Did you just -- in the same comment -- show yourself sceptical of the new technique, provide some evidence for your scepticism and approval for the old, then cast doubt on the old technique and provide evidence why the new was superior to the old?
Sir Humphrey?
Where do babies come from?
When a man and a woman love each other very much, they cuddle is a special way and make a baby.
How can I make this other person like me?
Firstly, you need to record all your actions for a whole month.
Once you have that footage, kidnap the person. Then randomly torture them for a couple of days asking questions that are totally irrelevant to your purpose. This is to invoke a Stockholm syndrome with the torturer.
Now, start showing clips of the video of yourself in different scenarios, and following that you test your victim with choices on their actions... such as way of walking, responding to people, types of clothing etc. If they choose the same as you would, they are rewarded. If not, they are beaten and tortured further.
After about 18 months of this treatment, this person will be just like you.
They would not be factually wrong.
Yes they would.
The argument is not that their world must "just exist", but rather that there is no evidence either way, and that the model without a creator is the one with fewer assumptions.
And that's where they're wrong. The massive assumption they are making there is: it is possible for their world to exist without a creator. I've no idea where they got that idea from.
The burden of proof is on those postulating the existence of a creator to come up with actual evidence supporting the more complex model.
In this case, which of the models is more complex depends on your initial assumptions.
If you can postulate a world where it is possible for things to "just exist" without being created, then our universe can be one of those things which "just exists". That is a far simpler answer than claiming that there must be an all-powerful creator who "just exists" and who, in turn, created the universe.
My virtual beings in my virtual world could make exactly the same argument. Since I know they would be factually wrong, I have to conclude that the argument is bad (even should it happened to be correct in this case).
I'm not sure that the argument that things therefore can not "just exist" is any better though.
I am talking about the possibility of something not needing a creator.
Well K. S. Kyosuke wasn't, and I wasn't in my response to him. That's why your arguments make no sense to me: they're nothing to do with the conversation we were having.
That is a universe you defined by saying you created it. By definition the stuff in it was created by you.
Well, yes, of course. I'm defining what I'm saying. Why do you think this strange?
At the very least, we'd have to imagine a universe you didn't create, perhaps that has always existed.
Why would I have to do this? Is this a reference to something I said, or something K. S. Kyosuke said? It doesn't seem to make any sense.
I'm saying that you yourself aren't bound by the rules of your virtual world. And that would be an error for someone inside your virtual world to think that you were.
This at least seems to touch on the point I was making, but you seem to be missing it.
So here things can't "just exist" and "somewhere else" (where the "creator" was before his alleged act of creation) they can?
So, I program a virtual world on a computer. In that world things can't "just exist". I have to create them.
However, where the "creator" (that's me!) is...well, what do you say?
You say I can't "just exist" and need a creator too? Or in my "somewhere else" am I allowed to "just exist"?
but you can't argue that a country could do without a military. Without that we'd be an Islamic state by now
How would that work? Say the USA decided that it couldn't afford a military anymore and basically just shut the whole thing down. In that hypothetical, what are the steps by which the USA would become an Islamic state?
So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.
Random choice of the second biggest city in the UK, huh? About 10 miles of coastline is the answer.
even if it happens to orbit another star or simply orbits the center of the galaxy.
In distance, this works. Not so much with heat. Put two pots on the stove, one on high for 10 minutes and another on low for two hours. Sure, the pot on high will boil, but it will eventually cool down to a temperature lower than the pot on low.
It does work with heat, in fact you've got it with your analogy, you've just left the pot too long. Put one on high for 10 minutes and one on low for 20 minutes and you might well have the one on high being hotter than the one on low!
Eventually is the key word. If methane just disappeared out of the atmosphere when it broke down then give it long enough and it would have had less of an effect than CO2 in the atmosphere would. It just takes longer than 100 years to do that. Well, it's complicated by that fact that methane breaks down to CO2 anyway, so that's like turning the pot on high down to low rather than off, but you get the drift.
Space is a poor insulator.
Actually, this is incorrect. The only way things can lose heat in space is through radiation. It insulates quite well. Your biggest problem with electronics in space is cooling them without convection.
Take this gem, from the EPA itself:
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Am I the only one who fails to see the massive logic fail in that statement? If methane only lasts for 9-15 years, how is more effective at trapping heat over a 100 year period?
I've already explained this to you, using a very simple analogy with a hare and a tortoise. Did you not understand?
It makes no difference if the vast majority of the effect from the methane happens over 9-15 years. We can still say how much effect it had over any length of time we choose. Over 15 years, say, it might have 70 times the effect of CO2. Over 50 years it might have 45 times the effect of CO2. Over 100 years it might have 20 times. Over 500 years it might have 4 times the effect. [These figures are not meant to be exact, they are purely to illustrate the concept]
Do you understand it now?
I agree 2000 is pretty small, but a lot of the words at the end of your list aren't even words and many others are not at all easy to remember. Kms, lta, meps, mhz, mics, nsc, owd, pac?
You exaggerate. The last 10 words are: lever lacuna lacked kosovo knock kms kenyon keenan jovian jeans
Of those, only kms isn't a word. mhz as short for megahertz and mics short for microphones are hardly unknown. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken the "all" list, but all those words are used. I'm not going to take the time to cut out all the acronyms just to prove a point. Assume 20% of my list is "wrong". That still leaves 16,000 words.
You actually want to use not short words but extremely common words, since they are more likely to be easily remembered. 2000 was chosen because of the XKCD about this password generation method,
Well, yes, of course, I was just being lazy. So I downloaded a list of the most common words in English (about 200,000) and cleaned it up, removing all those with any punctuation and then narrowed it down to only words between 3-7 letters. Then I took the first 20,000 of those.
You can download the file here. They're sorted by frequency, so look at the last 10 with tail. See, 2000 is just ridiculous. I do appreciate the xkcd since it mirrors what I'd been arguing for a while. More people listen to comics than to me
You could certainly find a dictionary of over 50,000 words without much trouble.
In fact, I just realised that right next to it was the Unabridged dictionary which is 213,557 words. Mind you, you get passphrases like: "unrealmed hagiocracy viverridae heterodoxal" (actually really got that with "shuf -n 4 Unabr.dict") but I guess it would be good for your vocabulary.
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
