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Shoku's photo
Sat 12/12/09 09:32 AM
Edited by Shoku on Sat 12/12/09 09:36 AM


There are levels and when you say that a question is too hard you are only saying that you do not have enough interest, time, and money to work on it.


No. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm simply saying that our scientific knowledge and empirical capabilities simply aren't advanced enought yet.
You can say that about everything we don't know. Get off your *** and work on advancing them if you care or you can just sit around complaining while other people do the work.

It's doesn't matter what I want, or have enough time, money or interest to invest.
If nobody ever works on answering a question how can you expect it to ever be answered?

And besides, it's silly to say that you can't pick out at least a few of the factors involved in walks lifting someone's mood. We're able to induce depression in mice and then monitor their brain activity with implanted electrodes these days. It won't give you the full story of how it works in humans but it's an easy start with useful information.

Surely, if you're a professional scientist yourself you are fully aware that science if far from complete.
What would complete even mean?

Beside, many scientists are proposing new dimensions, new quantum fields such as the Higgs Field, etc. How many more fields and hidden dimensions might there be?
How do you need quantum fields to work out brain chemistry? Do you just start gibbering about quarks every time you want to talk about things we don't know?

How can you sit there and pretend that science already has complete knowledge of everything well enough to be used for any possible arbitrary study?
You'll need to rewrite that. I can't understand how we would have any reason to study something if we already had complete knowledge.


It's not just hard to understand how you could not already know this but to understand how you could ignore it when I have placed it right in front of you.


What has been placed in front of me other than your own subjective opinion of what you imagine science should be capable of?
I stopped giving you sources and links when you ignored the fallacy page. Show me that you understand why an argument from ignorance is bad and maybe I'll start supplying you with sources.

I simply disagree with your opinion sir. That's all.
You don't read. I'm pushing you philosophically and logically here without my opinion having entered the equation. I can understand you not having read my conversation with JB about how I keep my opinion to myself but from this point on I expect you to stop rejecting my posts as opinions.

What you can do is reject them on factual or philosophical grounds, if you're capable of that.

Shoku's photo
Sat 12/12/09 09:22 AM

Sorry, I don't have any statistical data which you should provide in support your arguments...

But I think the boss would request a "favour" in return ONLY when the other party doesn't truly deserve the promotion!
Being a woman automatically makes them less deserving of the promotion. Actually you never deserve to be promoted.

Shoku's photo
Thu 12/10/09 09:05 PM
Edited by Shoku on Thu 12/10/09 09:06 PM
jrbogie:

rub being of course, the word "belief" is not in the vocabulary of science. who the hell is this feyman anyway. ah crap never mind. can't imagine i want to know.frustrated

Actually he's a pretty amazing guy. Excellent physicist but he applied his knowledge to all kinds of things and-

Well, he was the type to walk into a project and figure out what dozens of experts had been unable to.

The way that quote was used totally misses the point. For a better impression of him you can just find some made for public clips up on youtube and if you've got the time there's plenty more worth looking into.

Shoku's photo
Thu 12/10/09 08:59 PM

Shoku wrote:

But more alarmingly is that someone with your professed knowledge of science doesn't understand how to apply the scientific method. I can't imagine how you could have missed it.


But you've just recognized that I do indeed have a perfect understanding of the scientific method and how to apply it.

And it's in your following words:

Shoku wrote:

though with all things human there are a great many factors in play so it is no easy task to isolate them


I simply recognize that we currently don't have the ability to apply the scientific method to something as immensely complex as the human spirit. So I don't even pretend that it could be done.

Pretending that it could be applied would be a display of someone who doesn't understand how to apply the scientific method.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The scientific method is an extremely elementary and very limited reductionistic view of the world. As a professional, I'm fully aware of this. I would suggest that most of the truly credible professional scientist are indeed aware of this.

"Science is a belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman.

It really is true if you stop and think about it. The scientific method is extremely crude, and quite limited about what it can actually say. Most of what scientists think they know actually represents large leaps of intuitive conclusions that may or may not have any validity at all.

The Big Bang. A Conclusion? Or a Guess?

Take the Big Bang for example. We observed that light coming from what appears to be very distant galaxies is red-shifted and this red-shift increases as the galaxies appear to be further away. From this we conclude that the universe is expanding.

