I guess that solves the mystery. No grand project by an cult of druids, just some nut with too much time on his hands.

Credit for the genius of simplicity, though!

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
That is the same sound I make when the limited format of text fails to fully convey the ideas in my head! Like when 2 missiles pass each other in flight hehehe (they don't call them missiles for nothing I guess!)

Anyway, I didn't mean to exasperate you. This was not my intent. You are always a very insightful and humble person here on the sift, and for that you have my greatest respect. Here's to the next delightful convo!

i find you an interesting person also.
and one i feel i can discuss things with that others may either take offense or become indignant.
thats why i wrote you.not to be inflammatory but to suggest your over-simplification of buddhism/christianity may not be close to a reality but rather closer to the western worlds abridged and condensed version.
western philosophy/theosophy could not exist without eastern philosophy/theosophy, not the other way around.

i pointed out that many in the western world take a myopic stance,not intentionally i would presume but rather one set by culture.i was not implying that you are myopic but that you were espousing certain well-grooved tracks used by many concerning buddhism.soundbytes usually perpetrated by the church itself and then parroted.

it is interesting to note that even teillhard de chardin remarked on the similarities of christs teachings and buddha.this was rejected by the church but i tend to agree with chardin.

while i agree that text is not a suitable and contextual medium to express such dynamic concepts and philosophies let me make a few observations and you tell me what you think.
1.you stated that buddhism does not recognize the "changing soul".this is an incorrect statement due to the fact that just about every precept of buddhism stems from ones journey and the self realization that one must change,grow to move on to a greater consciousness.
the primary vehicle for this is forgiveness,but while in buddhism this is a starting point and eventually should lead to an awareness where forgiveness is moot due to the fact that your choices will no longer need to be forgiven,christianity tends to view forgiveness in the latter stages of awareness.
which one is correct?that is for you to decide.
2.you stated that KARMA is not a vehicle of divine salvation,but that is a misnomer,it is very much a vehicle of divine salvation due to the fact that buddhist view all life as divine.while christianity views humans as dirt,sinful and unclean and the only path to salvation is through jesus christ.this is a very complex paradigm and i do not do this subject justice but that can wait for another conversation.while the concept in itself is simple,to express it in all its simplicity takes volumes.(just look at all the writings on this subject,many many perspectives).

these are only a few points.points i make to show that coming from a christian perspective may color the beauty and depth of buddhism.i do not feel you are a fundamentalist and that is a good thing because the teachings of jesus are beautiful as they are succinct but if viewed only from the eyes of the church i have always felt the meat of jeus christ's teachings have gone either misinterpreted or outright twisted.then again,i view religion with a suspicious eye and read the teachings from a different vantage point.
does this mean i am right and my views infallible?
no..that would arrogant.
but it does mean i have the ability to glean understanding that is not tainted by the church because i view the teachings from a different angle.
studying cultural religious history has given me context to better understand those teachings.
that has been a work in progress for 25 years and im still going,still learning and still fascinated by it all.
as always my friend..a pleasure discussing my favorite subject with you.
till our next conversation.
namaste.

You have a Zappa playlist???!!? awesome... hmmm, I kind of remember it I think. Zappa is awesome

In reply to this comment by moodonia:
Thanks again for the promote! I am right now going through your playlist too and thanks for the invitation, I had no idea invites could be made so I will will have to send you one to the Zappa playlist I made. Sorry my response time has been slow, we have two inches of snow here so naturally the entire country has ground to a halt (including my metabolism), I've only briefly broken out of hibernation to catch up online

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
*promote!

Thanks again for the promote! I am right now going through your playlist too and thanks for the invitation, I had no idea invites could be made so I will will have to send you one to the Zappa playlist I made. Sorry my response time has been slow, we have two inches of snow here so naturally the entire country has ground to a halt (including my metabolism), I've only briefly broken out of hibernation to catch up online

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
*promote!

Wow, the whole thing was brilliant, but the final question was perhaps the best for me. I've had an interest in science, math, and other topics thought of as thoroughly "academic" for pretty much my entire life. However, during my own time at university getting merely a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, I got thoroughly disgusted with academics taking ideas that really aren't particularly complex and making long, jargon-filled papers or lectures about them that seem to only serve to hide and obfuscate the natural simplicity and beauty of the basic idea.

