There are some major problems with this claim, IMO. I would like to clean up the wording of your second sentence. Something that doesn't interact in anyway with the cosmos, doesn't exist meaningfully. So something that does not, cannot, and will not interact with an object doesn't exist to that object. Indeed, when our own galaxy is racing away from the other galaxies at a speed faster than the speed of light (the space in-between being created at a rate which pushes us away faster than the speed of light) you can say the same thing, that our galaxy is the only object that exists in the universe. Other objects existed, but the no longer do. They might "exist" in some theoretical way, but they don't meaningfully exist. I completely agree with this position. If a being we want to call God doesn't exist here in any way physically, than he doesn't exist.

Which brings us to your first point. How does the universe exist? I assure you we have more question in that than answers. And every answer brings forth new questions. We are no closer today to understand basic ideas than thousands of years ago. For instance, how to objects move? If space is infinite, how do finite objects transverse infinite space in a finite time? What determines gravity attract at the rate it attracts? Why are macro objects analog and quantum objects digital? We can't even show that the sky is blue, only that it exists as a wavelength of light that human preservers sometimes interpret as a mind object of blue, we are no closer to understanding if blue is a real thing or a thing of mind. I think you give to much credence to our understanding for this claim to be sufficient. To my knowledge, we have little understanding of the functional dynamics of the cosmos. We have pretty good predictive models, but that is a far cry for absolute certainty, a necessary for a claim such as this.

There are many metaphysical examples of all powerful beings and absence of their direct physical interactions being detectable as well. One of the more famous is of the "God mind" example. In a dream, you are in control of all the elements. Let's call all the elements of your dream your dream physics. The dreamer is in 100% control of the dream physics. The dream itself is a creation of his dream physics. The dream physics themselves are evidence of the dreamer. In addition, the dream, being wholly created from dream physics is also evidence of the dreamer. Parallel that back to us and you have one of the easiest and elegant explanations of the universe. Indeed, it is so comprehensible other views of the metaphysical nature of the cosmos will seem overly complex and lauded with burdensome hyper explanations, making this model satisfy an occam's razor over other possibilities. But complexity is hardly a model for evaluating truth, so I leave that just as an aside.

Indeed, there are further explanations that would seemingly leave little evidence for God except for things happening just as they "should". One being the Occasionalism model, which interestingly enough, comes from the same mind as the previous example, George Berkeley. There is no proof that causation is the actuality of the universe. Just as if I setup a room full of clocks, and from left to right the clocks would sound off 5 seconds from the previous clock. To the observer, the clocks "caused" the next clock to sound, and on down the line they go. The problem is, there is actually no causal link to bind them, I created it after seeing A then B happen again and again. The fact is, no such link is there, I, the clock creator created it to appear that way, or maybe I didn't and you just jumped to conclusions. It is a classic example that Hume also highlights in his problems on induction.

I will leave it there. I am resolved to say I don't know. I also don't know that can or can't know. I am uber agnostic on all points, I just can't say. And I don't even know if time will tell.
>> ^gwiz665:

It can be know, because that's the way the world works. There is nothing "outside" the world as it exists. While you technically might say that there could be something wholly removed from the physical universe, there is no overlap - there is no manifestation here or there of the other. Therefore, even though you could on a purely theoretical basis make the argument, it is ultimately a waste of time and futile.
>> ^Psychologic:
>> ^gwiz665:
If a god is like the regular God, a deity that just is eternal, then no they cannot exist.

"Cannot"? As is the existence of a being that exists outside of what we perceive as time is impossible? How can that be known?

What a load of shit ,

2 hour job to program a macro that converts the data from epoc device into left and right in a format the automated car can then use.

the real innovation in this is the headset ( nothing to do with this students ) and the car positioning and driving system which is glazed over in this vid. and again probably little to do with this students.

the specific head set controlling stuff just feels like a lazy student project if they spent more brain power on it they could have actually done something worth while.