Do we have any evidence that the universe is expanding? No. All we have is evidence that light is red-shifted. We must jump to the conclusion that this is caused by an expanding universe, which seems to be reasonable. However, this assumption also assumes that the physics of the intergalactic space is the same as the physics we experience here on Earth and that it has been homogeneous and isotropic over all of time*.

*Keep this lst thought in mind because it's going to play a huge role in just a minute.

Next we devise a 'theory' based on the idea that the universe is most likely expanding due to the evidence that light is red-shifted. And that assumption was based on the above assumption that the laws of physics have been homogeneous and isotropic over all of time.

Moreover the theory crashes and cannot be made to work if we stick to our guns assuming that the laws of physics have been homogeneous and isotropic over all of time. The theory has major problems and basically fails.

So then a New Idea is proposed that the laws of physics have not been homogeneous and isotropic over all of time, and there was actually a time when the universe underwent a major period of unprecedented Inflation. Keep in mind that there is no evidence for this New Idea. On the contrary this New Idea is entirely fabricated to salvage a theory that wasn't working!

There is no evidence that any such thing as "inflation" ever took place. That is purely an idea that was created to salvage a theory that wasn't working.

Moreover, even the theory of Inflation has its own problems because there is no way to "shut down" the inflationary process evenly throughout space without also having non-local faster-than-light communication. So as ironic as it sounds, the Inflationary Theory just took the non-local problem that caused the original Big Bang theory to fail, and moved it from the first instant of explosion to the end state after Inflation. laugh

In any case, there is no evidence for Inflation. Inflation is merely a plausibility argument to salvage a theory that wasn't working. And that theory wasn't even based on evidence that the universe was expanding, but rather it was merely based on the evidence that light is red-shifted. And that also included a need to assume that that the laws of physics have been homogeneous and isotropic over all of time. But now to save that theory we must assume that that the laws of physics have not been homogeneous and isotropic over all of time because we now need a period of Inflation that would have represented a different physical situation.

So how much of the "Big Bang" theory is actually based on "evidence" and how much is based on a biased desire to simply "save a theory"? spock

Now you might argue that there is also the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) that also supports the "Big Bang". But this isn't necessarily true at all. The CMBR would exist in any case. It's simply a measurement of the temperature of the universe as a whole. It doesn't necessarily point to a "Big Bang". The real argument there boils down to an idea of pure logic that suggests that IF the universe were infinitely old, and also static, that it would today then be infinitely hot. However, that's an argument that's also based on many unprovable assumptions as well.

In short, the only "real evidence" that we have for a "Big Bang" is the red-shifted light and the belief that this means that the universe is expanding and has always been expanding and that the laws of physics are homogenous and isotropic over time.

In fact, if you stop and think about this, it even gets more interesting!

The most recent cosmological observations suggest (from observing red-shifted light, again) that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. Well this throws a whole wrench into everything!

The entire picture of the "Big Bang" was originally proposed in the belief that the expansion was fairly constant, or at best, slowing down due to gravity. But now we see that the physics of the universe is indeed changing. The universe is accelerating in it's expansion at least based on the 'evidence' of observations of red-shifted light.

Well, if this is true then why should we assume anything about the rate of expansion in the past? spock

Yet, we must make assumptions about the rate of expansion in the past for the Big Bang theory to hold.

So, in truth, we actually have basically no evidence that there was ever a Big Bang. All we have is some observations about red-shifted light a whole bunch of assumptions and guesses after that. flowerforyou

Like Richard Feynman says: "Science is a belief in the ignorance of experts."


Most of your post looks like you copies it out of the first result of a yahoo search so I'm just going to respond to the part that looked relevant: that doesn't make any sense. With the scientific method you've got options other than "I need to explain everything there is."

I don't see how you could have missed that part where I listed off the ranges all of the time, most of the time, rarely, and never. That's what the scientific method can easily produce for you without funding and devotion. There are levels and when you say that a question is too hard you are only saying that you do not have enough interest, time, and money to work on it.

It's not just hard to understand how you could not already know this but to understand how you could ignore it when I have placed it right in front of you.

Shoku's photo
Thu 12/10/09 08:52 PM





Dear,
the sooner you get over the adolescent idealizm, the better...

Ok, done. Got anything with substance to say?


Sorry, darling, didn't mean putting you down... That suggestion of mine actually referred to your comment adout those women who "sleep their way up corporate ladders ".

