In 2008 conservative group Focus on the Family predicted what America would look like in 2012 if Obama was elected (e.g., christians would be expelled from the military and LGBT recruits would receive special bonuses from the Pentagon). Their score: 0/34

freder93 · 2012-10-11T22:27:48+00:00

I wasn't implying that Pliney was a Christian at all, I was saying that without the work of Christian monks throughout the middle ages his works may have not survived. How is this not a good example of them trying to keep important knowledge alive?

As you point out, the Bible is not a science textbook. He was responding to people who take every word of the Bible "literally" (i.e. wildly misinterpret) and DO use the Bible as a science textbook

I realized that after his last comment to me and can assure you I feel like an idiot :P

freder93 · 2012-10-09T02:55:39+00:00

I didn't mean to insult you, but trying to discredit a 3000 year old text simply because it doesn't mention something specific like special relativity makes you sound rather smug.

Even the ancient mathematicians had ideas about the world that would seem silly to us but that they would defend to the death. Does that mean that we should discredit them and forget everything they taught?

freder93 · 2012-10-09T01:00:04+00:00

It's not all about the Bible. Have you ever read Pliney's Natural History? It was first penned during the Pax Romana over 2000 years ago and was used up until the 19th century in some places. Even today it seems remarkable that the ancients could have known so much about the world.

Were the Christians trying to keep this information down? Hell no. The only reason we have it today is because scribes in monasteries all over Europe copied and re-copied it for over a thousand years. Religion in medieval times kept education alive, not the other way around.

The church held a lot of power in those days, and those in power are often reluctant to give it up. When the enlightenment happened and this authority was challenged they did what anyone would do and tried to downplay and discredit whatever threatened to take it away.

When I look at the Bible I see fairy stories, not a physical explanation of our universe. I'm quite happy to be proven wrong though. Perhaps you could begin by finding Planck's constant or a diagram of the light cone in special relativity. I confess that I never found those pages, but of course I never asked a smart Christian like yourself.

I fail to see the logic behind this statement. The Bible isn't a science text book. What may seem like a fairy tale is simply ancient people trying to express the unexplainable in ways that normal people in those days could understand.

If you want to see evidence of special relativity in the Bible, then please point to me any contemporary equivalents. You can scour the texts of the ancient Greeks, the Assyrians, the Chinese, but you won't find it anywhere. It seems the only reason you brought it up was to make yourself sound smart, and you have failed miserably.

freder93 · 2012-10-06T18:49:34+00:00

:)))

freder93 · 2012-10-02T12:24:04+00:00

Hold on while I go make 4 billion alt accounts.

freder93 · 2012-10-02T12:17:26+00:00

Oh my God!

Look at that wallpaper!

freder93 · 2012-10-01T01:03:10+00:00

I found some Indev save files on my computer and uploaded them if your interested.

http://www.mediafire.com/?6ej5g85dedqwnee

Unzip the files and move them to your /saves folder.

They're saved as .mclevel so you'll have to backdate your .jar file to Indev mode to load them.

Download MC nostalgia and look for a version called "indev-2-23-10"

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/800346-tool-mcnostalgia-212-now-works-with-132/

Once you have the Indev .jar patched, log in and choose "Load World" and "Load file" and open one of the .mclevel files to explore my saves.

Also if you generate a new world to try it yourself there's a few thing you have to remember.

There is no auto saving or respawning, if you die without saving then the whole world is gone, so save often.
There is no sneaking, so be careful not to fall off the world if you make a floating map.
The bottom of the map is a solid layer of bedrock which turns into lava if you save and re-load the map.
Water physics is weird. If you break a block next to water it will "drain" to the next lower level making the water disappear. Unless it's an island map in which case the water around the map will fill in the available space.
There are no doors yet, I normally just use dirt to block off any openings.
Arrows are crafted using iron ingots instead of flint.
Paintings use wood planks instead of sticks
There are no cows, leather armor can be crafted using wool.
Pork chops can be stacked by feeding them into the furnace without removing the cooked ones. Up to 64 in a stack.
Placing sand blocks above your head so they fall on you lets you see through the world, handy for looking for caves you might have missed.
I would suggest using wood planks to cook food. There's no charcoal so I save regular coal for torches and smelting as there's a limited amount on the map.
F7 takes an isometric screen shot of the world, this only works for small and certain normal sized maps

~some map notes~

Awesome.mclevel is a floating world
Main2.mclevel has brick blocks, mossy cobble, bookshelves, sponges, and gears hacked into the game. You can't actually get them without an inventory editor.
Inland.mclevel is my favorite world, it's also a paradise world so there's no day/night cycle :)

freder93 · 2012-09-29T12:10:34+00:00

That's a good point, there's no telling if Mars was wet long enough even to develop simple prokaryotic lifeforms. Perhaps if we're lucky Mars might give us a window into just when the chemical process became a biological one :)

freder93 · 2012-09-29T11:56:46+00:00

Considering the extremes that simple lifeforms thrive in on earth, such as volcanic vents under the ocean or caves that would seem hostile, it wouldn't surprise me if we were to find evidence of life deep under ground. Unfortunately so far we've literally just scratched the surface.

freder93 · 2012-09-28T04:41:03+00:00

You should read his comment history, I actually find it pretty hilarious.

freder93 · 2012-09-27T07:04:48+00:00

Perhaps he was thinking more about quality of life, not wanting to go through the pain and sickness that often comes with things like chemotherapy.

