I tend to start with accepting reality as shown by current science -- at least that that is a good approximation. Metaphysical stuff about the past is beyond experiment and the best we can do is extrapolate backwards from the present given a long list of assumptions.
The important thing is: how do we live in this reality? A consequence of our evolved nature, are a number of selfish and tribalistic traits -- we have not yet go to the point of seeing ourselves as part of one big organism called Life, and thus don't properly concern ourselves with the suffering of others in the same way we don't put our hand in a fire because we know it will hurt. Once you take that and start thinking it through, the natural consequences bear a great similarity to a lot of the teachings we find in various ancient spiritual teachings (Bible, Taoist and Indic stuff). Then you start to see what these ancient teachings are going on about, and how in the hands of those who were taught them formally but didn't understand as fully as the greats of the distant past, distorted understandings through centuries of Chinese whispers.

We need to see life and humanity as a whole, and ourselves as parts in that. We need to serve the whole primarily, not our individual selves, nor priorities personal success, or that of our genes or families or tribes etc. above that of the whole. If you try to give this whole an intuitively graspable personal nature (just like a child sees his teddy bear), so as to related to this whole on more than a dry intellectual level, you end up with concepts that look a lot like the ancient idea of the 'one true God'. Identifying our selves with this whole, just as you consider your arm you (if I hit your arm, you would naturally say I hit you) changes your perspective, and from that perspective ancient religious teachings have a clear (and important) message that is lost on most modern people, religious or otherwise.

The inspired free rational thinking of one generation becomes the dogma of a later generation. That's already happened with spiritual teachings in the form of what we call 'religion'. It is happening again with science. The cause is human nature and psychology (maintaining understanding is much harder than merely copying words and appearing charismatic and learned to a naive audience, and so evolutionary pressure tends to favour the latter as a strategy for being successful -- the only problem is when one of those pesky individuals who actually understands what the stuff is supposed to be about comes along and tries to explain it -- then they nail him to a lump of wood and build a new religion around his teachings.) Science needs to learn about its future from religion, because religion is what modern science will become unless people are far more careful than they are these days.

See http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

Ok. Let's think for a moment. What can a piece of paper with 2(i) in Physics do, on its own? Nothing, that's what.

What can a student capable of getting a 2(i) in Physics on their own merit do? Probably quite a bit.
What can a student capable of only getting a 3 in Physics on their own merit do? Probably less.

Exams are meant to test what a student has learned. If someone can't add up or multiply, having a first class maths degree to their name doesn't change that.

Judging people by qualifications is a shortcut to assessing their actual ability. But if qualifications are unreliable, and cheating makes them unreliable, then we have to revert to actually assessing what people can do, and ultimately by methods that are not written exams: rather the throw-em-in-the-deep-end sink-or-swim type tests. This takes more effort and resources, for no material gain. Hence everybody loses.

But cheating and corruption are the natural destination for a system which prizes exam results and pins career prospects on the back of them, rather than on genuine ability.

did the metastable false vacuum come from?

Bipolar Disorder, Psychosis and Schizophrenia for Dummies who know a little physics etc.

Life is generally in a good position when it has potential (like gravitational potential in the case of high ground) and the capacity to use it in a controlled fashion. That means balancing in a position that would otherwise be considered an unstable equilibrium in the sense of dynamical systems theory. Our bodies are at their most efficient when well balanced (just watch a good dancer to see this in action) and our brains are at their best when similarly balanced. If something disturbs the equilibrium, this disturbance and the required correction can be used to understand the disturbance. This is how stimulation affects us.

Now consider a simple example of a balancing physical object, but with no control mechanism: a spinning top. This has three states--spinning upright (when the gravitational potential is near its maximum), wobbling (when the gravitational potential is slightly lower, in which case it behaves erratically and gives up its energy randomly until...) finally we have the fallen over state. This is what medical people term depression. The simple solution is to get upright and balanced again, but this is hard in our modern overly complex society, and the result of trying to get up is often a lot of wobbling, which gets diagnosed as things like mania, psychosis and schizophrenia depending on how exactly this wobbling manifests itself. The key is to get balanced before you get pushed over, and that is hard when the medical mental health people seem to have the idea that you fix a wobbling spinning top by knocking it over and gluing it to the floor.

Trying to understand mental health in a 'sum of the parts' way is just dumb, but it is the obsession of the medical fraternity, and is to the extent that it is politically very difficult to suggest otherwise. How our genetic code creates us is an approach that misses the point that without the environmental context in which that genetic code develops, it won't develop, so you need to understand the environment as well (and that means understanding the entire world in complete detail, which is rather a long way the other side of impossible).