Unfortunately, pulling tricks isn't restricted only fo the "street walkers" (i.e. "ladies of the night").

On the other hand, if "sleeping with the boss" is the only way a girl can secure some favoritism (and the boss actually bites her bate), then more power to her!!! (as long as she can perform her duties -- at her job and under the boss's table!!!) laugh laugh laugh

It's basically been a requirement for actresses for... the better part of the century I think.

I'm not talking about favoritism though. I mean where a woman cannot hope to advance without exchanging her body for it.

What do you mean??? Haven't you seen the movie "9 to 5" and many other "girlish" flicks where the chauvenistic behavior is frowned upon?
The higher up a woman advances along the social ladder, the less of the chauvenistic behavior there is.

The lower the woman's social status, the more subordinate she is. Exchanging sexual favours for advancement is, often, the woman's initiative (rather than the boss's demands)!

I'm saying that we think the boss demands it a lot less often now when that hasn't really changed.

Shoku's photo
Thu 12/10/09 12:42 PM


Without getting into any major detail(s) concerning any specific situation or idea, I would like to attempt to discuss the importance and/or value of evidence. Obviously, in order to have evidence there must be a reason for it to be in consideration. That requires the need to show something as reasonable or provable.

Do we not automatically use this concept in all that we come to believe or think that we know?


I'm not sure in what way you are thinking of "evidence".

For example, suppose you're feeling down and someone suggests that you go take a walk by the river and you'll feel better.

Well, before you go for the walk you have no "evidence" for anything. If you accept the suggestion you just take it on faith.

Then after you come back from the walk you decide on the results whether or not it was a worthy thing to do. So often times the evidence can only become obvious after faith. Without faith you'll never do what's required to experience the evidence.

So sometimes the evidence requires doing. It doesn't necessarily come first. If you always wait for evidence before you make a decision you may never experience the evidence. So sometimes faith must come before the evidence.


Here's a different way of approaching it:
"I don't have any evidence that taking that walk is going to help."
"Well, I'm not too busy to do it so I think I will test if the walk improves my condition."
one walk later
"I feel better/don't feel better so now I have some evidence for/against walking by the river affecting my mood."

If you're really upset you probably wouldn't be concerned with testing this but if that someone that suggested it notes your mood when you return they will then have evidence that it works or does not.

Obviously a single walk by a river impacting someone's mood or not is not very compelling evidence but after you sum up many people's walks through nature you could come to the conclusion that it always helps, often helps, sometimes helps, or never helps.

If you had the time/interest/money or a suitable combination of those you could attempt to isolate the factors that make the difference between a successful walk, though with all things human there are a great many factors in play so it is no easy task to isolate them.


But more alarmingly is that someone with your professed knowledge of science doesn't understand how to apply the scientific method. I can't imagine how you could have missed it.

Shoku's photo
Thu 12/10/09 06:09 AM

You'd have to catch the monkey spurting. :wink:

I don't want my hands anywhere near that spock


But as them reptilians are supposed to be more tech advanced you could just use the time machine to probe for short moments of carelessness and then grab the keys from one of their ships or whatnot.

Or if they've got impassible scanners for humans then travel back to when they were less advanced and get yourself a ship then.

Shoku's photo
Thu 12/10/09 06:05 AM



Dear,
the sooner you get over the adolescent idealizm, the better...

Ok, done. Got anything with substance to say?


Sorry, darling, didn't mean putting you down... That suggestion of mine actually referred to your comment adout those women who "sleep their way up corporate ladders ".

Unfortunately, pulling tricks isn't restricted only fo the "street walkers" (i.e. "ladies of the night").

On the other hand, if "sleeping with the boss" is the only way a girl can secure some favoritism (and the boss actually bites her bate), then more power to her!!! (as long as she can perform her duties -- at her job and under the boss's table!!!) laugh laugh laugh
It's basically been a requirement for actresses for... the better part of the century I think.

I'm not talking about favoritism though. I mean where a woman cannot hope to advance without exchanging her body for it.

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 01:15 PM

A paradox? Come on people this is not star trek. The only way you would not be able to exist in a parallel or divergent plane I would believe would be a result of your matter or energy or parts of it being of the same essence which would mean there are two identical atoms or water at play this should break the law of science. Regardless time travel is over zealously seen as possible when in reality it is highlu unplausible.
This is acting like atoms are permanent units with particular assigned positions in time- but position need not be a function of time, and there's not any good reason to even think that it is based on any of the physical laws of the universe we understand.

