unreality

it's okay, I don't mind This one will be on BD, mine's (elsewhere) and later this summer. Plus the rules+roles of mine are very different so it's no big deal ;D

is my signature too long? (I took out the VNA 3.0 link)

I hang with Sasquatch all the time - he is pretty anti-photogenic as you say, but just get him a little drunk and he's snapping shots of himself on his cell phone and sending them to major news channels. I've seen it happen quite a few times The problem is that CNN and Fox and whatnot just think they're pranks... so much of the world's best evidence is thrown aside as pranks *sigh* edit: I don't mean to insult anyone's beliefs I just thought this topic needed a little lightening up Continue your discussion!

why do thousands of generations have to suffer because one idiot named Adam made a bad choice? Why is he (or he and Eve, or whatever) representative of Humanity? Though to diverge, if I was in the same spot, I would choose Knowledge over Bliss

nice riddle!

i have a few ideas: * I,Robot collection by Asimov ('bout time I should read them) * Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge... interestingly enough, it's written for young ppl (grades 6-9 it says), however it has complex themes that go much deeper than the surface story and long beyond its intended age... either way I thought it was a great read, and I'd be interesting in rereading it know that I know all the twists and turns * GEB - I'm already partway through this, and it's huge, and may not appeal to everyone. Just getting that out there ;D * I can't think of anymore now but I probably will

(0) Congratulations on Lyra (1) Since we don't know any of the chances, we'll call all chances 'c' (between 0 and 1), equal in possible consideration rate because they're unknown and possibly unpredictable values. If we change the diaper, the chance is c that the baby will wake up due to its diaper being changed. If you don't change the diaper, the chance is c that the baby will wake due to its soiled diaper. HOWEVER, if you change the diaper, the chance is again c that the baby will resoil the diaper, so your chances of sleep become (1-c)2 (the chance that it won't wake up multiplied by the chance that it won't resoil the diaper) as opposed to a greater 1-c for not changing the diaper. In fact, if the baby soils the diaper n times, your chance of sleep is (1-c)n, getting smaller and smaller as n increases. Because this could go on for the Hawking-Einstein Soil Limit (2.8069 times 1013, a constant denoted by L), the chances of being able to get to sleep after changing the diaper are the astronomically tiny chances of (1-c)L. Therefore, if you change the diaper, it's unlikely that you'll get any sleep. If you leave the baby sleeping in the diaper, you are more likely - however, you have to factor in your love for the baby and also your own sense of smell - you have a strong parental (and scental) urge to relieve the baby from its dirty diaper. That being said, we know that the chance value of 'c' is actually 1 - it's 100% likely that the baby will wake up in either case. That reduces both (1-c)L and 1-c to 0 values, which means either way you will get absolutely no sleep tonight. Therefore, you might as well change the diaper. (2) Like I said, this chance is 0

yeah... well the bell curve is used to predict natural phenomena, many of which follow a bell curve... so I guess the sdev method is kind of reverse-engineered to give a more "natural" distribution

Hopefully I'll be able to host it later this year - by summer or definitely by late summer

i've been designing an awesome VNA Mafia game, which I plan to host soon somewhere, just to let everyone know

yeah I started from the other end and got at least 15 long before I hit where you left off

k. It was just an idea yeah, Others has tons of them I addressed that in my reply to andromeda yeah for sure. I think there's at least 40 but I can't be sure. If you want me to do a formal count with links and stuff, say so, and when I get the free time (I'm pretty open tomorrow I think) I'll do it

anything involving philosophy, really. From overall philosophy stuff to religious and spiritual stuff; from theories on life and free will and the universe and metaphysics to debates about war and abortion and other issues; from discussions on brain science to arguments about political philosophy; from paraphysical topics to discussions on philosophy within a book or movie or whatever... There won't be a problem identifying the subset of topics which belong in "Philosophy", it's a very easily identifiable subject. I could go through the Others forum right now and pretty easily pick out the topics that would belong in a philosophical discussion subforum

when I was in statistics I always wondered why we didn't use the mean of the absolute values of the differences from the mean, rather than the convoluted sdev formula. Does anyone know if there's some special advantage with the standard dev. formula that averaging the absolute-value-differences from the mean wouldn't accomplish?

It seems clear that despite anyone's intentions for or against it, BD has become quite the hotbed for philosophical discussion. And why shouldn't it? It attracts more-or-less intelligent people, and intelligent people like to think, and thinking leads to philosophy. Anyone, with all the topics about philosophy from the past, the ones currently active, and the ones that will no doubt crop up in the future, I think there's enough general interest and focus in the subject to warrant a separate forum. Just a suggestion, of course. What do you think?

yeah I recently finished Ender's Shadow, the companion/parallel book to Ender's Game, it was really good... I also read a bunch of other classics and stuff like Slaughterhouse 5, 1984, etc - also excited that an Angels & Demons movie is coming out. The only book left (for my interest) on the above list is GEB, a massive volume of math and philosophy, which I've been reading/skimming for a few days now

it could be ball lightning - fascinating stuff Clearly déjà vu is when the Agents alter the Matrix ;D personally, one of my strongest convictions of disbelief in current religions is that I can't find any compelling reason why one religion is better than another. If SomeGuy were born in Indonesia, he would probably be Muslim. Anyway, this leads to two separate conclusions: all religions are right in a way, or all religions are mostly wrong. My own philosophy sort of resides in both of these conclusions.

lol I thought I made it... I guess not, oops Speedy 1 is pretty damn good as itself When I get more time I'll def get back into VNA, now that more people are interested

perhaps chocolate cheesecake could enable them to coexist in peace

^ that's nihilism if I ever saw it Going back to what Octopuppy said, our universe really could be a hypothetical universe. They say that a 2d universe exists somewhere just because it's logically possible This fleshes out the idea kinda: http://xkcd.com/505/ Other than that I don't really have any answers for you Why does the universe exist - there are so many different views. Same with the meaning of life, since Izzy brought it up. She thinks it's pointless, I think exactly the opposite... it just shows that even within groups like atheists & agnostics, there are many differing opinions ;D

when you first learn this in physics, you (should have) also learned that the action/reaction force pairs act on different objects.

SomeGuy: I don't think you're understanding mathematics. We didn't just make math up - we discovered it. Or at least that's my belief. Well, more specifically, you start with a few axioms that you define in the beginning (the Successor function, or the parallel postulate) which give rise to complex, discovered features (the Successor function leads to addition, then multiplication, then exponentation, etc; the parallel postulate and some other geometric axioms lead into Euclidean geometry). All we did was define the initial axioms based on the world we observed, laying the bedrock for basic logical system. After that we discovered the rest. We didn't make up the value of pi - we learned it

the watchmaker is from the Classicism period And I'd agree - if there is a god, we're a speck - perhaps an interesting speck, but a speck nontheless, a piece of a grander picture much larger and more complex than ourselves ;D

I like where SomeGuy is going with this, and in a lot of ways I agree. There is definitely an order-out-of-chaos thing going on in the universe - but we diverge when you decide to call this balance 'God'. Why? <- I'm not asking that incriminatingly but I am genuinely curious: what prompted you to use the God label for the balance and order in the universe?

Last I heard, he's hanging out with Laplace's Demon while Laplace and Maxwell are bar-hopping