I fear you're all wasting your time.

At the heart of this debate is one simple element: that of changeability. Is the theist changeable? Is the atheist changeable?

If neither is capable of changing their (or the other's) mind, then debate is a waste of time. For the theist, doubt and skepticism are poisonous to their faith so I'd be very surprised to hear any theist say they are open-minded (changeable) and really mean it. This thread is evidence of that.

On the other hand, I've never met any atheist (though I'm sure some exist) who couldn't describe, at the ready, a specific example of some otherworldly event that would change their mind about god forever. That's what results from placing value on evidence.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins tells of a marvelous story at a lecture at Oxford's Zoology Department. I'll quote the author if that's OK with everyone:

...my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.

It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said - with passion - 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.'

We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that.

How do you prove something that exists outside of space and time? What physical process could you use to point to it? Anyone could go and examine you and verify whether you have "laser eyes". There is no way to put God under a microscope.

Therefore, we rely on Him to communicate with us. Faith is in the unseen, it is not blind. I don't believe in God because the bible told me to. I believe in God because He showed me He is real. He would show you too, if you honesty sought Him out. Yet, you just believe what you've heard and haven't looked for the truth yourself.

Lets say there was a certain King, whom you had never seen..and you are one of his peasants. You're under his authority and expected to work for him in the fields for a wage, and that when you are of the age of retirement, he will give you a home on his land and thank you personally. You see soldiers of his, marching through the town. You hear people talking about his attributes, his justness and intelligence. You witness his authority displayed all around you. It is plain there is a King though you had never seen him.

Now lets say one day you refuse to work, refuse to submit to his authority. You say to yourself, I don't believe this King is really real; I've never seen him with my own eyes.. This a conspiracy, I will just do whatever I want. You even decide to go into the towns square to tell others to stop working for this King. That it is a fools errand, the King is a hoax you say. You're wasting your lives when you could live for yourself! Yet, when the King gets wind of this he tells his soldiers "Fetch my ungrateful servant and bring him in front of me"

The soldiers fetch you and bring you before the throne. Finally, you get to see this King with your own eyes. Yet, it's too late..you've already earned His judgment. If you had pleased him the evidence would have been forthcoming. If you had done a good job, you would have earned a reward. Instead you refused to do your duty, and thus earned a criminals fate. Cursing your foolishness, you are taken to the gallows, but there is no reprieve forthcoming.

>> ^Sketch:
You CANNOT prove the non-existence of something like this! It's the same old Celestial Teapot, Pink Unicorn, Flying Spaghetti Monster issue! As with my laser eyes, prove that they don't exist! It is a ridiculous thing to even request!

There are many models which have their own proofs. Without wave-particle duality, there would be not electron microscopes. One definition of a wave is the probability of a particle being at a certain time t. This is one topic where Einstein disagrees with de Broglie, who also disagrees with Feynman, and so on, hence the Copenhagen interpretation. They all agree on the differential equations behind the wave-particle model, but their interpretations of the equations are all in violent disagreement. Great topic though

>> ^offsetSammy:

According to Feynman's QED, there's no such thing as "wave-particle duality", it's just all particles. The behavior of the particles, however, is very strange, and that's what accounts for their wave-like characteristics. QED came after Dirac and Schrodinger (it was a refinement of their theories), so I'm not sure why it doesn't get acknowledged in these kinds of discussions.
QED also predicts exactly the results of things like the double slit experiment without ever resorting to the "well the wave collapses into a particle when we observer it" kind of thing.

Hey ghandi, remember me, the crazy guy with the crazy idea? I switched majors to biology but I keep on keeping on with the dreaming. Chemistry is a lot more interesting than a state university's current idea of computer science. My wait-and-see attitude, coupled with my tendency to only do things i enjoy, lets me stick to projects where I can make personally satisfactory progress. Other people will have to complete the LDP as I sort of always knew.

Check these out regarding logical discourse:

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"This seems like the perfect question to pose to Slashdotters: how would you foster more dynamic spaces for online news discussion? How would you preserve the context of online discussions and stamp out trolls? " Sound familiar?

