Great poll. This one was a tickler.

Definitive (adj.): supplying or being a final or conclusive settlement.

Which proves beyond doubt that of which it is evidential.

As opposed to ye olde ordinarey evidence which merely contributes to the probability that something is likely.

Your ironic point, denzacar, is easily made and quite valid, but not nearly so straightforward as it seems.

You use the word "civilised" without single quotes, as though it is unproblematic. You tacitly but inescapably suggest that areas (and people?) which lack roads, health care, formal education and a constant hum (all features of civilisation) are not 'civilised'. That is very problematic, as it assumes the primacy of your own system of judging what constitutes 'civilisation' and does not admit the possibility of any other. But since you are talking about people who are very much 'other', that is absurd.

You also seem to suggest that the absence of all these things is, in fact, a lack. These may not have been your intentions, of course, but they are implications nonetheless.

The value systems of people in 'uncivilised' areas may well differ altogether from our own but be completely valid on their own terms. Don't conflate this with a romanticisation of poverty, but the San of southern Africa, for instance, have no concept of private property but would (and this is my assumption) nonetheless place unimaginably greater value on an untarred swathe of desert stretching to all horizons and the sight of the milky way in the night sky than they would value 'formal education' and modern 'entertainment'.

Thanks to this ground-breaking scientific research, submarines will be even better equipped to collide with each other.

Quite right. Buddhism may be more intellectual than other religions, but its final application is to the "inmost yearnings of the human heart". That means it is a religion. It is also very definitely a 'spiritual' tradition, in that it contains methods for realising our ultimate nature and aligning our way of being with that nature. And Buddhism should not try to disavow either of those simply because the terms 'religious' and 'spiritual' are unfashionable.

Whether Buddhism is truly nontheistic is debatable. Certainly it rebuts the notion of an anthropomorphic creator God. But doesn't the notion of the Dharmakaya make it a kind of pantheism?

But finally, who cares? Not Buddhists, who are supposed to understand well the emptiness of names and labels.

That would be the answer according to a dualistic, naive conception of reality and causality (which most of us have, most of the time) but it's not the correct answer in the Buddhist version of the story.

In the traditional story, the 'third monk' is actually the teacher of the other two monks. Following their two inadequate answers, he rebukes them and says:

"It is the mind that moves."

The monks' answers are deemed inadequate because they are dualistic: they make a distinction, in a fundamental way, between the wind and the flag (and, in fact, movement as such), and then try to think whether movement begins with the one or with the other, or whether movement can be considered apart from that which moves.

But to distinguish 'movement', 'flag', or 'wind' as particularities of what is, beforehand, an unparticularised situation, is a movement of the mind. It is the monks' dualistically inclined minds which move towards a view, and any particular view is partial and therefore inadequate. So the master's answer is the 'correct' one, as it's the most accurate and apposite statement of what's happening.

On the face of things, I think you shouldn't accept the offer. You clearly value your independence and self-determination, and if you're confident of your statement that your project will be worth more money in future, stick with it! But whatever you decide to do, come back in a year or so's time and tell us whether you think it was the right decision. That would be interesting.

I think you're making an unwarranted assumption. It could have learned to bury food by watching its mother do the same. The First Food-Burying Fox might originally have learned to do so after surviving a winter without a food cache, or it might have happened upon some food during a hungry winter and thought "Awesome!", or some occurrence like that. (Who knows where thoughts come from? /EmpireRecords) Anyway, then it's memetic transference of an idea, not a genetic reproduction of an instict. To dismiss this possibility out of hand would reflect (arguably) unwarranted assumptions about intelligence in foxes.

Oh, don't be so precious. The boy is hardly in anguish -- he's just really, really spaced out. It's not as though the father is laughing -at- the boy's pain. He's laughing because it's really funny. And it really is. Tomorrow the kid will wake up perfectly fine and the entire car trip will be the vaguest memory, if that.

It's great that Obama is president, but I'm skeptical of the true interests behind the progressive, benign image. To achieve a meaningful, positive change in the USA and the world he has to face down a corporate/military system of great wealth and power. If he doesn't, it'll be more of the same: a devious and rapacious foreign policy, strategic falsehoods, strife and inequity with the aim of US hegemony. There's never been a better character for the job, but it's a hell of a tough job.