With this in mind we have a few options for time travel. The first is that the timeline is constant, unchanging, and already laid out in it's entirety. We can, under this model, recognize that all time travel events are already recorded and that, like that radio broadcast, we should have several time travelers among us right now. Otherwise it is safe to say that there can be no time travel.

People frequently sidestep this by suggesting that there might be many identical universes to our and that we could step between them but land in that universe's version of the past or future but this and other such models should not really count as time travel so much as travel to a place that happens to be near or totally identical to different times in our own history.


Yet there are much more compelling models available to us. The random decay of particles and various quantum phenomena at least remove the deterministic nature of the universe in terms of Newtonian action and reaction. This doesn't fully remove the option of a deterministic universe but it does strongly suggest that it's being written as it goes along.

In this view we can see that travel to the future should just eliminate you from history until you showed up once again and thus you should never be able to travel to your future self. In traveling back to the present you would now once again be there to have various impacts and so the future you had traveled to could no longer exist. If we assume that time sloughs off that period of time and writes itself anew starting from your trip back we start to see potential problems.

To maintain causality the trip to the future and back does not really create any issues. Time begins to process itself again with your trip back so the trip to the future changes you accordingly and then your return carries back information from a place that no longer exists but you have obeyed causality the entire way through and your trip to the future would still make sense if we were to rewind the universe and then have it carry out on it's own, which we will presume gives the same result if nothing is changed, in accordance with causality.

Trips back to before your initial trip, however, have some actual problems. You are now altering the history that led to your trip. Time can write itself forward with you having showed up from nowhere but if it gets up to the point where you made your trip but instead you do not make the trip then there is no explanation for where the you that showed up in the past came from. In writing itself forward you would have now not made the trip and on a single time line this must mean that you never showed up in the past.

The real problem is that in removing you from the past time should now play out in a way that you DO make your trip back and as we try to lay down history piece by piece we get stuck without it ever able to continue beyond when you made your trip back.

Unless you want to think that time is like video cassette tape and decreases in quality as you record over it again and again there would be no way to ever recognize that someone had done this and instead of time continuing on in a line it would just get up to a point and then circle back on itself infinitely.

There is a relative fail safe however: you need only not do anything that will prevent your trip from happening. This makes killing Hitler and that sort of thing mostly impossible as with a dead Hitler there is no Hitler's Nazi party and thus nobody would know why you would want to kill some random German guy named Adolf Hitler.

If, however, you go back in time and set up a group to both kill Hitler and make sure you travel back in time to set up their group we have averted the problem. Killing Hitler will have many implications though and there is no guarantee that you would be born in the new version of the world so you would instead have to set up the group to make sure that a particular person according to some set of rules be chosen to perform the task, or if available have a robot built for the task.

To avert the paradox whatever messenger must make their trip back in time before your trip would have occurred (and thus erase the troublesome section of history.)

Once we have established a stretch of time that leads to a trip back in time that establishes that stretch of time we can now continue fluidly into the future and though the present of such a movie-style loop would baffle anyone trying to figure out how it began causality will nonetheless be preserved.

Of course this relation could be worked out if we were to travel to the future and confirm that by having taken that trip we were absent from it and that sort of thing. We would still not know who had set up any self preserving travel events but we could recognize the method.

However this cannot be attempted prior to the initial invention of a time machine on the unaltered time line and thus we will have no such loops to observe until them (presuming that we are on the very first construction of time right now.)

With the advent of space travel it will be much easier to determine the nature of time as we would be able to just choose a place to change something that could have no impact on our creation of time travel or our interest in using it and then leave the information about what we did and what it was like without the change (and then take action to make sure the change happened so we could keep that information.)

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 09:52 AM

Shoku wrote:

Well you could go grab some fruit from the tree of life and hand it to them right after they ate from the tree of knowledge if you really wanted to give god the finger~


Well, considering that I'm even concerned about it and God obviously wasn't that implies that I'm the compassionate superior to God which is an oxymoron anyway and flies in the very face of what the Biblical God is supposed to be.

Of course, if this had been the mythology of Zeus it might make more sense since no one ever claimed that Zeus was a necessarily a nice guy (er, I mean, a nice God).