Tyson does a fantastic job of achieving the opposite: making more complex ideas seem simple and presenting them in a way that is easily accessible yet open to exploration for more depth.

Thanks for the sift, was well worth watching the entire hour and a half!

Me and the other Cybertronian Warriors will be waiting for this,
it looks really good yet most 'leaked' videos are just to gain fan reaction and gameplay is rarely anything like the film. we'll see.

In reply to this comment by Drax:
Have you played it very recently? It's incredibly easy to jump on a custom map now.. it's pretty much like TF2 in that regard.

And yes the chance based randomness of it just makes it more fun to me, but I can see how some might feel it's unfair at times. The game's like a hand of poker, you have to do the best with what you're dealt.

Anyways, I'm constantly going in and out of L4D phases. I never leave frustrated and completely enjoy when I jump back into it. The game has a certain doom like simplicity to it... also in terms of the amount of bodies you get to pump shotgun shells into >: D

>> ^Drax:
Have you played it very recently? It's incredibly easy to jump on a custom map now.. it's pretty much like TF2 in that regard.
And yes the chance based randomness of it just makes it more fun to me, but I can see how some might feel it's unfair at times. The game's like a hand of poker, you have to do the best with what you're dealt.
Anyways, I'm constantly going in and out of L4D phases. I never leave frustrated and completely enjoy when I jump back into it. The game has a certain doom like simplicity to it... also in terms of the amount of bodies you get to pump shotgun shells into >: D


same, can't play it steadily like TF2 that's for sure.

Have you played it very recently? It's incredibly easy to jump on a custom map now.. it's pretty much like TF2 in that regard.

And yes the chance based randomness of it just makes it more fun to me, but I can see how some might feel it's unfair at times. The game's like a hand of poker, you have to do the best with what you're dealt.

Anyways, I'm constantly going in and out of L4D phases. I never leave frustrated and completely enjoy when I jump back into it. The game has a certain doom like simplicity to it... also in terms of the amount of bodies you get to pump shotgun shells into >: D

This is just beautiful. I love the music which is strong in it's relative simplicity.

This feels kinda nostalgic. I remember doing this back in the '90s with Doom. There was of course not that many sounds to replace, so it was a much smaller task. (Oh, good old DOS, how I miss thine simplicity. One command to play a sound from the .wad, one command to record a new one, one command to replace the original sound with the new one. A simple .bat file to automate. And that lovely 386 SX 25Mhz. I dreamt about Doom running smoothly every day. )

Oh goodie, all sorts of interesting discussions going on here.

Yay, somebody that wants to respectfully debate, rather than call me a pussy. If I were you, I'd ask your camp to show a little more respect. Not that it's always returned by the proselytizers, but I hardly feel I'm being disrespectful to your beliefs. I wish your comrades would show the same courtesy.

Agnostics make no claims to know anything, they say "I do not/cannot know X". The celestial teapot is the oldie counter for that - in principle we have to be agnostic about it, but in actuality we're not. We are all a-teapotists. Atheism is the same way. You can say that you believe in the celestial teapot, but with no evidence, you're not going to convince anyone.

Yes, but we are not all a-consciousness. Nor are we all a-string theorists. This comes down to basic inference. One adopts an arbitrary prior probability over the space of alternatives. This is the rational Bayesian thing to do. Putting any sort of constraints on that process is completely a subjective process. For instance, people typically cite 'simplicity', or 'elegance', as properties that should be more highly weighted. There is no more evidence for that then there is for God, at least as far as the 'truthfulness' of the claims is concerned. Now, I remain agnostic as I'd rather not make the claim, because as you've correctly pointed out I shouldn't expect to be able to convince anybody else. That doesn't mean that I consider the lack of existence of a deity as more likely than the existence.