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/203221/Ask-Slashdot-Going-Beyond-Comment-Threads

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Truthy is a research project that helps you understand how memes spread online. With our images and statistics, you can help identify misuse of Twitter. Our first application was the study of astroturf campaigns in elections. Now we're extending our focus to the diffusion of all types of information in social media.

http://truthy.indiana.edu


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United States Patent 7,805,291 Berkowitz Appl. No.: 11/137,594
Filed: May 25, 2005
September 28, 2010

Method of identifying topic of text using nouns


Abstract
A method of identifying a topic of a text. Text is received. Then, the nouns in the text are identified. The singular form of each identified noun is determined. Combinations are created of the singular form of the identified nouns, where the number of singular forms of the nouns in the combinations is user-definable. The frequency of occurrence in the text of each noun that corresponds to its singular form is determined. Each frequency of occurrence is assigned as a score to its corresponding singular form noun. Each combination of singular form nouns is assigned a score that is equal to the sum of the scores of its constituent singular form nouns. The user-definable number of top scoring singular form nouns and combinations of singular form nouns are selected as the topic of the text.

Inventors: Berkowitz; Sidney (Baltimore, MD)
Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the Director National Security Agency (Washington, DC)
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This paper was coming out about the time I started to get interested in the possibility of analyzing for semantics and stuff. Good thing someone smarter figured it out.

Modeling public mood and emotion: Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena
Authors: Johan Bollen, Alberto Pepe, Huina Mao
(Submitted on 9 Nov 2009)

Abstract: Microblogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, also known as tweets, to the public or a selected circle of contacts. A variegated mosaic of microblogging uses has emerged since the launch of Twitter in 2006: daily chatter, conversation, information sharing, and news commentary, among others. Regardless of their content and intended use, tweets often convey pertinent information about their author's mood status. As such, tweets can be regarded as temporally-authentic microscopic instantiations of public mood state. In this article, we perform a sentiment analysis of all public tweets broadcasted by Twitter users between August 1 and December 20, 2008. For every day in the timeline, we extract six dimensions of mood (tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, confusion) using an extended version of the Profile of Mood States (POMS), a well-established psychometric instrument. We compare our results to fluctuations recorded by stock market and crude oil price indices and major events in media and popular culture, such as the U.S. Presidential Election of November 4, 2008 and Thanksgiving Day. We find that events in the social, political, cultural and economic sphere do have a significant, immediate and highly specific effect on the various dimensions of public mood. We speculate that large scale analyses of mood can provide a solid platform to model collective emotive trends in terms of their predictive value with regards to existing social as well as economic indicators.


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Cheers,

Vairetube

Fixating on things that bother you can be productive, for example it can drive people to right wrongs. But I do agree that focusing on problems through only a microscope can lead you to miss a wider picture; not seeing things in context.

Like Icarus, moderation is the goal. Too much emotion will lead to irrational conclusions and action, but the opposite extreme is equally destructive. Passivity or the suppression of internal conflict for its own sake can leave you unchanging or unwilling to act where you should.

On the whole though, I very much appreciate his thoughts. It sounds like he's having a moment of epiphany, which is a truly special event for a person.

I'm sure we COULD draw it to scale, I just doubt we would be see anything meaningful relating to our tiny microscopic section

I was really impressed with this. This really puts the ethics embedded in star trek that I really enjoyed under the microscope.

One of the difficulties of lifting the underlying ethics out of the series is that the series itself spans its creation over an incredible period of time; I'm not sure Gene Roddenberry was thinking 30 years ahead when he first came up with it =P. Also, Gene died shortly into the 4th season of start trek TNG...he wasn't around to be really involved with deep space 9, voyager, or enterprise. This is reflected in TOS vs. TNG; in TOS, the goal was to, "explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." TOS was about adventure; they had the people fly out to find a new world, fly down 'n meet 'em, and then get in all kinds of trouble. They seemed to focus on meeting civilizations that were approximately as technologically advanced as starfleet's. In TNG, the stated mission is the same, but the show has a much stronger anthropological sentiment to it. They actually fly down to places where they would be considered gods (and occasionally are, when they screw up).

