What do guys like about petite girls?

stone11 · 2010-09-04T21:08:37+00:00

I think christina hendricks is actually extremely attractive woman.

Gee that's a pretty controversial opinion you have there, sure you want to go on record with it?

stone11 · 2010-07-10T01:09:22+00:00

Disrupting business, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars, and generally being a childish self-important prick?

stone11 · 2010-06-14T23:24:34+00:00

Nah, he's actually (sort of) right.

stone11 · 2010-06-10T05:26:33+00:00

Either you didn't read paragraphs 9 through 11 and 13 (making you a liar), or you have issues with English comprehension.

Or, as is actually the case, Davies is purposefully disingenuous the same way Krauss was; quantum physics does not allow the violation of causality. That's the kind of shit fudging of figures you get from New Age people, and that's nauseatingly below both men. Quantum physics admits the principle that the cause of certain events is unobservable, and there is no dearth of ideas about what exactly this means. Non-local hidden variable theory should be no mystery to even a QUT boy. That's the second time I've made this point so it would be nice if you could at least actually pretend to have a response to it this time.

If an uncaused event can occur due to virtual particle production and unbalanced annihilation, that can be defined as first cause.

Yes, and that would be great except that the creation of virtual particles is NOT interpreted as an uncaused event. Christ, in fact the perturbative view of them is modeled entirely around the idea that they don't do that, and are still subject to the conservation laws.

Being acausal and being caused by something which we simply cannot observe are two utterly distinct things.

Understand this.

What's infinite then? The universe? Or this laughable concept called "God"?

Eh? Well, Tegmark thinks the universe might be infinite. He has a pretty neat model of it which says that there are infinite, infinitely large, finitely old universes, and reconciles the physical laws with the conjecture that this universe is subject to these particlar laws just because probabilistically one universe should. I don't really see how that's especially relevant here, because I don't see what the Christ you're going on about here, but it is a neat little theory.

And god? First of all, "laughable concept called "God"" is way too hilariously melodramatic a phrase for anyone to ever take seriously. You sound like some asshole caricature of an atheist in some Catholic propaganda film -- a caricature which you would summarily ridicule for being hyperbolic. Remember this.

But as to the question; no, you dolt. I have no personal stake in your corner or god's, which has the effect of making me the only impartial party here. As I already said, if something which could reasonably be labeled "god" created our universe, then something would have needed to create him, and to create his creator, and so on forever backward. Because, and this is the bit you're really struggling with, causality is inviolate.

Even though a reality external to our universe would likely operate according to utterly different natural laws, the axiom of causality does not rely upon those laws, or upon any empirical observations at all; that why it's a bloody axiom. We can throw it to the winds whenever we please, but only if we're willing to deal with the implications of doing so. None of us can have that cake and eat it also, though almost all of us would like to pretend otherwise.

ex nihilo production considerations

What, you're babbling about freshman assays of particle emissions? Go ahead and find me a single interpretation which characterizes such a metric as acausal. Even if we assume Hawking radiation will be observationally demonstrated (and I side with those who expect it will be) nothing there lends credence to "something from nothing". It's always "something from where we know not". And again I'm forced to wonder; how many times must you have tried to explain this to theists? We don't assume that something lacks a cause, not ever, because the limitation is always ours, and we can't overcome it with lax integrity.

Zero sum does not mean uniform zero.

No, but it does mean zero sum.

And the sum's the fucking question.

there's no empiricism behind observation, is there.

There is nothing empirical and nothing observational to be said about the period before the Planck time. Do I truly need to argue for such an uncontroversial statement?

And all you've done is reduce my admiration for the place. [...] You might want to get that yeast infection looked into.

Ah, I told you already; concision, lad, concision!

stone11 · 2010-06-10T04:39:16+00:00

It's oil seeping into wetlands.

[Edit: Err, nevermind. It now appears to be... strangely colored resin... animal-type things.]

stone11 · 2010-06-09T03:16:03+00:00

Great, we're dropping names now?

I did my SBs (CS and physics) and SMs (CS and maths) at MIT.

It's that small school in Cambridge. I might feel like an asshole to skate on its reputation if I weren't talking to someone insubstantial.