Anyway, I don't think I'd truly be interested in doing this. I was really just joking. I think when I got to the days of Jesus I'd discover that Jesus was indeed a pantheistic monk just like I have suspected. Then my next stop would be to go back and see what Siddhartha was up to. Then finally I'd grab a hot chick and take her with me to travel all the way back to just after the dinosaurs left and before humans came onto the scene. We'd have to whole planet to ourselves then. laugh


Might as well go to the future and get a starship to cruise over to some paradise planet.

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 09:48 AM

nonsense? Try proving or disproving it. It's not gonna be easy to track both events and every air current moving between them. Though Mirror has the traditionally "correct" viewpoint here, I think my thought is at least interesting, if not entirely valid. Basically we were saying the same thing though.
Well what needs to be understood is that it's not the butterfly being so powerful as to cause a storm. The air has to already be very close to causing a storm and the butterfly would have to be in the right place at the right time to give just enough of a push to make everything fall in the way that eventually comes together to make the storm. Obviously very few butterflies will give the perfect contribution that has such a huge impact on the weather but they are definitely able to change air flows because air flows are such a chaotic thing.

But again, it's not the butterfly making the hurricane from nothing. It's all butterflies, birds, animals exhaling, rocks moving down hills, trees and things being in the way of wind, etc. It's all of these things adding up and the idea is that if you change one very small input that has a little bit of an effect on a lot of things around it and the change in those things has a little more impact on everything around them.

It's easier to understand if you look at things you understand better than air currents: imagine if you were to travel back in time and destroy a single sperm as the cell was first forming. Most likely a randomly chosen sperm is not going to be one that fertilizes an egg but assuming you got one that would have been ejaculated during coitus the chances are still slim. However the enzymes sperm release when they get to the egg to eat their way up to the actual cell surface might have made the difference another sperm needed to be the one to fertilize the egg. Now there's no way you'd know which sperm was going to fertilize the egg.

Because we're talking about time travel I've got to mention Hitler. What if the sperm you killed had been involved in his conception, as the one to fertilize the egg or just a contributor in some way? Switching the genes he got from his father could have resulted in a stillbirth or he could have been born anyway. Maybe the sperm he actually got had basically the same set of genes and differences so small they couldn't even take effect until generations later or maybe they'd alter his childhood so much he'd become a pastry chef.

But think about a world with a Hitler pasty chef. Could you believe that the change of a single cell before he was ever born could lead to the hurricane of a person that rocked the foundations of the modern world and lead to the deaths of so many?

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 09:24 AM


The Butterfly Effect says that something as simple as a butterfly flapping it's wings on one side of the world, has the potential to cause tsunamis on the other side of the world at the same time. When used in reference to time travel, it is an easy way of saying the following, "If you go back in time and change any one tiny thing, there will be consequences that you can't even imagine for the time line that you left when you traveled back in time." Basically, the butterfly effect is based on how reality (moment to moment anyway) is all about the choices we all make.
:smile: The time travel "butterfly effect" term comes from an old science fiction story.:smile:

-Another spoiler-
They talk a bit about an election where it would have been crazy if one guy was elected. Then they go T-rex hunting being careful to shoot one that was about to be crushed anyway. The client goes off the trail and steps on a butterfly and then they return to the present and find out the really bad guy got elected and also that evureewun spehls tings liek dis.


Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 09:21 AM

I beg your pardon, but could you enlighten me:
What theHell is the butterfly effect ? ? ?

Butterfly effect refers to the idea that a butterfly flapping it's wings could cause a hurricane halfway around the world.

A lot of people get mixed up in the meaning though. Chaos and order are not opposite things for this explanation- rather chaos refers to a situation where a very small difference in starting conditions leads to extremely different results. For this reason it becomes easier to say that chaos is basically something that's really freaking hard to predict.

For example asteroids striking Earth are a chaotic system. You may know where all the big ones are but if you don't know the small ones the little tugs they give could move the big ones towards different groups of small rocks and those could lead in various directs and so on. After a couple of steps of this you can see how one tiny difference quickly multiplies up to a huge difference.

More down to Earth you could imagine a grassy park with trees. If you move one tree where people walk a lot they might prefer a different path entirely and then the people walking through a different spot because of the tree will make that other spot more crowded which will make other people prefer to sit down somewhere else and so on.