As for determinism, what about quantum mechanics? When I look at that evidence I see randomness, not determinism. Some people, such as Roger Penrose, have thought that the key to the hard problem might dwell at the quantum level. I'm not prepared to jump into the "micro-tubule" camp, but the existence of quantum mechanics does leave the door open for a less deterministic reality.

[edit] If you are interested in this idea of consciousness as an illusion, you should read "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders.

Well, no. String theory has so many parameters, and there are so many variants, that it can fit just about any data set you throw at it. In my mind, that is no different than many people's impression of God, as that which was there before all else, or some form of universal consciousness. There is no reason such a concept of God is incompatible with the objectively observable universe. Unfortunately, as with string theory, the hypothesis does not make any predictions not already made by quantum mechanics, particle theory, relativity, etc...

The only grounds on which the theories are selected is based upon some undefinable concept of "simplicity" or "beauty". It's all a subjective mishmash of questionable inductive inference anyhow. So why then should a personally held, relatively benign, concept of a creator be like believing in unicorns, whereas pursuing a career of investigating similarly untestable scientific theories should be laudable?

Further, is someone that supposes that some concept of God is more likely than NO God really an atheist? Or would you call that more of an agnostic sort of thing?

Chapter 1 courtesy of the http://richarddawkins.net/article,4217,Extract-from-Chapter-One-of-The-Greatest-Show-on-Earth,Richard-Dawkins---Times-Online

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

It is frequently, and rightly, said that senior clergy and theologians have no problem with evolution and, in many cases, actively support scientists in this respect. This is often true, as I know from the agreeable experience of collaborating with the Bishop of Oxford, now Lord Harries, on two separate occasions. In 2004 we wrote a joint article in The Sunday Times whose concluding words were: “Nowadays there is nothing to debate. Evolution is a fact and, from a Christian perspective, one of the greatest of God’s works.” The last sentence was written by Richard Harries, but we agreed about all the rest of our article. Two years previously, Bishop Harries and I had organised a joint letter to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

[In the letter, eminent scientists and churchmen, including seven bishops, expressed concern over the teaching of evolution and their alarm at it being posed as a “faith position”at the Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead.] Bishop Harries and I organised this letter in a hurry. As far as I remember, the signatories to the letter constituted 100 per cent of those we approached. There was no disagreement either from scientists or from bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

They may think God had a hand in starting the process off, and perhaps didn’t stay his hand in guiding its future progress. They probably think God cranked the Universe up in the first place, and solemnised its birth with a harmonious set of laws and physical constants calculated to fulfil some inscrutable purpose in which we were eventually to play a role.

But, grudgingly in some cases, happily in others, thoughtful and rational churchmen and women accept the evidence for evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large. And it should be as worrying to the churches as it is to scientists. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

To repeat, they constitute more than 40 per cent of the American population. The equivalent figure is higher in some countries, lower in others, but 40 per cent is a good average and I shall from time to time refer to the history-deniers as the “40percenters”.

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.

Think about it, Bishop. Be careful, Vicar. You are playing with dynamite, fooling around with a misunderstanding that’s waiting to happen — one might even say almost bound to happen if not forestalled. Shouldn’t you take greater care, when speaking in public, to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay? Lest ye fall into condemnation, shouldn’t you be going out of your way to counter that already extremely widespread popular misunderstanding and lend active and enthusiastic support to scientists and science teachers? The history-deniers themselves are among those who I am trying to reach. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those who are not history-deniers but know some — perhaps members of their own family or church — and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

Why, then, do we speak of “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, thereby, it seems, giving spurious comfort to those of a creationist persuasion — the history-deniers, the 40-percenters — who think the word “theory” is a concession, handing them some kind of gift or victory? Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word “only” be used, as in “only a theory”. As for the claim that evolution has never been “proved”, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting.

Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science.

Mathematicians can prove things — according to one strict view, they are the only people who can — but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried. Even the undisputed theory that the Moon is smaller than the Sun cannot, to the satisfaction of a certain kind of philosopher, be proved in the way that, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. But massive accretions of evidence support it so strongly that to deny it the status of “fact” seems ridiculous to all but pedants. The same is true of evolution. Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the northern hemisphere. Though logic-choppers rule the town,* some theories are beyond sensible doubt, and we call them facts. The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

We are like detectives who come on the scene after a crime has been committed. The murderer’s actions have vanished into the past.