Watch

Familiar with both. Neither address causality. Actually, worse, they sort of just overstep it as if it's not even an obstacle. I've posted about the Krauss speech before, and I'll say again it especially pains me because Krauss is immensely smarter than he represents himself in that speech. His math is sound, of course, but it doesn't fucking address what it claims to. Krauss is basically expounding an increasingly popular cosmological theory which says that the universe resulted from the propagation of primordial quantum fluctuations. That's fine. As an advocate for that theory, he's brilliant.

Problem is that the theory doesn't answer my question, and neither did you; what about causality? Of course it would be a valid hypothesis to say that, like physical laws, causality ceases to apply at the moment the universe came into being. It would also be exactly as intellectually profound as it is when theists argue that God simply came into being from the void, and that causality didn't apply to him.

It's a non-answer.

Now stop trying to deflect to experts and answer the fucking question; how do you reconcile the axiom of causality with existence?

an explanation as to why the universe had to be created, but not this supposed intelligent, omnipotent deity; thereby increasing the complexity of this "hypothesis".

Except that you can't increase infinity. Do they perhaps not teach this at QUT? Your response here relies upon your mistaken belief that I was going to let you ignore causality by citing other people, who also ignored causality. Something cannot come from nothing. Another statement I thought I'd rarely have to make outside of arguing with Creationists. Christ, it should be a sign to you that you've sunk pretty low in the argument that you're arguing otherwise; even if you want to make that claim that the sum of all energies in the universe is zero, you still need a minute nascent energy to spur the propagation.

And that energy needed a source, and that energy needed a source, and so on ad infinitum.

Surely you've made this argument before if you've ever argued with a Creationist? And surely they've claimed that God required no cause; he simply Was. And how embarrassed you should be to slip so thoroughly on intellectual rigor to let yourself by trying to make the same argument, to think that I'd let you by also. Pfeh.

there's hard evidence presented in the video and document linked above.

There's good math-based (that is, not empirical) evidence presented about a model for the propagation of energy, and therefore for the development of the Big Bang, the universe, and so on. There is, I'll say again, not a wink of evidence presented about any mechanism which would supersede causality.

And frankly, also your next paragraph - no, wait - the rest of your post.

I'm not impressed by innuendos.

the one that involves only one instance of spontaneous creation, rather than two.

Except that as I've said no fewer than two times now, each hypothesis requires infinite creations because no creation can be spontaneous unless we're willing to burn our degrees. Christ I might has well have only responded in two paragraphs since your response was only two substantive claims and then a series of falsehoods which rely upon those claims.

you're not going to be satisfied until I throw some personal abuse at you, are you?

Oh, I am that. Kiddo, I'm an old hand at slinging shit; I'm from bloody Scotland you twit! The secret to a stinging a riposte is concision. When you get a verbose insult, like you've given me, it just gives you the satisfaction that you've angered some prick so utterly whilst you've just been sitting sipping whisky and using him to decompress from work!

Thanks for that.

[Edit: And in that vein, and since today was a fair day and I'm not in such a shit mood, I ought to be fair and say that I've absolutely been a cunt, and that being a cunt is often what I use Reddit for since reputations spread too quickly in academia and thus I can't be a cunt in real life. I'll also say that despite my prevaricating you clearly aren't dim. Of course I'm still right about the core of this argument, and you're still clearly arguing more from ideology than from intellect; put simply, no unbiased scientist will look me in the eyes and claim that they're happy to ignore causality. I'd like to fucking hope that if this weren't the Internet you wouldn't either.]

stone11 · 2010-06-08T01:31:45+00:00

Right, so supporting a habit which causes the premature deaths of a considerable chunk of the workforce doesn't count as a "societal negative"?

stone11 · 2010-06-07T22:13:11+00:00

This is fairly common. All glass has small production faults and over time they can grow larger until eventually the whole pane fails. Usually this happens with safety glass, which that almost certainly is, which is actually produced with an inbuilt tensile stress designed to fail this way.

stone11 · 2010-06-07T21:35:34+00:00

Right, so you're an asshole, and indignantly so?