Anyway, in regards to time travel the idea is that if were to do something like delay someone for three seconds that might add up to the difference between them being in a car accident or not and a world with a particular person alive instead of dead is going to echo forward as that person keeps interacting with people and changing what they would have done if he wasn't there. If you know about stuff like six degrees of separation it's easy to see how trivial changes could make huge differences all around the world as time marches forward.

*Due to the multiplication thing butterfly effect would make a rather small difference if you went back five minutes. If you went back a year there would be a bigger effect and if you went back centuries there would be a huge effect. Of course the five minute trip can add up to a big effect a century later but because you could only know what was going to happen for five minutes nobody would know.

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 09:08 AM


There is no time or place that I wouldn't go to. I want to see it all! bigsmile


Boy you're a great candidate for a game of "Reincarnation".

If I had a time machine I'm not sure where I would want to go in time to be quite honest about. Does it come with a Travel Guide?

I kind of like Sunny's idea of going back and being a mentor to myself. laugh

But like the monkey says, that could potentially create a time-warp paradox.

I'm really not interested in time travel to be honest about it. It'd rather just have a crystal ball and watch it like a TV.

It would be fun to watch the actual history and find out what really happened rather than have to rely on the hearsay history records that we currently have.

I would like to see who Jesus really was (if he existed at all). And of course, if he turned out to be real, my next stop would be back to the Garden of Eden with a ax to chop down a certain tree before it became fruitful. laugh

If you're going to change history you may as well nip it in the bud. :wink:



Well you could go grab some fruit from the tree of life and hand it to them right after they ate from the tree of knowledge if you really wanted to give god the finger~


Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 09:05 AM
Edited by Shoku on Wed 12/09/09 09:06 AM




You know, I know I'd like to have talked to myself as a kid. I know it would probably mess time up and everything. But babysitting myself at six years old would be so interesting.

bigsmile


drinker Good ideadrinker

bigsmile But to travel back and meet yourself would cause a paradox of the timestream thoughbigsmile

Yea I know but what if I was an unknown new babysitter or teacher and she(I) would never know.

Don't you think that'd be amazing!




bigsmile That is right Sunny.drinker If your identity were to remain unknown to your past self, then a paradox would probably be avoided.bigsmile Yes,that would be amazingdrinker
Sort of. If she remembered the babysitter as a kid then she would be changing her memory anyway. If she was especially good at behaving exactly the way she remembered herself behaving then you would have to have time rewriting itself over and over but would instead get something more like Back to the Future's end
-spoiler n_n -
where Doc looked like he got gunned down but was wearing a bullet proof vest.
-spoiler-



I'd like to go back and kill whomever invented commercials grumble bigsmile laugh drinker
I wouldn't mind grabbing a bit of modern or near future study about commercials and handing it out a decade ago.

Right now we obviously see so many that we just learn to ignore them. The big plan for dealing with that has been to show us more advertisements (and often make them nearly pornographic,) but that obviously feeds back on itself and we ignore them that much harder.

You've probably asked yourself "who the hell buys this crap?" at least a few times when you were bored enough to actually look at what was being advertised, or worse, had your attention forcibly grabbed by the ad with something like siren noises. Well, back when people had maybe five options total ads were a great way to swing their favor towards one but now we've got about a million options so there's no use competing with so many other commercials and we couldn't even keep track of them anyway.

The solution is obviously a healthy helping of shut the hell up but they know that zero advertising is a company disaster. The actual solution is just lighter ads directed at niche groups. Viral marketing campaigns are some of the forerunners for this concept but it can be taken a lot further. If they'd stopped trying to get an ad seen by everyone back then just so that the 5% that were actually ever likely to buy it would definitely see it...



Though here's an interesting use for time travel: go back and show the terrorists in Afghanistan how the US was going to respond to the 9/11 attack. "Use it as an excuse to invade countries without full international backlash" doesn't even need to be something you agree with, it really ought to give them second thoughts if they had to think about if they were going to make US citizens easier to manipulate thus unshackling the people most willing to do the things they hate most about America.

Plus I'd bet about half of the people here (maybe more because it's an internet forum?) doubt we learned anything from the whole ordeal.

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 06:25 AM




a true "Jumper"? like in the movie?




I hated that movie!
The villain didn't make any sense. "Only God should be everywhere at once" doesn't sound anything like what they do yet he's got a whole army of people that agree with him and then that machine they make has him do the same thing at the end.

If not for that and with a little bit better directing it could have been good.