The detective has no hope of witnessing the actual crime with his own eyes. What the detective does have is traces that remain, and there is a great deal to trust there. There are footprints, fingerprints (and nowadays DNA fingerprints too), bloodstains, letters, diaries. The world is the way the world should be if this and this history, but not that and that history, led up to the present.

Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.

*Not my favourite Yeats line, but apt in this case.

© Richard Dawkins 2009

I picked "advancing the rights of women" because the roots of feminism lie in the historical oppression of women in society. Now, certainly the stated goal of feminism has been equal rights for women, but much of the public discussion has centered on the advancement of women's rights as the method for achieving that. I feel this is an important point to consider. With such a goal, how do you know when you've reached it? How do you know when you should stop advancing one group's rights? How do you even define your groups? There is no objective viewpoint to take, subtle oppression is difficult to quantify. The risk of exaggeration is inherent in any attempt to increase the rights of one group of people only.

Now, certainly feminist theory acknowledges, even actively propagates the point that it is not just men who perpetuate restrictive gender roles, and not just women who disavow them. Gender roles, as far as I can tell, are seen in feminist theory as a powerful meme that resides in all our minds, and restricts us all. Men, too, are bound by their roles, although those roles may traditionally grant them more power than the roles of women. I agree with this assessment to a large extent, and that is why I find it disappointing that feminist rhetoric remains so gender-centric.

"Feminism", "patriarchy", "sisterhood", "matriarchy" - these are all terms stuck in an old-fashioned mode of thought. Rhetoric using these terms is likely to be counterproductive now. Like it or not, a lot of people identify with their gender, partly for cultural reason, partly because most of us are hard wired to seek gender roles, whatever they may be in our culture. To say a society is patriarchal may be accurate, but it perpetuates a division that should not exist. A man is likely to take such a claim as an attack on them personally, because it implies that the male sex oppresses the female sex, making anyone identifying with the male sex an oppressor.

There is a paradox here I'm having difficulty putting into words. That gender is not really an either-or thing, but rather a diffuse gradient, or a combination of many gradients, seems to be a fairly widely accepted claim in feminist theory. Humans have a wide variety of attributes, too many to reasonably list, that vary with cultural background and hormonal makeup. Some people are more aggressive, some people better able to empathize with others, both traits likely influenced by nature as well as nurture. Gender affects us; to say that the mind of someone with XX chromosomes is not, on average, influenced by a different set of chemicals than that of someone with XY is foolishness. (For simplicity's sake, let's not get into women with Y chromosomes, men with double-X etc. here.) It is equally foolish to claim that simply based on someone's perceived gender you could tell what their abilities are. Gender matters, but individual variation matters more, so it seems silly to group people into "women" and "men" for purposes of defining what their rights are or should be. Still, this is effectively the division a lot of feminist rhetoric perpetuates by continuing to use gender-specific terms.

If you accept that individual variance trumps gender-based differences, I do not see how you can talk of women's or men's rights. The terms lose meaning. To say anything about women's rights implies that there is, for social purposes, a well-defined group called "women". If your goal is to let people live their lives however they please regardless of their gender, such segregation is counterproductive. There are human rights, and that's all.

In summary, fuck isms. Fuck them hard.

I'm currently reading "Freedom Evolves" by Daniel C. Dennett, which is quite interesting but a bit of a challenging read.

The book that I'll never forget, that changed my view of nature and science forever would have to be The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. I recommend it to absolutely everyone. Up until I read that book, I thought I had this evolution business pretty much right, but TSG explained it for real, and the stunning simplicity and elegance of the concept struck me for the first time in full force.

Prior to reading it, I read a quote by the late, great Douglas Adams saying something very similar to what I just said, and I thought "Huh? didn't Douglas Adams know ANYTHING about evolution before reading Dawkins?" and I thought that reading that book would not reveal anything new to me, but boy was I wrong. Turns out nearly everything I thought I knew about evolution was either wrong, inaccurate or inadequate.