Forgot the one very important thing. Golems represent not only the army, but also automated production, that is, a post-scarcity society.

Let me just translate these goals into modern language: resources, health, lifespan, energy, money, death, materials, army. These days we believe that nanotechnology will solve all of these problems. Or will it be biotechnology? Gene technology? Drones? IT? MMT? Every time we open a new frontier of understanding into the world, we try to use it to solve our problems. This is why we do this progress thingy. Hoping that the next big thing will solve the problems is no more stupid now than it was then. It is also no more taken literally now than it was then.

What is stupid, and rather common these days, is believing that the philosophers stone was supposed to be anything more than the applied mastery of the alchemical method for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan. What is also stupid is to take word-for-word the language of then, and interpret it to be the language of the now. Have you heard the european medieval legends about the huge ants in India? Those ants were said to carry gold out from underground for people. Stupid, right? Except the legend was true - it was the best way possible to describe the important qualities of an elephant.

A way to define Qi would be 'the thing that makes acupuncture work'. Since acupuncture works, there must be something to make it work. Thus, empirical proof. If you go and practice some certain schools of meditation or martial arts, you will also find first-hand proof of this something.

Getting to the root cause has not been that much on the agenda of the eastern worldviews. Unlike the western world, that seeks to identify causation, the eastern cultures have more interest in correlations. In the center of a certain cluster of correlations then lies something that has been named Qi.

Homeopathy I would classify under placebo most probably, but I do not know much about that. While medicine probably could make some use of another method of administering placebo, I'm afraid it is detrimental for the general populace to believe in something that has such a wtf modus operandi.

The question of whether the method or the answer is important has also been debated in western philosophy. You might want to look at 'justified true belief' versus Gettier, and then Wittgentsein's ladder. Since it is by definition not provable that the input of any induction is sufficient and/or true, no method to reach an answer can be 100% relied upon. But for exactly the same reasons, it is possible that the answer is still 100% true!

Actually, Newton was an alchemist foremost. He only did physics and calculus to help with his alchemy.
And no, alchemy was not the crackpot gold-seeking they teach it was in history class. Promises of gold were and still are what gets you the funding. Alchemy was a larger discipline concerned with truth about the world, a kind of philosophy 2.0 that finally recognized the need for empirical data and experiment; the most advanced worldview up to that point. Later, as it progressed, physics and chemistry were branched out from it, other parts merged into medicine, philosophy and humanities.

For what I gather, spaceX is mostly made up of ex-NASA people. From that it follows that spaceX probably did not invent the wheel, but simply copied and improved the one invented (and paid for) by NASA.

So, while spaceX stuff is better than the NASA stuff, it is not because spaceX is somehow hugely better at what they do. It is just that NASA paid for the initial development of space technology, and folded soon after delivering some proof-of-concept stuff. SpaceX was then simply able to pick up where NASA left off and beeline straight for the economy-of-scale phase.

...awk-ward!

Does this mean Perl is considering to jump on to the tablet bandwagon? I cannot even imagine what that would mean for a programming language. All I do know is that we have lost many a great seamen to the sirens of tabletia. Shipwrecks, shipwrecks everywhere.

My guess is that they just want to ack some pressure on the big ISPs who all want Netflix to cough up for outbound traffic.

By that logic, you would want to do everything by yourself. Well, if you are a fisherman, you probably will not start a bank yourself even if being a bank looks profitable. Unless you are from Iceland, that is.
There is a thing called the division of labour which says that if each of us specialize, we will get more stuff done as a whole. This is what built the civilization.
Also, if you are looking into investing, you can choose between a high-risk high-profit endeavour, like building chips for your own mining operation, or a low-risk low-profit endeavour, like building chips for other's mining businesses. By going the second route, you can hedge yourself against the uncertain final success of bitcoin, while pulling your profit from the general public's current and certain interest in bitcoin.

imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

I'd also go with the fact that braille is 6-bit byte binary. That's about as simple i/o as you can get in this area.

Let me get straight to the point then. The existence of god has neihter been proved nor disproved scientifically, yet Dawkins goes around preaching about the "fact" of nonexistance. I call for a separation of church and science - a scientist should not be anything but agnostic concerning matters that have not been prooven nor disproven.
And don't even get me started on any other world-describing/explaining discourses that are older than science - hogwash, they are said to be. Furthermore, even after we accept for a scientific fact the knowledge that kids should not talk to strangers, we still won't accept the Little Red Riding Hood for more than just fiction for kids.

A common non sequitur I see in the science circles goes something like this:
First, there is the scientist who is there to check out every idea out there.
Second, the scientist somehow becomes certain that what has not been checked is not there.
I mean, there is a logical fallacy here. Between the things that have been proved to exist and the things that have been proved not to exist, there lies a gray area of things that have neither been proved to exist nor been proved not to exist. Somehow your regular scientist does not differentiate the gray area from the things proved not to exist. This blind spot of course acts like a censorship mechanism, limiting scientific discourse.
Where do you think this error comes from, and what could be done to improve the status quo?

And while you're at it, also leave Britney alone! Look at all she's been through!

Grow up. No war has ever been fought on the reasons of morality. There are only three reasons for a war: power, resources and land. Which, of course, are pretty much the same as long as you keep your shit together somewhat.
Morality in a war is never more than a popular justification. The US Civil War? Not about the slaves, but it did use the promised freedom of slaves as a way to use them behind enemy lines. The invasion of Iraq? Not about freedom or democracy, but about keeping the dollar as the currency of oil trade. I dare you to find one that was really about morality.