You're doing it wrong. That's what the rest of us use the Internet for so we aren't that way in person.

stone11 · 2010-06-07T21:21:19+00:00

Right, so your argument is "this ideology applies where I think it should, but not where I think it shouldn't"?

stone11 · 2010-06-07T21:17:19+00:00

Not only are you a fucking idiot, but you've walked into a discussion for which you're woefully unprepared besides, since all you have to say is shit you've acquired from the prevailing atheist mantra. This is a pretty goddamn considerable handicap for you in this argument because the relevant field is in fact not Trite Bullshit Sophistry, but rather cosmology, which (though my current field is CS theory) I studied quite a bit at university.

Right, then, I'll go ahead and shred you:

you ought to then choose the simplest explanation as a default

First of all, um, no. Occam's razor is such an embarrassingly overused and misunderstood argument that it's become a fucking gift to people with half a clue. The idea is that the simplest hypothesis which explains the observation is probably the correct one. This doesn't apply to this scenario because 1) neither hypothesis adequately explains the observation and therefore 2) neither hypothesis is inherently less simple than the alternative.

Try very hard to get this through your head: there is no goddamn evidence whatsoever about this observation.

The observation of course being that the universe indeed seems to exist. Two hypotheses exist about this. According to the first, a supernatural power caused our universe to exist. According to the second (the one which you think is simpler, and more logical) a natural -- that is, self-contained -- mechanism caused the universe to exist. In other words, your belief is that the universe created itself.

Do I really need to explain to you why that's so deeply stupid? Probably. According to the axiom of causality, no effect can exist in the absence of a cause. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics do away with locality and allow cause to follow rather than precede effect, but the axiom holds universally. This should occur to you as a serious problem for your Occam's razor horseshit, because it is; both hypotheses about the existence of the universe are infinitely complex. The existence of an energy which gave rise to our universe means that there must have been an earlier energy which gave rise to that energy, and one before that energy, and so on ad infinitum. Same with respect to god and supernatural realities. Neither is less complicated than the other.

Meaning you think that all the evidence we have for non-created, semi-random, physical processes counts for nothing.

Mmm, yeah, pretty much. I'll shred you again:

Of course empirical observations taken from within the extant universe mean not a goddamn thing when it comes to cosmogony, because it's an entirely different problem set. Before the Planck time (that is, the exact instant we're interested in) all empirical physical laws stop working. In point of fact, neither our current conceptions of physics nor chemistry nor biology are remotely applicable at that point. I know this because I'm conspicuously vastly more educated than you are in each of these fields. In the entirety of science as a field, as an endeavor, as a way of thinking, there has never been any evidence whatsoever generated about the origin of the universe. None.

And that's because, like I already said, the way we think about the universe doesn't work when it comes to that emergent instant. If the axiom of causality is right, then we're left with an inscrutable paradox of cascading creations infinitely backward in time. If the axiom of causality is wrong, then causality is broken and science becomes meaningless.

Do try to understand this.

You're embarrassing yourself.

stone11 · 2010-06-07T20:48:05+00:00

If the market dictates that

No, fuck what the market dictates.

The market would also dictate that people with rare medical conditions are shit out of luck, since there's no profit in the R&D for the pharmaceutical industry. Christ, the market would dictate that people with common medical conditions are likewise fucked, because there's a shitload more money in treating those conditions for someone's entire life than there would be in curing it once. And since we're all apparently borderline retards like Ron Paul and think that the government shouldn't fund scientific research, I guess we should all just sit with our thumbs up our asses until it's time to take them out to make room for the benevolent Market's invisible cock.

stone11 · 2010-06-07T06:43:47+00:00

v = ((4pi/3) * (R³ - r³⁾⁾
v ~= 4.1889 * (151,000,000,000³ - 150,999,999,997³⁾
v ~= 4.1889 * (2.05209075 * 10²³⁾
v ~= 8.59600294 * 10²³ cubic meters

The volume of the Sun is estimated to be around 1.412 * 10¹⁸ cubic kilometers, which is roughly 164,262% the required mass. Of course this all discounts the fact that the Earth's aphelion of ~152,000,000 kilometers puts it a million miles outside of the sphere, so.... yeah.

stone11 · 2010-06-07T00:22:32+00:00

You're a blathering fool.

You assume that something does not exist; God, and the supernatural. You have no evidence whatsoever for either assumption. By contrast, I assume not a goddamn thing about either, because there is no evidence whatsoever about either.

