there?" The answer is yes, before you got there, before sanctions crippled their economy. Ever since then, not so great.

'Raven' as been my avatar/nickname on the internet for many years now, I've also used a longer version, 'Raven Wilde' as an alias for some small art-related projects I've been involved in. My avatar is out of a Peterson field guide I've had since I was a kid.

We had another similar discussion about this some time ago, Avatar Stories and Favorites, some of the older members probably remember it.

Aemaeth
downvote on your comment for gross vagueness.

you say, "True until 4 minutes in", yet do not mention anything specific that you take offense to or disagree with. BE SPECIFIC.

There was nothing negative in this video. perhaps you did not watch the video presented above, as it is a PBS Frontline documentary, and has nothing to do with me ( you say, "as presented by the poster")

you say, "None of the so called experts are members of the church"
please read this page which lists who Frontline interviewed and then please retract your comment. http://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/

Gordon B. Hinckley
Gordon B. Hinckley is the 15th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has led the church since March 1995.

Jeffrey Holland
Holland was ordained an apostle of the church in June 1994 and became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles later that year. He received a master's degree in religious education from Brigham Young University (BYU) and has a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale. Prior to joining the Quorum of the Twelve, Holland served as the church commissioner of education and later as president of BYU.

Marlin Jensen
Marlin Jensen is an LDS church historian and member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.

Daniel Peterson
Daniel Peterson is a professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University, a member of the university's Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, and a contributor to the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research and the Scholarly & Historical Information Exchange for Latter-day Saints. He is the author of numerous articles and books on Mormon history and doctrine.

for the full list, again please visist http://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/

You then bring up a story about Mike Wallace (without sources) which has nothing to do with this video. I personally think your quote is rubbish, back it up with a source.

your not starting an arguement, your just being overly vague and bringing up unrelated storys

My favorite:

NORM: "What's goin' on, Mr. Peterson?"
WOODY: "Let's talk about what's going IN Mr. Peterson."

This is taken from The Singularity Summit symposium hosted by Stanford University, where a good number of speakers about this topic gave keynote addresses. My goal was to have them all posted in the same place, in order for people to easily find them, and I was in the process of doing just that, but due to the queue, Sunkid got to this one first. Here's the rest of the info I already had prepared to go along with this.

--------------------------------------------------

Eliezer Yudkowsky - The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion (Full Title)

The Singularity Summit symposium hosted by Stanford University was a series keynote addresses given with the purpose of addressing the very real implications that the Singularity may hold in the near future in an academic setting, and (without being too melodramatic on my part) to question what the very fate of the human species may be in the 21st century.

--------------------------------------------------

Here are the rest of the keynote videos that go along with this, in the order that they were given at the event.

Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity: A Hard or Soft Takeoff?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Ray-Kurzweil-The-Singularity-A-Hard-or-Soft-Takeoff

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Trying to Muse Rationally about the Singularity Scenario
http://www.videosift.com/video/Douglas-Hofstadter-Musing-Rationally-about-the-Singularity

Nick Bostrom - Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks
http://www.videosift.com/video/Nick-Bostrom-Artificial-Intelligence-and-Existential-Risks

Sebastian Thrun - Toward Human-Level Intelligence in Autonomous Cars
http://www.videosift.com/video/Sebastian-Thrun-Human-Level-Intelligent-in-Autonomous-Cars

Cory Doctorow - Singularity or Dark Age?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Cory-Doctorow-Singularity-or-Dark-Age

K. Eric Drexler - Productive Nanosystems: Toward a Super-Exponential Threshold in Physical Technology
http://www.videosift.com/video/Eric-Drexler-Productive-Nanosystems

Max More - Cognitive and Emotional Singularities: Will Superintelligence come with Superwisdom?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Max-More-Will-Superintelligence-come-with-Superwisdom

Christine L. Peterson - Bringing Humanity and the Biosphere through the Singularity
http://www.videosift.com/video/Christine-Peterson-Humanity-Biosphere-the-Singularity

John Smart - Searching for the Big Picture: Systems Theories of Accelerating Change
http://www.videosift.com/video/John-Smart-Systems-Theories-of-Accelerating-Change

Eliezer Yudkowsky - The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion
http://www.videosift.com/video/Eliezer-Yudkowsky-The-Intelligence-Explosion-and-Humanity

Bill McKibben - Being Good Enough
http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-McKibben-Being-Good-Enough

Ray Kurzweil - Stanford Singularity Summit: Closing Thoughts
http://www.videosift.com/video/Ray-Kurzweil-Stanford-Singularity-Summit-Closing-Thoughts

From wikipedia:

"During the presidential campaign of 1800, the Federalists attacked Jefferson as an infidel, claiming that Jefferson's intoxication with the religious and political extremism of the French Revolution disqualified him from public office. But Jefferson wrote at length on religion and many scholars agree with the claim that Jefferson was a deist, a common position held by intellectuals in the late 18th century. As Avery Cardinal Dulles, a leading Roman Catholic theologian reports, "In his college years at William and Mary [Jefferson] came to admire Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke as three great paragons of wisdom. Under the influence of several professors he converted to the deist philosophy." Dulles concludes:

“In summary, then, Jefferson was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death; but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher. He was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God. Jefferson's religion is fairly typical of the American form of deism in his day. ”

Biographer Merrill Peterson summarizes Jefferson's theology: “First, that the Christianity of the churches was unreasonable, therefore unbelievable, but that stripped of priestly mystery, ritual, and dogma, reinterpreted in the light of historical evidence and human experience, and substituting the Newtonian cosmology for the discredited Biblical one, Christianity could be conformed to reason. Second, morality required no divine sanction or inspiration, no appeal beyond reason and nature, perhaps not even the hope of heaven or the fear of hell; and so the whole edifice of Christian revelation came tumbling to the ground.”

Jefferson used deist terminology in repeatedly stating his belief in a creator, and in the United States Declaration of Independence used the terms "Creator" and "Nature's God". Jefferson believed, furthermore, it was this Creator that endowed humanity with a number of inalienable rights, such as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". His experience in France just before the French Revolution made him deeply suspicious of Catholic priests and bishops as a force for reaction and ignorance. Similarly, his experience in America with inter-denominational intolerance served to reinforce this skeptical view of religion. In a letter to Willam Short, Jefferson wrote: "the serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects, to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous."

Jefferson was raised in the Church of England, at a time when it was the established church in Virginia and only denomination funded by Virginia tax money. Before the Revolution, Jefferson was a vestryman in his local church, a lay position that was part of political office at the time. He also had friends who were clergy, and he supported some churches financially. During his Presidency, Jefferson attended the weekly church services held in the House of Representatives. Jefferson later expressed general agreement with his friend Joseph Priestley's Unitarianism, that is the rejection of the doctrine of Trinity. In a letter to a pioneer in Ohio he wrote, "I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its conscience to neither kings or priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."

Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, but he had high esteem for Jesus' moral teachings, which he viewed as the "principles of a pure deism, and juster notions of the attributes of God, to reform [prior Jewish] moral doctrines to the standard of reason, justice & philanthropy, and to inculcate the belief of a future state." Jefferson did not believe in miracles. He made his own condensed version of the Gospels, omitting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection, primarily leaving only Jesus' moral philosophy, of which he approved. This compilation was published after his death and became known as the Jefferson Bible. “[The Jefferson Bible] is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw.”

However, early in his administration he attended church services in the House of Representatives. He also permitted church services in executive branch buildings throughout his administration, believing that Christianity was a prop for republican government.

Church and state:

For Jefferson, separation of church and state was not an abstract right but a necessary reform of the religious "tyranny" of one Christian sect over many other Christians - and of the interference of the state in affairs of religion. Following the Revolution, Jefferson played a leading role in the disestablishment of religion in Virginia. Previously the Anglican Church had tax support. As he wrote in his Notes on Virginia, a law was in effect in Virginia that "if a person brought up a Christian denies the being of a God, or the Trinity …he is punishable on the first offense by incapacity to hold any office …; on the second by a disability to sue, to take any gift or legacy …, and by three year' imprisonment." Prospective officer-holders were required to swear that they did not believe in the central Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

From 1784 to 1786, Jefferson and James Madison worked together to oppose Patrick Henry's attempts to again assess taxes in Virginia to support churches. Instead, in 1786, the Virginia General Assembly passed Jefferson's Bill for Religious Freedom, which he had first submitted in 1779 and was one of only three accomplishments he put in his own epitaph. The law read: “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

One of Jefferson’s least well known writings is: "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world"- Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia.

Jefferson sought what he called a "wall of separation between Church and State", which he believed was a principle expressed by the First Amendment. This phrase has been cited several times by the Supreme Court in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause. In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, he wrote: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

Jefferson refused to issue proclamations calling for days of prayer and thanksgiving during his Presidency, yet he did do so as Governor in Virginia. His private letters indicate he was skeptical of too much interference by clergy in matters of civil government. His letters contain the following observations: "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government", and, "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government". Yet, Jefferson advocated the influence of religion in abolishing the institution of slavery in America stating, "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!”

While the debate over Jefferson's understanding over the separation of Church and state is far from being settled, as are his particular religious tenets, his dependence on divine Providence is not nearly as ambiguous. As he stated, in his second inaugural address: “I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations."

mmm... maudlin's fez cat is indeed choice avatar material, although I gotta admit, yours is one of my tops gwaan, having always loved spider jerusalem!

My own avatar is out of a Peterson field guide, hence the L 21".