I dont know how I would do it, but I would there to help my son every time he tripped, every time he fell.


I would use it to be my sons greatest cheerleader in the moments I otherwise couldnt.


I would use it to make my son assured, that I was truly with him, every step of the way, because I would be there, always.


And, I would use it to go back to the time when I was 12, and set more stuff on fire, with hairspray, and a lighter.
You sure he'd ever develop a sense of balance if you were always doing that?


Time travel:

Okay go back in time to Kill Hitler.

I imagine a guy went back in time to kill Hitler and he found him by reading the popular account of where he was and he killed a guy that looked just like Hitler (one of his many doubles) and thought he had killed Hitler. So nothing changed, except there was a little heard about attempt on Hitler's life and one of his doubles got killed instead. Meanwhile, Hitler and his top aids escape to South Africa and Hitler hides out for years, finally dieing at the age of 95. Another one of his look-a-likes takes his place in Germany and eventually is killed. It is made to look like a suicide.

We hear the Hitler one so often it's cliche. If you halted WW2 there wouldn't have been as much military tech upgrades and we'd find ourselves at a sloppier level of technology. Without Germany's involvement all those other places in and around Europe wouldn't have even been kicked in the crotch and we'd have had a much nastier situation a few decades later. America would remain some podunk back woods country so you'd probably see power concentrated to the Soviets and Japan, or China if Japan ran out of steam for some reason.

But you've already heard people saying that it's best not to take away all the lessons you learned from in the past.


I would go to the very beginning of the universe, the very exosecond it started...then i would travel to the very end when the last blackhole finally radiated itself away....will both experiences be the same?
No, in the first one you either wouldn't be able to fit in the universe or you'd basically burn up in ways we don't have words for.


Anyway, since this was described as multidimensional I wouldn't have to worry about time paradoxing myself out of existence so I'd mess around with other world's history heavily to see how big of an impact various ideas have really had on humanity.

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 05:58 AM

Dear,
the sooner you get over the adolescent idealizm, the better...
Ok, done. Got anything with substance to say?

Shoku's photo
Wed 12/09/09 05:57 AM




We've changed biologically within the last few decades.
:smile: In what ways do you think we have evolved in the last few decades?:smile:
Height, reduced wisdom teeth, various immunological things (it's technical but stuff like AIDS immunity,) straighter spines (you can see this in malnourished populations so you can rule out nutrition having caused it.)

We're also slowly whittling away the dependency on certain Y chromosome genes necessary for sperm production. Presumably we'll eventually transition to an X chromosome dosage trigger for gender and then we'll just drop the Y chromosome altogether for more reliable cell reproduction.

I'm not really prepared to talk about aggression and stress genes though so this is really just tip of the iceberg stuff.
:smile: That isnt evolution.:smile: Those are all improvements in health because we have better and easier lifestyles.:smile:

You see them happening in the parts of the world where people are malnourished.

Or do you not believe that Somalia is a real place?

Shoku's photo
Tue 12/08/09 07:10 PM

ronny4dating wrote:

Then again i am no where near as smart as Richard dawkins or most scientists. But they do tend to be biased sometimes, i beleive its a reverse descrimination at this point!


Well, there is nothing in science that actually supports a non-spiritual universe either.

To pretend that science supports non-spiritual views any more than it supports spiritual views is truly a false claim in itself.

ronny4dating wrote:

Well I can only speak from my relgious beleif but the bible's explanation is man has not the capacity to understand God.


Well this is a belief that is held by almost all spiritual traditions. For example, Pantheism and Taoism both hold that spirit is unknowable in its essence. Just the same, it can be directly experienced by aligning with it in harmony. bigsmile


How would an existence with the spiritual look different from a universe without it?

Shoku's photo
Tue 12/08/09 07:07 PM


We've changed biologically within the last few decades.
:smile: In what ways do you think we have evolved in the last few decades?:smile:
Height, reduced wisdom teeth, various immunological things (it's technical but stuff like AIDS immunity,) straighter spines (you can see this in malnourished populations so you can rule out nutrition having caused it.)

We're also slowly whittling away the dependency on certain Y chromosome genes necessary for sperm production. Presumably we'll eventually transition to an X chromosome dosage trigger for gender and then we'll just drop the Y chromosome altogether for more reliable cell reproduction.

I'm not really prepared to talk about aggression and stress genes though so this is really just tip of the iceberg stuff.

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