The boundary between self and others isn't as clear as you think. An other breathing in the same room as you exchanges with you gases, germs, particles of dead skin, and so on, so at some level you temporarily become one system. If the other has a deadly airborne disease and the society is not allowed to do anything about it, it may affect the self, i.e. you.

Not saying drinking sodas is the same as walking around lethally infectious but hope you can see shades of gray. Action of each one ultimately reach everyone, the question is only what is reasonable to police. That said, I personally believe that too many rules make things worse.

Big deal. Just because people on Facebook tend to post like their Facebook friends, there is no reason to conclude that they continue with that "emotional contagion" of Obama memes and cats and whatnot once they switch to another tab or turn off their computer. A Facebook study can only tell what people do on Facebook anyway.

I went to see an opera recently (free tickets), and given that the orchestra was hidden from view, I imagine I wouldn't have been upset much had the music been prerecorded -- all of my attention was on the stage. Maybe we are naturally more impressed by people singing and moving about than by great instrument playing.

The net (short term) consequence of the project is, if it happens, people will be able to see and hear masterful singers performing live to the background digital music. Compared to nothing at all due to financial issues, it seems like a benefit.

Believing that "machines not made of meat" can think is based on faith, and not science. There is no evidence and no valid theory/model for it, or even for thinking in general. Same with Singularity. Same with extra-terrestrial (intelligent) life for that matter. In fact you can find far more potential evidence for paranormal phenomena (whether the evidence is valid and what would the theories behind it would be is another story) than for any of those three.

Not that there is anything wrong in having faith in things, that what keeps most of the world going. But it's not science.

From my side, POP3 account checker. Gmail sucks when it comes to POP3 accounts and this extension fixes it. That extension (which I paid for, $5) is the reason why I stayed with Gmail. If it's disabled, bye.

"Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: What happens at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility stays at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility."

http://www.theonion.com/articl...

It makes errors mostly in one direction however, as dictated by evolution -- dogs are potentially dangerous and paper bags are not, so you'll rarely see a dog and think it's a paper bag.

Great point, and the problem is exactly that we may be way past the health benefits with our soap/shampoo habits. We didn't evolve to use soap on the skin every day, and most people (I assume) do not have such exposure to pathogens that they need soaping every day.

The effect of overdoing soaping for the abstract modern idea of what healthy means may be diminishing actual health. I think the best first step, health-wise, would be to scale down on cleansing products, and gradually.

There's another value of this research: if you take the test, you can see how attuned you are to social media (group) thinking. I took the test and selected answers that I genuinely thought were more interesting for retweeting, and I got success rate of less than 30% -- worse than chance. That tells me if I had to do a social marketing campaign, I better not do it myself.

That you even bring this up is an indication that supporters of science today are in an ideological battle with supporters of religion -- and engaging in ideology of any kind is a loss for science. Let the religious folks do their thing, the brighter among them already know that religion concerns the spiritual and not the material aspect of human existence, the less bright you can't reasonably convince in anything anyway. (And let me point out that it works both ways -- the brighter in the science camp also know that science concerns the material and not the spiritual -- i.e. not what cannot be detected and measured -- aspects of our lives.)

And today you find most of it instantly on stackoverflow and the like. If the library/language is well known and there is the "right way" it will crop up in your google search. If it isn't, it's OK that you will be one of those who will discover it.

The division to four elements is made from the "first person" i.e. subjective view: you as a person experience heat/fire in the body, moisture/water (eg. in the mouth), solidity/earth (flesh) and air (eg. in the lungs). As such it is still valid and useful for describing your first person experiences, and to some degree for describing how stuff in the world affects you, though much less for how stuff in the world around you interact.

As for "changes becoming smaller and more focused" that's not true -- each new physical world theory is vastly more complex than the one it replaces. I think it's likely that as we go deeper that trend will continue, and my personal belief is that there is no end to how deep we can go. But that's the joy of science.

It is an excellent point about the Occam's razor. However assuming Sun going around the Earth was also Occam's razor, and Earth around the Sun as we progressed was also Occam's razor. Now neither one is true per se and we have a bizarre space-time twisting with Einstein's GR that works the best so far. And we may well find exceptions to GR at some point and replace it with something stranger.

And it was the same on the atomic scale -- individual atoms = OR, then electrons orbiting the nucleus = OR, then the strangest of all, probability wave = OR, and standard model with numerous patches. That is the pattern with scientific discoveries has always been Occam's razor at certain depth, but at a deeper level the previous OR reasoning didn't hold true.

Maybe you can say it like this: if there is a finite depth you can go to, perhaps there are constant laws. But if you can always go deeper in observations -- which I would intuitively pick as the option -- then it might well be that the laws themselves can be nuanced into infinity. So the Truth presumed to be captured by the laws would always elude us by a hair's breadth.

Even parametrized time changing of laws would still be laws. I'm not proposing the laws change randomly -- and I don't take the credit for the idea, heard it elsewhere -- but that it is essentially a leap of faith to think they are constant (just because we humans have laws) and that they are completely accessible to our way of thinking. They may change in ways that may never appear to make sense to our rational minds, e.g. a constant here and there drifts unexpectedly, some patterns that occurred before no longer happen or happen differently, and so on.

If true, then research on matters of immediate consequence (e.g. quantum) would be useful, and research on what happened billions of years ago less so. Which I think is already the case (regardless of constancy of laws) -- much as I find theories in astrophysics fascinating, I wonder if we are essentially making up those stories by stacking one set of assumptions after another.

...as someone said once are human-centered idea, that there are laws obeyed by nature that we can grasp with our minds and that those laws must be unchanging. This is the unspoken assumption, that the models that would explain the physical processes never changed in the course of the evolution of the Universe. I'm beginning to think that such assumption is no different from Newton's "mind of God" that he wanted to know -- we just call it slightly differently.

And how is this claim relevant? If those "laws" have not been unchanging, we may be wasting enormous time and money trying to find out how it all began in a way we imagine has to have happened, ie. producing theories that have no consequence other than to satisfy philosophical questions that we insist must be posed only in a certain way -- and they can't even do that. I hope at least some consequential discoveries and tools will be made along the road.