From the anthropological perspective, the prime directive really does make a lot of sense...to a point. Suppose that you do come across some relatively underdeveloped civilization, and you have the chance to immediately save a lot of citizens of that civilization. Your direct interference with that civilization will indeed mess up your experiments concerning the study of how civilizations develop, so it's something that you generally want to avoid. Trying to save a civilization from one problem necessarily induces another problem. By solving a civilization's problem, their behavior may change to become reliant, and therefor dependent, upon you. Then, what are the ethics of *not* stopping your mission to explore out new civilizations? What are the ethics of *not* creating a supply line to suit the needs of your newly dependent civilization? Should you try to make that civilization self-sufficient to solve their own problems, what are the ethics of giving them technology without the social infrastructure for them to be able to deal with that technology? Finally, after all that, suppose that you give a new civilization new technology and a new social infrastructure to be able to deal with that technology responsibly; you've just committed a much more interesting and philosophical upset, and you've essentially wiped out an entire culture, and replaced it with another. From an anthropological standpoint, that's complete disaster.

That said, there are still times when it's a much bigger disaster to let things fall their course. Suppose a natural disaster is about to occur in which an entire planet will be destroyed. In this case, by not intervening, the entire culture and population will be eradicated, which is completely unacceptable from both anthropological and humanitarian standpoints. What do you do? In one episode of TNG (I can't remember which one), the solution was to transport the entire civilization to their holodecks, and transfer them to a new planet, all the while they believe that they are migrating to some new location on their homeworld. They preserved both the life and the culture, and satisfied both standpoints, which is a great and rare solution.

This video illustrates this caveat and many others by showing that the prime directive should *not* be considered a dogma that should be followed by every anthropologist blindly, but rather should be a rule of thumb. In a tough spot, it'll get you the best outcome most of the time. At other times, advanced levels of thought are necessary in order to fish out the actual best solution. For someone to break this rule of thumb very frequently might raise some eyebrows about what they are doing, as is the case seen in the clip where the senior officer was putting Picard in the hotseat about breaking the directive on 9 separate occasions in a short span of time.

The fact of the matter, though, is that it is *not* treated as a dogma in the series; it *is* treated as a rule of thumb. The fact that Picard broke it on 9 occasions in a short span of time truly shows this. In several other clips that was shown in this video, they actually *did* end up breaking the prime directive.

I believe that the person who created this video was just upset that he was never issued a starfleet academy textbook on the prime directive which spells out every detail and nuance of the directive =P. Of course they don't go into high levels of detail on it; the mass wouldn't be interested, or would just take a course on ethics & philosophy instead. Instead of going into high detail, they did as entertainers do, and just presented the rule in its most frustrating (and therefore interesting) fashion, by showing all of the situations when it makes us violate our own compulsion to follow our own set of moral standards. I believe that the prime directive in the series does come close to that which the author of the clip wants, but is merely stifled in its presentation by drama and intrigue.

Upvoting so I can say I'm reaching out to the pumpkin-assed, forehead, eyeball monsters.

That, and the microscopic glimpse of the sign "Hate is not a family value", hear hear.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by arvana.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Laser-Microscope

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by Hybrid. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

Regulatory capture is routine. This is why senators, representatives, heads of agencies, and other high level government employees should have a lifetime exclusion from being allowed to receive any emolument from anyone for anything except their government salary/pension. The cost to the government for providing a lifetime pension to 1-term senators and representatives would be microscopic compared to the amount of federal money that gets wasted because of bribery and regulatory capture. It's very often the case that a high level official in the government does something in favor of a corporation, and then 1-2 years later goes to work for that same corporation making a 7-figure salary. It's bribery, plain and simple.

Roads shifting isn't a problem for glass, as long as the glass is made for that spec. Glass isn't a solid, it is more like a trapped liquid. As such, it shifts around depending on the structure of glass, it could be made to cope with different level tolerances for movement. So, it is more an application of engineering than some insurmountable problem.

The amount of light that WON'T be reflected back and instead harness would out shine any led I would suppose, though don't know.

