They insist their God, Science, can indeed answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything. But of course it can't.
Uh no. It's more likely that we disagree what the big questions actually are. But, just to be sure, why don't you give us examples of questions you feel that science can't touch, and we'll see if those are actually big questions about the universe or just questions that flatter the human ego.
As someone who grew up on Marathon and remembers it well as it was, the original Marathon did NOT have mouse look. It did have free look of a sort. Unlike Doom II, which had no actual vertical aiming and instead auto aimed any shots up or down, Marathon had vertical aiming, and you actually had to aim at things to hit them. Add to that that the game had no targeting reticle and it made for some difficult moments. It also had quick glances left and right, which were really dangerous if someone became proficient at them. You could run off a ledge in one direction, quick glance to the side while in mid-air and snap off a rocket or a grenade to take out an opponent, and quickly be accused of cheating by those who didn't know about or know well how to use the controls.
But, the original game did not have mouse aiming and was fully keyboard controlled.
Fun fact: the game also never had jumping or crouching. Fun fact #2: the game invented the grenade-hop. Doom II gets credit for the rocket hop, in that you could used the rocket launcher to give you a slight horizontal speed assist to get across a larger gap than normal (it also had no jumping, along with no aiming), but Marathon with it's vertical aiming invented the modern grenade hop and rocket hop or using the blast from an explosion to give you a boost.
You don't have to have the ability to replicate in order to be alive. For example worker bees can't reproduce, yet they may be considered alive. Also women past menopause and kids are alive yet they can't replicate. Or even some people who many not be fertile for whatever reason.
Also you can't make "ability" to evolve as part of the definition of life.
This is a very narrow, organism-focused view point. Every cell in bees and other "dead-ends" such as all of your somatic cells, are full of replicators, evolved in such a way to enhance the further replication of the germ-line into future generations. Without genetic replication, life as we know it cannot exist. So, yes, replication is a defining aspect of life.
As for the "ability to evolve"... it's not a definer, but more of an emergent property of any and all systems with error prone replication.
In the real world, in the absence of government, I could walk up to you and smash you in the head with a rock killing you and then take everything you have without consequence. There's your "inherent" rights.
That is only true in isolation; that is, only if you and your victim are the only people to witness. Otherwise, there will probably be consequences. Do that to someone in your same hypothetical absence of government in front of the victim's friends or family or other such group that we humans have evolved to form so readily, and I highly doubt that you would be walking away "without consequence".
So called "inherent rights" and "natural rights" are not necessarily, clear, discrete properties of an organism or a person or however you are defining us. Rather, they are more like emergent properties that will emerge naturally from being the gregarious social organism we have evolved to be. Rights appear because of the "social contract" of being such an organism.
And if you still think those rights are "inherent" then I suggest you take a trip to Somalia or Afghanistan or Syria or Bahrain.
And if you think in such a place a person can do anything like you suggested in your hypothetical example, you are also much mistaken. There will be consequences. Take away someone's "right to life" and unjustly kill them in front of anyone, friend or family or other, who thinks fondly of them for feels you are being unjust, and you may just find there are consequences to infringing on someone's so-called rights.
That's certainly nice of them (and quite unexpected from previous experience) to finally have some settings default to privacy. I would be interested to know if it stays that way the next time FB fiddles with the ToS or the privacy options. That's not minding the sheer number of privacy options and settings which makes all the harder for the less technically inclined to set correctly if they didn't give up immediately.
That's why I pretty much scramble for the privacy settings every time I see a news story about a new FaceBook feature. However, either a.) I've been lucky and they overlooked setting "on" as default for new features in my account or b.) they somehow actually take into account the privacy amount of current settings and make the new setting in line with that (e.g. if someone has everything shared with everyone, then the new thing defaults to "on", but if someone is like me and has things fairly well locked down and controlled, then the new thing defaults to "off"), or c.) something else.
I don't know how they do it. All I know is that whenever a story hits and people start freaking out about what FaceBook is doing to their privacy, I check my account settings and find I have no obvious cause to complain. Of course, the closet conspiracy theorist inside me suggests the possibility that the settings aren't actually protected when it comes to sharing data with advertisers or for other purposes, but he has no evidence of that yet, so I tell him to shut up.
This is about automated, mass identification for profit without a clear way to disable it, opt-out, or delete the data, nor do people really know who ends up with this information and what those buyers can do with it.
Account menu -> Privacy Settings -> Customize -> "Suggest photos of me to friends" Settings -> Disabled
Seems pretty clear to me, as it is a logical progression through the menus and pages. It's not hard to find. It is easy to disable. It's probably already disabled for many people.
And, at least on my account, it was disabled by default. i.e. As soon as I heard about this feature, I went immediately to my account privacy settings to turn it off and found that it was already turned off.
I don't abstain intentionally. I've just never been prescribed any medication, and have never needed it. I have no objection to taking prescription medicine if I ever actually have need, but I've never been seriously injured or ill enough to need it. Only times I've ever been to the hospital for my own problems in my life were broken bones (and a set of stitches when I was very young), and those simply required setting, putting on a cast, and doing nothing for several weeks.
"Abstain" is the only choice there. Even choosing "seldom and glad of it" would be a lie, because it really is a "never" for me.