>> ^ghark:

You guys bitching about tennis fail to comprehend why we watch sport in the first place - because we are rooting for one of the teams or individuals. Watching any sport that you have no idea about is a bit bland because you don't have a team you are going for, you don't understand the rules, etc. So you're criticisms of tennis as a sport simply underline your ignorance of the game and it's players.
In the end it mostly comes down to what you got introduced to as a kid, you guys that are fans of NFL, baseball etc probably enjoy it because your dad cracked open a beer on Saturdays and let you watch the game with him, so you have strong memories of the game from a young age, you know how it works, and you have some knowledge of the players - that's about it really. If your dad introduced you to goat racing when you were 5 you'd be just as hot about that.
/rant off


I will adress your pionts one by one

"You guys bitching about tennis fail to comprehend why we watch sport in the first place - because we are rooting for one of the teams or individuals"

Rooting for one of the teams or individuals is just one aspect of sport and if you are watching a sport only for this then the sport could be anything might as well just bet on coin tosses.

"Watching any sport that you have no idea about is a bit bland because you don't have a team you are going for, you don't understand the rules, etc. So you're criticisms of tennis as a sport simply underline your ignorance of the game and it's players."

Although it might be the case that with Manny sports not knowing anything about a sport or the basic rules will make it bland for the general observer , I'm sure Manny people know the rules have played and follow sports and still can say why X sport is more bland or a worse spectator sport than another.

I know allot about tennis have watched allot of matches Your average tennis match i think can objectivly be described as predictable and bland , the same goes for most of the modern sports that are popular.


"In the end it mostly comes down to what you got introduced to as a kid,"


Again this can also be true but anny thinking person who looks for new exsperances will not simply go for things they are culturally indoctranted with.

you can also really enjoy all the external aspects of a sport the family gatherings and social aspects but then you are enjoying all the exsternal factors and not the macro aspects of the sport.

Tennis is actually a good example for this Its easy to follow interms of play x is winning will he wont he get the piont and you have tention derived from match pionts and what have you , However this same tention could be derived from a computer simulated match , and most matches play out in exactly the same way due to the lack of room for players to be creative and put an origonal stamp on play. ( this is a problem with Manny mainsteem sports It seems that people are more concernd with the ablity to follow the score and supporting a team or player and how clear that is over the macro elements of the game.

Now Granted there have been some tennis players that have played creatively but tennis produces very few of these players and evan these players often have bland matches. looking at other sports like English football you have countless players that play in a demonstrably different way to an existent where Evan a casual observer would notice. zeedane for example , or in f1 Michal Schumacher , personally i still think English football and F1 are still mindnumbingly bland for the most part but at least in something like f1 you have compleaty unexspected things happaning quite regulary ( cars blowing up people getting run over as well as pure racing thats uneequ )


Almost rant off ...

I still say you can objectively say x sport is a worse spectator sport than Y , and i would say that Tennis for the resion of lack of creativity afforded to its players makes a pore spectator sport.

I all-so apreceat that people have largely irrational motivations for why they like x sport over y nothing wrong with people enjoying stupid shit i enjoy stupid shit on a daily basis.

one thing that baffels me is the amount of people that turn out and watch these sports when we have the technology and ablity to have people competing them selfs and getting the benefit of not only seeing who will win but fitness and direct social interaction. if im to watch other humans partcing in an activty it has to be something Incredible that my mind cannot conseve of and that i cannot simply watch on a video.

Not really that impressive quite allot of tennis players could have done this the fact that this is considered exciting and how mental the crowd goes shows you how mundane tennis is as a spectator sport.

I think its grate playing tennis and its not a bad sport ( apart from the snooty rich twats that generally run allot of the stuff in the uk ( when there is no reason why it could not be a far more accessible sport )

I'm sure people get all worked up and involved when they watch it with all there mirror neurons firing off and the whole supporting one person over another will he win or lose motivation.

but objectively its pretty bland sport to watch and incredibly predictable in terms of macro play by play action I really don't understand why it has such a large following over other sports such as badminton Tidly winks or chess.

To compound the issue its Realy very rare in tennis that you get players that are entertaining to watch/ have a very original play stile , personly i dont like football but it does seem to produce or leave space for players to be far more creative.

Bah rant over ,

>> ^srd:

For those of us that haven't played starcraft 2 yet, what just happened?


Excellent question. I haven't played the sequel either, but I did play the original. Here's my take: The Terran player debo uses a single Banshee (the flying/cloaking attack helicopter thing) to bypass any frontal defenses of the Protoss player in order to directly attack the player's drones in the back of the player's main base. Consider these drones to be the army's worker bees, collecting resources (crystal and vespene gas) in order to fuel the player's war economy. A direct hit on those drones cripples the Protoss player's economy by slowing/stopping resource income and forces the player to react. Worse yet, whatever attack units the Protoss player has already built in the early game are powerless against the Banshee because the Banshee can cloak and avoid detection.

