Two very different things: why does the universe exist and how did the universe come to exist. There is no why for the universe. It is. Looking for a why is what theists do.

Clarifying the clarification: I was only attempting to answer the question, "Why do atheists flock to science?" My answer was simply that, rather than arguing something vacuous, they simply say, "Meh, the scientific explanation will do for me." That is hardly flocking but just throwing a "good enough" explanation back at the theist that they will hopefully leave us alone.

Cheers,
Dave

Same here in Colorado. We had a cool, wet summer. I think we only had one day that broke 100F. Saved a bunch on the water bill though. Barely had to water the lawn.

Cheers,
Dave

No. You have a better chance of being right.

Cheers,
Dave

So 'unfortunately' if you are going to build a product that people may need and enjoy you are going to start a business, that may create new products and create investment opportunities and jobs in the process, you are going to 'siphon'? 'Siphon' talent away from government ('and everybody else')?????

This 'story' is one gigantic flamebait.

There is nothing unfortunate about building your own company to pursue your own goals and you are not siphoning anything from anybody by building your own business. Under all circumstances, it is better if government doesn't get any talent whatsoever, why should talent be wasted in government rather than be applied where it is actually needed: in the private sector, doing something useful?

This entire premise is insane and asinine.

I am an atheist because I do not believe in anything supernatural.

AFAIC if something has no evidence it may or may not exist, however if a belief requires me to accept possibility of unnatural phenomena I am going to reject it completely until such time that it is actually shown to be true repeatedly and without possibility of being faked.

If you show me a magic trick, pull out a bunny out of a hat and claim that there was no bunny hidden anywhere near you and anywhere near the hat and the bunny simply appeared out of nowhere because you willed it to appear, I want to study you and the hat and the bunny. I want to figure out what makes it possible for you to achieve that effect (and how it can be replicated and possibly used for other things, like pulling electrical power out of a hat or something). I suspect that if such a thing happened and somebody was pulling bunnies out of hats, we would eventually figure out how it was done and by figuring it out we would remove the 'unknown' and the 'unnatural' or 'supernatural' about it.

I do not believe in things that are seemingly impossible, and when somebody claims something impossible, I want a serious study of that, not something based on feelings and reading of scriptures, but actual delving into the reasons behind it.

If you are in a normal discussion as to how something knowable works but of which you have no knowledge, saying "I don't know," would be quite reasonable. Unfortunately, quite a few of the "true believers" seem to take someone saying, "I don't know," in this context as an invitation to be "educated" with their particular mystical explanation. So, unless you want to hear the current mystical explanation, just say the scientific explanation works well enough for you and let them expend their energies attacking that. It's usually much more entertaining than the lesson you get with "I don't know."

Maybe, "I'm OK with not knowing," would work better than "I don't know." Trying to convey that you're more comfortable with a blank slate than one that is filled with mystical gobbledy-gook is hard to get across to those who embrace the mystical gobbledy-gook.

Cheers,
Dave

Seems silly to point out but, if you don't believe some god created the universe, life, etc. then you need some explanation for the universe around us and us as observers of that universe. The flying spaghetti monster is one alternative but it sort of makes sense that quite a few atheists will just say that the scientific explanation of the universe works for them; no more, no less. It's not something to be carried on your sleeve. I'd hardly call that "flocking to science." I haven't heard of too many militant atheists picketing some religious get together with signs saying, "Believe in string theory!" or "Quantum Gravity has the Answer!"

Cheers,
Dave

Believing that there isn't a god is a belief: the acceptance of an assertion without sufficient evidence. Accepting that there probably isn't a god due to the total lack of objective evidence isn't a belief. It's just accepting observable, objective reality. Still, a good atheist maintains a scientific doubt about atheism.

Cheers,
Dave

I usually go with the W.C. Fields line, "Everyone should believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink."

Cheers,
Dave

We heard this argument many times before.

The problem with it is that with Windows you are pretty much forced to buy such solution, either from MS or from 3rd parties.

With Linux, it is really an option, a "nice to have".

For example, a small engineering company in Germany. They actually bought it for 12 desktops in their office. (One desktop is actually server.) Not because they had to, but because it basically freed them up from having a full time admin. (They have admin, but he wanted to go into the CAD/design, and the Ubuntu managed solution simply allowed him to.) (Why Ubuntu? They have tried it - it worked for them well and they have stayed with it.)