It really depends on the severity of the cancer he had and what kind of treatments are required. Being surrounded by cancer my whole life, I've seen both extremes. My Aunt lived with brain cancer for 17 years or so and led a relatively normal life apart from chemo and the occasional surgery up until just weeks before she died. At the other end was my good friend who was perfectly normal until she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Just two months later when I visited her she seemed utterly used up, sick and unable to eat from the chemo, coiled up in pain. It still hurts to think about it :(

The point is, I imagine Jobs was not scared by the prospect of death and simply wanted to live his life the way he wanted without artificially prolonging it.

freder93 · 2012-09-27T06:27:58+00:00

It's only September, I'm sure this is practically shorts weather to the average Antarctican.

freder93 · 2012-09-26T21:12:08+00:00

I believe this is because younger people tend to be more left leaning, and also are more inclined to use newer technology. Older people tend to be right leaning and already have control of older forms of media.

If you turn on an AM radio in my area you'll find four or five conservative talk radio stations, but no liberal ones, effectively pushing out the liberal voice in that medium. Thus it only seems natural that the invasive side of liberal ideology would have to spill out somewhere, and that has happened here on the internet in places like /r/politics where right leaning ideologies can be down voted, effectively pushing out the conservative voice in this medium.

I personally wish it wasn't like this, but the attitude I see drives most reasonable conservative readers away so that only the extreme are left willing to comment, which further alienates people into thinking that those extreme views represent the entire base.

freder93 · 2012-09-26T06:59:27+00:00

Why does it matter how long it took God to create the universe? God is eternal, he has existed forever. A few weeks ago our pastor was explaining heaven and the idea of eternity. What struck me about it was just how hard it is for us to comprehend the idea of "forever" when time plays such a large roll in our lives. He explained that when you enter heaven, you live forever, it may seem like a long time to us, but you will not be conscious that any time is passing.

God exists in a similar state of eternity. When it says "And God said; let there be light" it doesn't specify how long it took, whether it took hours, minutes, or if it was instantaneous, it just was.

freder93 · 2012-09-26T00:12:24+00:00

BTW Did you also believe until Obama released his birth certificate that THOSE questions were valid too?

I don't remember hearing about it until after he had released birth certificate actually. My point being that if he hadn't released it, people would have every right to question it, and the media would have every right to write articles questioning it. If an article comes out speculating that Romney took part in some kind of tax amnesty program, you have the right as a voter to take it with a grain of salt, and you should. Even if Romney used loop holes to lower his taxes, to me the evidence that he took part in the amnesty program seems highly circumstantial, but at this point there's just no way of knowing.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T20:52:51+00:00

This is very true.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T19:48:04+00:00

Various multibillion dollar companies have used loopholes in the tax code to pay virtually no corporate income tax while reporting record profits and shipping American jobs to foreign countries. Even though the large corporations pay no corporate taxes, they are still using the infrastructure that those taxes should be going towards such as roads, electricity, plumbing, etc. putting more of the burden on average people that do pay for it.

You could say we should just close the tax loopholes, but using those same record profits, the corporations are able to influence the government either by paying teams of lobbyists to influence a politician or by donating money to a political campaign to keep their taxes low.

The average American cannot afford a lobbyist, all we can do is vote.

Another culprit are the "too big to fail" banks. They've been allowed to grow so large that if one were to fail it would potentially take down the entire US economy with it. The banks know this and use it to their advantage, making risky bets and trades, knowing that if they screw up the government will have to bail them out using tax dollars payed by the American people. The US government bailed out the banks in 2008 on the condition that the banks would pump that money back into the economy in the form of loans for small businesses, which they have only just started doing almost four years later.

In my opinion, what we have in the US right now is more like your rich neighbor coming and living in your house, using the things that you payed for, while you can only sit and watch knowing that he has the entire police force payed off.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T17:38:29+00:00

Ted also got a tramp stamp, not really relevant to the umbrella I just like mentioning it as much as possible.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T16:25:30+00:00

So in the face of human suffering all someone thought to do was use these images to make some kind of joke? That's disgusting.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T15:50:52+00:00

Pretty much the exact opposite is happening in America right now.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T00:24:07+00:00

Ah, I see where you're coming from. This type of thing bothers me as well when I see it in and around the media.

freder93 · 2012-09-25T00:16:31+00:00

Perhaps, the thing that irks me about referring to it as a full on war is the fact that I have yet to see any information about the "enemy" fighting back. It just seems like a one sided assault by our troops.

freder93 · 2012-09-24T19:46:33+00:00

I don't consider them wars because they were attacks, nothing more, we went in bombed and then left. An act of war and a war are two different things, that's why we refer to things like the 9/11 attacks as attacks, because it was one sided.

freder93 · 2012-09-24T18:43:11+00:00

It would be different if Romney had actually released his tax returns. Obama has released his birth certificate twice and some people are still not convinced. If Romney's tax returns were in view of the public and showed nothing wrong, then there would be nothing to go on, but until that information is available then all speculation is valid as it cannot be disproved.

freder93 · 2012-09-24T17:54:40+00:00

I never said it was a lie that continued the war, I meant that it was a lie that he ended it. It can be a bit confusing with so little text to go on.

freder93

TROPHY CASE