Viewed as an equilbrium seeking system, 'mental illnesses' like mania and schizophrenia are just seen as things like oscillations and resonant modes that are being excited by either an appropriate drive, or are resonating within the equilibrium seeking system. The biological stuff is just an implementation detail in much the way that transistors on a chip are implementation details of your python program that you are running that you can safely ignore in most cases. Medication is basically trying to solve a software problem by randomly pumping noise into the processor. A computer will crash instantly if you do this, but humans are rather more robust, and can survive for a long time in an unbalanced state. They are, however, rather unproductive in this state and won't tend to find life enjoyable. But they can survive for a long time, but can become desperate to get out of such states.

Imagine a world where coding is as ubiquitous as reading and writing is to us today. Bear in mind that centuries ago, reading and writing was about as ubiquitous as coding is today, and was at one point in time the preserve of the masses. Writing for machines and reading machine instructions will at some stage become part of our everyday literacy. The thing is, efficiency matters: in a competitive marketplace, for a given market niche, barring underhand business tactics, the more efficient (and effective) software will tend to do better. Eventually underhanded business tactics will become too inefficient relative to the state of the art, and will be destined to die out (as, in general, will self-serving greed, it too not being the most overall efficient use of resources). Maths is unavoidable, and computer science is an outgrowth of maths, and is the part relevant to modern digital computers. Furthermore, concepts and phenomena we see in computer science and artificial intelligence often have implications and applications well beyond digital computers once considered in mathematical generality. Long term, coding is not enough, but not being able to code when computers are as ubiquitous as they are today is as sensible as not being able to read or write, or do simple arithmetic.

Whats all that got to do with the price of eggs?

Of course, you could use a few Bash aliases for fun.

Who needs :47,80s/hello/world when you can do

mknod -p a b c
head -n 47 myfile > a & tail -n $(($(wc -l myfile) - 80)) myfile > c & ( head -n 80 myfile | tail -n $((80 - 47)) | sed -E 's/hello/world/' ) > b & (sleep 1 ; cat a b c > myfile.version2)

on the command line.

Caveat, this has neither been run, nor tested, so may need debugging.

When I first played with Linux in 1995, with no *nix experience, I recall the situation of getting trapped in ed or vi. After trying various random key combinations, I discovered that Ctrl-Z got me back to a command prompt, then jobs -l gave a list of stopped jobs with PIDs which I could pass to kill -9. That restored sanity. Years later I actually got round to learning vi(m) after hearing from a local sysadmin how useful it was, and by then there were tutorials online that eased you into it. The thing I'm most grateful for with vim is how I can get a command prompt on windows, mac, linux, or over ssh to my webhost, and the environment works the same way. But for things like android programming I tend to follow the sheeple and use eclipse/android-studio and I'm beginning to get into Code::Blocks for some things. I've thought for years of writing my own vim-like editor as an exercise, but haven't got round to it yet.

I can imagine Streisand effects coming into play. If google blacklists one article, in compliance, what is to stop other articles containing the information and possibly linking to the original appearing.

How many biologists understand the nature of randomness though? When it comes to metaphysical stuff, the biologists are punting the difficult bit into the term 'random' and ascribing this 'random' thingamajig the properties that fundies ascribe to their God. Then things such as mind, consciousness and intelligence have yet to be turned into sufficiently concretely defined concepts to answer questions like 'is evolution directed in an intelligent way' let alone how and if human intelligence and consciousness arise from brain activity, or emerge in other ways. We really know less than we think, and many untestable hypothetical foundations are elavated to the position of unquestionable dogma by the phenomena of 'near universal acceptance by experts'.

That climate change is happening is beyond doubt, but the case that humanly produced CO2 emissions are the primary cause, and that massively reducing our CO2 emissions will fix the issue is not beyond doubt. Funding for projects which subject these ideas to scrutiny is harder to get than funding for projects which assume the CO2 caused warming and then show results consistent with it. The diagram correlating CO2 with global temperature as inferred from ice cores, famously used by Gore in his 'inconvenient truth' has been claimed by some to put the causative relationship the wrong way round (suggesting that instead rising temperatures cause the oceans to release stored CO2, hence the increase in CO2). Some have advanced the notion that solar activity is the cause, with evidence. But global warming has become so politicised that proper scientific debate is stifled, for example by the need to adhere to CO2 caused warming theories in order to get funding for your project.

Your point of 'Never underestimate the power of a person to disagree if agreeing means that they will need to alter their worldview.' is just as valid for the wide acceptance of the CO2-warming relationship. The great political momentum attached to this worldview is hard to argue against, even on scientific grounds, since those who don't wish to change can keep pointing to the mass who believe CO2 causes global warming.

Caveat: I'm not an expert in this area, but find how politicised it is to be worrying.