I know the feeling, so I'm taking the edx Thermodynamics MOOC to try to learn more about the subject.

Something I learned in the first week: the assumptions of Thermodynamics are astonishingly limited. According to Professor Gaitonde, the science of Thermodynamics is macroscopic (so it doesn't say anything about microscopic phenomena). The assumptions are:

1) No quantum effects

2) No relativistic effects

3) No scale effects.

So any limits derived by Thermodynamics only apply to a small range of phenomena, when you consider the universe. Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, and Computer Science (since scale effects are very important) are not limited by the assumptions Thermodynamics makes. The laws of thermodynamics, based on these assumptions, don't apply as broadly as people commonly assert.

I don't write for you or for anybody, I write for myself.

Free market capitalism gave us Viagra, sure.

It also gave us pretty much everything else, from factories to sewing machines, to refrigeration, to transport, to medicine, to housing, to clothing, to food, to entertainment and more.

The only people with short term thinking are found in government, but not only their thinking is linked to their election campaigns and is aimed at buying votes by generating class and racial and sexual (and actual) warfare, it is also the exact opposite of what the people actually need in real life.

A business on its own is a market participant that gives people what they want to generate profits for itself and if it fails to give people what people want it fails as there are losses, not profits.

A government on its own is not a market participant but a propagandist with a large and armed police and military forces, ready to murder and steal and lie in order to stay in power. Staying in power is antithetical to generating profits, since staying in power cannot be achieved by finding efficiencies and eliminating them or by actually eliminating any problems that governments pretend they are trying to solve.

Nobody in government got more power by solving any problems, but they certainly grow their power to worsening the situations, which then gives them an excuse to use violence and steal more and more in order to 'increase the fight' in those areas.

War on drugs doesn't solve the issue of drugs, but it sure grows government and worsens the actual situation for the people who use drugs or deal drugs or even simply participate in the economy where that war is taking place.

War on poverty doesn't solve the issue of poverty, this issue was being solved by the free market just fine when the government decided it will wage the war. The poverty only increased since then, more unemployment, the money is worthless, the economy is failing.

Governments may or may not have long term goals, however their goals have nothing to do with giving the people (market) what they actually want and need, that's what the private individuals do in the free market capitalist economy.

I am not writing it for you or for anybody, I am stating the obvious.

What about information entropy? The entropy is lowered when the file is zipped, then raised when the file is unzipped. According to the "rule of thumb" cited above, if a process is reversible, the entropy remains constant. Zipping is reversible, but the information entropy is not constant; it lowers and increases.

What cost does the absorption and re-emission extract from me, every time I use the lens to do the work I want it to do? What am I losing, what am I giving up to get heat of ignition from sunlight?

I had to buy the glass, and there was an energy cost in producing it. But those are one-time expenditures. Once it's made, the cost to light a fire is nothing.

Also, the first law of thermodynamics seems to be violated, as outlined above. U = Q - W. U (internal energy of the system, in this case the magnifying glass) should be negative, since Q (heat added to the system) is very small, and W (work done by the system) is relatively large. But the internal energy of the magnifying glass doesn't go down, if anything it increases slightly because of a temperature increase?

Greed is good, government is an atrocity against individual freedoms. I do not care what does not get funded if the government is involved, I don't want to see anybody being forced under the barrel of a gun to give up 1/100000000th of their income (which means their money, their time, their lives) in order to allow government to steal control over the individuals.

Now the actual problem with scientific funding in USA (and some other countries) comes from lack of free market capitalism, which is what builds innovation and requires research, which is the way innovation was and should be funded. The economies are being destroyed by the socialists that think the way you do and eventually manufacturing leaves, which means engineering is no longer done in those countries and once you have no manufacturing and no engineering you will have no research either, it just has no economic grounding to exist in those failing economies.

What is actually required is for the individuals to take power away from the governments, shut down as much government as possible in order to free the people, which is the only way to have a productive society - to have free people working for their own personal private individual benefit and gain, where the invisible hand of the market drives them to provide useful market solutions to other market participants.

Government is violent poison that destroys individuals and their lives.