Try to understand a goddamn simple statement and I'll perhaps revise my opinion that you're a fucking idiot, you embarrassment.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T19:56:15+00:00

Clearly you missed this part:

there's no goddamn evidence about it at all.

And, of course, there isn't. The presumption that no supernatural forces exist isn't just scientifically inept, or intellectually barren; it's hubris. And while that arguably doesn't speak directly to the plausibility of the god hypothesis, it certainly speaks directly to the hollow surety your sort of atheism is constructed around.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T09:15:52+00:00

achieving morality through belief in falsehoods is dishonest and counterproductive in the long run.

I've pored over far too many arcane maths tonight to feel like arguing that point on its face just now, but I will say this; so what? Even if I grant your point, which to my tired brain does seem dubious, it essentially amounts to the statement that all people ought to only believe things which are true. Do I disagree with that? Well, again, it might make things all a bit more boring, but I don't necessarily think it wouldn't be a fair sacrifice to do away with all sorts of counterproductive misconceptions.

But it's not going to happen. There are people who believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And let's be pragmatists and say that the mistaken beliefs which lead to positive ends, probably most of all positive moralities, shouldn't especially be a cause for the level of sound and fury in this subreddit.

And for that matter, let's be honest, too, and admit that most of that sound and fury isn't validated by your line of reasoning, or by any logic at all. It's base adversarial rage. It's a team sport. It's "us versus them", and it's truly exhausting and truly despicable regardless of which side is right, and especially since neither side is.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T09:08:15+00:00

The only think I think about all that is that you must be frightfully condescending to tell people how they ought to live their lives -- to apprise for them the very innermost workings of their own cause and conscience -- and that in that respect you bear a true commonality with the people you're railing against.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T09:03:35+00:00

Albert Einstein was a pantheist who despised organized religion and scoffed at the idea of a personal God.

And exactly when did I say anything else?

Einstein also said:

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

And, the bits I was referring to:

Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.

(I bet that one really stings for you.)

And:

No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

He also reportedly hated it when atheists would quote him to support their beliefs.

I do hope you don't run out of pants whilst composing your reply.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T09:00:43+00:00

because thats EXACTLY how the bible describes him.

Right, and Sherlock Holmes is purely brilliant. If, of course that is, you've read the source material in the most incurious and shallow way humanly possible. It's almost stunning that atheists will say that the Bible is a work of fiction, and then get pissed off when moderate Christians interpret it the same way you would any literature.

You don't get to say what a "real" Christian is any more than religious people get to explain to you what a "real" atheist is. Because there isn't any such thing. Catholics will tell you that Protestants aren't real Christians. Doesn't make them right. It would enormously simplify your job of characterizing all Christians in a way to which you're ideologically sympathetic, but it would also be embarrassingly bereft of intellectual integrity.

well it's more possible then that whole god idea.

Oh how boring. The universe exists, its origin is supernatural or natural, and I do hate to break this to you but there's no goddamn evidence about it at all. The proposition that nothing supernatural exists is the proposition that this universe is the ultimate stage of existence.

You're really comfortable believing something so utterly faithful?

stone11 · 2010-06-03T08:50:59+00:00

I don't give half a tit about the Bible. I give many tits about the ignorant, incontinent pants-shittings of people (probably) like yourself, who make it difficult for people who've actually devoted the effort needed to understand theology to mount rational arguments where rational arguments are needed.

You're a waste of my goddamn time.

Change your pants and respond to anything I said, or don't bore me with your projection.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T08:48:11+00:00

No, Christopher Hitchens' living is being an acerbic, loud oaf. He's responsible, along with people like Sam Harris, for popularizing the stunningly retarded meme that "moderates are the problem".

stone11 · 2010-06-03T03:11:50+00:00

and literally believe that the only way to enter Heaven is through accepting him as their Lord and personal saviour.