There should be no doubt that solar cells aren't a clean tech in terms of it is an industrial process. But it is still much better than supporting the oil refining process for taring up the soil. However, the future of solar technology is moving away from large silicon sheets to small, cleaner applications.

Costs of technology are always high until they hit wide spread use. With that, comes innovation that you can't calculate for. Just look at food, or computers, technology is one of those things you can almost count on getting cheaper. And as the video points out, oil and oil based derivatives aren't cheap currently. If 2 things cost near the same, and one also pays for itself, then the math is in your favor

Glass isn't just made from silica nowadays. You can make mostly transparent glass for metals, salts, and other compounds. The result is, among other things, a blend of textures and groves, and other microscopic features. You could actually construct your glass to have microscopic barbs to yield you a greater net traction effect than most surfaces.

The point here is, like most technologies, it is just how you get it to work at what price point with how much functionality...not if. Going to the moon with a computer that is less powerful than your pocket calculator is hard, this is considerably easier problem

For those are unknowing in the ways of the pan:

"Food that sticks is caused by chemical bonds that form between the food and the material of the pan - almost always a metal. These bonds may be relatively weak van der Waals forces or covalent bonds. Protein-rich foods are particularly prone to sticking because the proteins can form complexes with metal atoms, such as iron, in the pan.

The oil, being liquid, fills in the valleys and caves of the pan surface. Although the pan may look smooth at a microscopic level the surface of even the smoothest metal pan looks rough with hills, valleys and even caves. Hot oil is more viscous than cold oil and will immediately flow filling the gaps.

When oil in the pan gets hot enough a steam effect begins to occur ---

"A small amount of oil added to a very hot pan almost instantly becomes very hot oil. The oil quickly sears the outside of the food and causes water to be released from the food. This layer of water vapor ("steam") lifts the food atop the oil film and keeps it from touching the hot pan surface. If the oil is not hot enough, the steam effect will not occur and the food will fuse to the (too) cool pan surface." Source: Ask a Scientist, Newton BBC" Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#Soft_tissue_and_DNA

One of the best examples of soft-tissue impressions in a fossil dinosaur was discovered in Petraroia, Italy. The discovery was reported in 1998, and described the specimen of a small, very young coelurosaur, Scipionyx samniticus. The fossil includes portions of the intestines, colon, liver, muscles, and windpipe of this immature dinosaur.[45]

In the March 2005 issue of Science, the paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer and her team announced the discovery of flexible material resembling actual soft tissue inside a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. After recovery, the tissue was rehydrated by the science team.[46]

When the fossilized bone was treated over several weeks to remove mineral content from the fossilized bone-marrow cavity (a process called demineralization), Schweitzer found evidence of intact structures such as blood vessels, bone matrix, and connective tissue (bone fibers). Scrutiny under the microscope further revealed that the putative dinosaur soft tissue had retained fine structures (microstructures) even at the cellular level. The exact nature and composition of this material, and the implications of Schweitzer's discovery, are not yet clear; study and interpretation of the material is ongoing.[46]

Newer research, published in PloS One (30 July 2008), has challenged the claims that the material found is the soft tissue of Tyrannosaurus. Thomas Kaye of the University of Washington and his co-authors contend that what was really inside the tyrannosaur bone was slimy biofilm created by bacteria that coated the voids once occupied by blood vessels and cells.[89] The researchers found that what previously had been identified as remnants of blood cells, because of the presence of iron, were actually framboids, microscopic mineral spheres bearing iron. They found similar spheres in a variety of other fossils from various periods, including an ammonite. In the ammonite they found the spheres in a place where the iron they contain could not have had any relationship to the presence of blood.[90]

The successful extraction of ancient DNA from dinosaur fossils has been reported on two separate occasions, but, upon further inspection and peer review, neither of these reports could be confirmed.[91] However, a functional visual peptide of a theoretical dinosaur has been inferred using analytical phylogenetic reconstruction methods on gene sequences of related modern species such as reptiles and birds.[92] In addition, several proteins, including hemoglobin,[93] have putatively been detected in dinosaur fossils.[94]