I've found that most people can't grasp how big space is. I can on a intellectual level but most people don't seem to understand just how distance even the closest stars are. I've met a few who thought a lightyear was the distance it took up to travel in a year in a modern space shuttle. But wow Voyager is going itno the black, I hope it doesn't turn into a Reaver.
Indeed. I always felt like I kind of "got it" on an intellectual level of matching big numbers to huge differences. But I realized that I didn't really get it until I started playing with Celestia, a free space simulator that lets you move around the universe using actual astronomical data. Everything is to scale in that program, and it really does give you a feel for just how big and empty space really is.
I highly recommend playing with it, for anyone who really wants to try to grasp the hugeness of space.
From TFA:
"This is a necessary first step in the process," said Parker. "We wanted to answer the question: Can you build a circuit that would act like a neuron? The next step is even more complex. How can we build structures out of these circuits that mimic the neuron, and eventually the function of the brain, which has 100 billion neurons and 10,000 synapses?"
Uhhh... That number of synapses is off by about 10 orders of magnitude. I assume the number of synapses was meant to be a "per neuron" number, but that's a pretty glaring thing to leave out of that sentence.
I'm not satisfied with your job. That's not really your fault, of course.
To be fair, unless you live in Bangkok, Thailand and have run into some of my former students, then I highly doubt you've ever run into the results of my job.
It's never about critical thinking. It's never about solving real life problems. It's always about passing the next test or quiz.
And, again, you miss the point. I apologize if I didn't make that clear. It's not about directly solving real life problems. It's about learning the STYLE AND WAY OF THINKING LOGICALLY in order to solve real life problems.
The way math classes make you do this is by doing math problems, because math problems can only be solved by logical thinking and a logical application of mathematical properties. Doing this again and again, building in complexity over the years, doesn't just teach you to solve math problems, it teaches you HOW TO THINK about any problem. Just like muscular exercise builds up muscles that are used repetitively for some task that you want to be stronger at doing, the kinds of problems you do in math are brain exercises that build up, through repetitive use, the pathways that are useful for logical thinking.
I'm sorry if your teachers didn't make this explicitly clear to you. A lot of teachers don't. I, for one, do explain this to my students, because I understand very well that the level of math we are doing is not very interesting, the types of problems we solve with it are very contrived and not realistic (because the math required to solve "real" problems is way beyond these basics, but you must master the basics if you want to learn to do the advanced stuff), and a lot of the actual things we do in class are not very applicable themselves in real life. For most people, math is not exciting or interesting. But learning it gives the gifts of clear and logical thinking and the ability for sustained chains of reasoning.
I'm sure not many of my students get this, even though I have explained it to them, but that's simply a product of them being young and inexperienced with the world. If even a few of them come out of this class as clearer, more rational thinkers, then I've done my job well.
Which average: the mean, median, or mode?
Meanwhile, I have not used the quadratic formula since I finished Calculus, let alone had to recite a proof of it. I have little doubt that knowing what the formula is and how to use it is relatively important. However, I would like to see a plausible theoretical situation in which one would need to recite a proof of the quadratic formula, without the use of any references.
There are a lot of posts like this, so apologies for singling you out... But, as a math teacher I have to say in response to the "but I never use this" ideas...
Though doing such things is required as class, mathematics is NOT and has never been about memorizing formulas, or even about using specific ones. Yes, we all know you probably don't use the quadratic formula in real life, nor to you have to find the rules for number sequences, nor do you have to find all of the number patterns you can in Pascal's triangle, nor do you have to use Pascal's triangle as a convenient shortcut for binomial expansions, nor do you have to do proofs using all of those uselessly memorized names and properties from your various classes, etc. Yes, you probably had to do all of these things and more in your math classes, but believe it or not, learning math is not really about these things.
Mathematics is (or should be) the class where you learn how to think logically, and use logical and critical thinking skills to solve problems. Not just math problems, but ANY kind of problem you are likely to encounter in life. No, you won't ever use pythagorean theorem to solve relationship problems in your love life, but the logical and critical thinking styles you gained in your mind from solving problems in math will apply to you finding reasonable and logical solutions in real life.
Not only are you learning how to think in math, but you are learning how to break down your thinking so you can check it step by step to make sure there are no flaws. THAT is why we math teachers make you show your work. I, for one, don't care if you get the correct answer or not. I care about how you arrived at your answer, if you can show me the process you used to get to it, and if, in the case of an incorrect answer, you can find the flaw in your thought process that lead to your mistake. Tell me the ability to explain your thinking or the process you intend to engage in to reach a particular outcome is not an important and necessary life skill!
The fact that we use mathematics to try to teach these things is a side effect of what math is. But math class is not just for learning math. It is the class where you exercise your brain so that logical thinking and sustained reasoning become easier in all aspects of life.
And that is why learning to prove the quadratic formula, rather than programming the answer into your calculator, is important.
Borderlands was flawed (lame level scaling, inactive NPCs, weak story, etc) but it was fun as hell. I'd love to see a Borderlands 2 fixing those flaws but keeping the cool design and graphics, the quirky humor, the bazillion guns, and so on.
Like any game, it's not for everyone. But, Borderlands was awesome and you suck for not thinking so.
Where is Portal 2 60 bucks? Because accessing the Steam store from Thailand, I see a price of $49.99 with a current pre-order discount of 10% plus a free copy of Portal 1.
Are the prices different where you are?
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