Thus, not only is the Protoss player collecting income at a slower rate than the other players, but the Protoss player is now also forced to spend additional money to rebuild drones and to build Observer units that can reveal the cloaked Banshee which would allow the already-built Protoss attack units (who are lingering by the resources in the back of the base) to open fire. The Banshee continues to harass those units while Observers are built.

Meanwhile, debo's masterstroke is to send conventional infantry units through the front door of the base while the Protoss units are amassed in the back trying to locate and remove the harassing Banshee. This is a tactical win in terms of superior positioning, where the general infantry are guaranteed to do significant damage on the base's main buildings before being possibly defeated by the returning Protoss units, but also a strategic/macro/'long-view' gaming accomplishment by having forced the Protoss player to deplete his slowed economy on non-fighting Observer units due to a single Banshee, which opened the economical and physical door for the conventional frontal attack that the player is ill-equipped to handle.

TL;DR SEVEN KILLS, N*GGA, EIGHT KILLS, N*GGA

Mine: http://i226.photobucket.com/albums/dd219/marinephoto/desktop.png?t=1296106873

I took the photo myself of an old clock with my macro lens. That large rusted flat part is maybe an 1/8th of an inch wide. I like my desktop nice and clean; no clutter.

Yeah her. She's attractive.

In reply to this comment by GDGD:
My avatar gal? I have no idea. It is just some image macro that helps remind me that nothing is ever that big of a deal.
In reply to this comment by ant:
Who's that gal?

My avatar gal? I have no idea. It is just some image macro that helps remind me that nothing is ever that big of a deal.
In reply to this comment by ant:
Who's that gal?

>> ^Psychologic:

Indeed. I would much prefer more specific designations for particular ideas within evolution (micro, macro, etc). "Evolution" seems to have a different meaning for everyone so at times it's difficult to know if two sides of a conversation are discussing the same idea.


"There is nothing mysterious or purposeful about evolution...it just happens. It is an automatic consequence of cold, simple mathematics." -- Scott Freeman & Jon C. Herron, Evolutionary Analysis

Microevolution is the change in an allele's frequency over multiple generations. Macroevolution is commonly referred to as speciation, the formation of new species via microevolutionary methods along with the isolation of organisms (either geographically or otherwise) and their eventual genetic divergence due to this isolation.

>> ^bmacs27:

Now, the real problem here is that what we mean by "evolution" is a moving target. It's so broad it's meaningless. In many ways "Darwinian evolution" has been falsified hundreds of times, much like Newtonian mechanics. It was wrong in the details.

I just get worried about how far people push the assumption of natural selection (e.g. evolutionary psychology).


Evolution is a moving target in as so much as any scientific discipline is. I'm sure if we started arguing about the physiology of vision, there would come a point where theory is still changing and, if I may, evolving within the scientific community. As I'm sure you know, this is just how science works.

Darwin was wrong in the details, true. Up to his death, Darwin believed in gemmules (small particles that travel through the body and deposit their "characteristics" into the gentialia) but that does not make his ideas any less sound. Modern evolutionary theory has filled in the gaps of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The fact that we can even reference Darwin 150+ years later should be a testament to how radically brilliant his ideas were and it should not undermine them just because he lived in a time where nothing was known about genetics (save Mendel's small garden patch).

About your last point concerning natural selection, I agree in so far that natural selection is not the only cause of evolution. Since evolution is merely the change in allele frequency over time, this can also be caused by migration and genetic drift, two very powerful forces and often more powerful in shorter time spans than natural selection. Albeit these forces are not influenced by agents of selection such as the environment, competition, predation, or sexual selection, they are still effective at causing the evolution of populations.

>> ^bmacs27:
Now, the real problem here is that what we mean by "evolution" is a moving target. It's so broad it's meaningless.

Indeed. I would much prefer more specific designations for particular ideas within evolution (micro, macro, etc). "Evolution" seems to have a different meaning for everyone so at times it's difficult to know if two sides of a conversation are discussing the same idea.