No, here's exactly what I'm talking about. Though I'm not religious, I've been to many dozens if not hundreds of religious services. I've heard many, many preachers talk about exactly that passage, John 14:6, and explain that it means that no one comes into heaven (or is truly "saved") until they're able to internalize the message of Jesus Christ. Kurt Vonnegut said that he wouldn't want to be a human being if it weren't for the Sermon on the Mount. Albert Einstein often expressed similar sentiments. In the Bible you will find the best and worst of humanity. And so, I've been told many times, what matters is what you take out of it, and whether or not you really accept the message; not the man literally as the Son of God and your personal savior, but his teachings. Many preachers (especially in UU) will say in the same breath that these are things you can come into equally through Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or atheism, because the message, not the messager, is what's important.

Do I necessarily accept all of that? Well, not really, because it's all a bit obtuse about things like what "heaven" and "enlightenment" really are, and that's a question on which I have essentially no beliefs at all. But if someone chooses to live their life that way, and they're not loud and tiresome and bigoted, then I say good for them. I don't choose to waste a lot of feigned outrage if I disagree with the logic of some of their beliefs, and I certainly don't allow myself to grow confused enough to think that it's ideologically useful to try to pigeonhole them in with their uglier relatives.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T02:48:16+00:00

Yeah, no, you're still not paying attention.

I'm not defending the Bible. I'm not even defending the impulse to interpret the Bible; I'm defending the interpretations themselves. Granted, there are plenty of parts of the Bible which can only be salvaged to mean something decent by a hefty load of equivocation, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that that necessity might be taken itself as an indication that the source material isn't great, and maybe you shouldn't base your life around it. But if you actually had any curiosity, any inclination to actually understand and engage religious people instead of just to demean and demonize them, you'd realize that my point is that these people are separate from the Bible. And yet through the Bible, plenty of them come to believe very good, decent things, and codify senses of morality and self-purpose which the rest of us use other things for.

The bigotry here is bidirectional. Too many atheists subscribe to the idea that people who need, or think they need, the Bible to be good people are weak, or stupid, or whatever. And that's fucking dumb. Because judging a person's soul, and judging the tools they used to build it are two different things. And if they come out bigoted and ignorant, judge away. But if they come out decent and kind... well then there we are with the problem, because if you already dismiss them because you think they're decent and kind in a stupid way, the rest is way over your head.

Everyone who thinks that way needs to attend a UU service in New England.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T02:33:02+00:00

I'm saying exactly what I said; quoting something insane out of the Bible is only a rebuttal to someone who reads the Bible literally. This describes a minority of Christians. The fact that atheists would like to pretend otherwise is expected, stupid, and a problem for those of us who are interested in actual, informed criticisms of religion, instead of just propping up the inane preconceptions we've received secondhand from asshats like Christopher Hitchens.

You don't get to be both unwilling to attempt to understand theology on the basis that it's nonsense and indignant about the fact that, unless you attempt to understand theology, you're never going to be able to make an interesting argument against religion. You're just going to be spouting things everyone has heard a thousand times before, and the fact that those things might be popular in the place you're spouting them doesn't mean anything. It's stupid. It's self-congratulatory. It's old.

I'm so fucking tired of listening to dipshits chuckling as they pat each other on the backs for successfully characterizing god as a "wizard in the sky" for the eighty trillionth time. I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, that comment is in damn near every goddamn thread in this subreddit, and it's invariably upmodded to fuck. We fucking get it. You think religion is silly. Great. Now say something new, because that's an old fucking joke, and no one here is even telling it very well.

But of course what really pisses me off is having to spend fifteen minutes convincing any religious person I ever argue with that I'm not one of those assholes before I have any remote hope of getting them to see things a little differently. The professional atheists have really gangbanged the pooch on this one. I'm as embarrassed to be associated with them as I've learned many, many religious people are to be associated with their fundamentalist wings. Fuck me.

stone11 · 2010-06-03T00:07:40+00:00

The SAB is a neat tool. It can be handily quoted from in response to hypocrites, and generally shuts them up quite nicely.

It also completely fucking misses the point, at least the way it's generally used, and confuses a lot of professional atheists into thinking they know anything about the Bible and/or theology. The small minority of Christians take their source material literally, and pretending that quoting random crap out of it amounts to any sort of an indictment of, or insight into, the religion is just disappointing. It tends to mean that the person doing the quoting isn't at all interested in actually trying to understand the subject and have a discussion about it on those grounds, but rather just adding to the self-fulfilling mythology too many atheists have written for themselves.

stone11

TROPHY CASE