If it helps, I never thought you were advocating for creationism. =)

>> ^Gutspiller:

Where's the proof that it's CGI? The posters word?
Give me wireframe overlay or side by side, otherwise "didn't happen".
If it truly is CGI, then we've come along way... that is until you try to do CGI with living creatures, and motion, then most of the time it looks like shit.


Although it does look realistic , the Technological side of this is not that amazing (in the sense that technalogcaly speaking you can and have been able to render stuff to this degree for at least 17 months even 2 years. for example you can get this quality of render using Vray with 3ds max.

the talent is in how an artist uses the tools to make something look realistic with the tools at hand.

there are 19th century paintings that look pretty photo real.

one of the central resions as to why this looks real is that the majority of it is macro shots , macro camera angles and views are not something we see and exsperance on an every day level and look quite abstract , and thus its harder for sum-one to pick up how fake something looks. ( macro photographs and films often look cg even when they are not ,

A perfect example but in the opposite sense would be how Tilt shift photography makes things looks like plastic models.


all in all nice shots though regardless of how real it looks its just a nicely composed peace of footage.

>> ^nock:

The authors themselves state that there is a direct link between the Great Depression and deflation. They then go on to say that besides that unfortunate link, there is only a small connection between the two.
Anyways, like I said, not necessarily titans of the field. They have a few grants, most university PhD's get those now and then.
Also, I wouldn't go around saying that the linked article is a report from the Fed. As best I can tell it was a research paper with one of the authors being employed by the Fed at the time, not an officially accepted Fed position.
Thinking outside the box is fine, just as long as it's not just for the sake of thinking outside the box.


I was never arguing that there was no link to the Great Depression and deflation. My point was that minor cases of either deflation or inflation are negligible mirco and macro economically speaking. It may well be that deflation in a population that is growing isn't optimal, but that isn't what I was ever saying in the first place (and is debated even by those that work for the fed). My main topic of interest was that as far as it concerns all the things that I buy, prices are rising steadily, and in other cases, rapidly. That holds to all but loans, of which abound with new, cheaper offers of refinancing, and mortgages.

And your right, it would be more correct to say a report from people of the fed, not "the fed" itself, thought that would be self evident...we all know the Ben Bernanke position on the Great Depression. And in this case, I don't believe I am thinking outside the box without merit. More like not handing the keys to the guy who either A...didn't see it coming or B...flat out mislead people. Either way, the Ben Bernanke's interpretation of our current financial position is about what I come to expect from most appointed government officials, lacking.

>> ^blankfist:

>> ^NetRunner:
I took two full semesters of Econ in college, and the word "Keynesian" never came up. Neither did "Austrian", "Monetarist", "Classical", "Neoclassical", or any other label for different schools of macroeconomic thought.

Probably because they want you to believe it's a free market economy.


Actually, now that I know a lot more about the different schools of economics, I can definitively classify what they taught me in college as Milton Friedman's Monetarist view of macroeconomics.

Which, according to you, isn't "free market" economics at all, because Friedman believed that monetary policy alone could stabilize the economy on a macro scale to the benefit of all.

Mostly though, I think you don't understand that economics is supposed to be a study of the origin and nature of wealth, and not some holy scripture, handed down through the generations intact and unchanged, that tells us what the structure of society must always be.

That's called religion.

I always found this kind of playing unsuitable for how I enjoy RTS games. While there does need to be a pace for excitement, I prefer that to be mainly unleashing my final tactical strategy. I would rather micromanage other things rather and every movement of everything. Fighting on multiple sides of the universe at once is more my taste, and thus I play sins of a solar empire and supreme commander (1, screw 2!) as my poison.

I love watching these guys play SC2 though, but for me it would be no fun. Now, give me an FPS and Ill twitch out like that, but my brain doesn't work at that speed when considering macro and micro troop management, AND limited economy.

>> ^dag:

I played Homeworld quite a bit- but could never really get into it. This is what made me realize I'm not an RTS guy. You either are or aren't.


you should play ruse !

Im not into RTS realy just feals like to much time and effort for something thats often very prodictable and a very long winded process to achive what can bassicaly be gotten from a game of cards.

ruse multiplayer is realy good however , it plays allot more like a real time board game and games are realy quick , i think its out in a cuple of months.

but yah id mutch rather just play poker than a general RTS , although the total war games r good as well more overall stratagy than macro manigment:)