Either that or the videos are mislabelled. Because the "good video" sure has a lot more arm flailing and rapid leg movement than the bad one.

Exactly. Either the study is either a victim of crappy journalism or the researchers simply couldn't properly analyze what they observed. The good moves are better coordinated, yes, but what seemed noteworthy to me is the use of broad/bold gestures and how much space the dancer occupies. "He" appears certainly more confident judging from his movements. And on a crowded dancefloor, this guy would also appear to be one of those jerks who gets in everybody's face all the time, which is probably what attracts women the most because it betrays the general douchebaggery required for those oh-so attractive displays of "dominance".

(Why, yes, I'm single, what a coincidence...)

When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?

She is there, why should it be a paradox to see herself? If I make a video of you and show it to you afterwards, is that a paradox?

When the speed of sound is broken by a jet, they could actually fly for quite a while, stop, turn around, and then hear the sound of them arriving.

Indeed.

Why should light be any different?

It isn't.

However, the problem here is how to actually arrive somewhere sooner than a photon would. Anything that has mass experiences a time dilation towards (but never reaching) the infinite the more it gets accelerated. Light, on the other hand, has no mass and hence moves with the maximum allowable speed through flat space. The fact that it is light specifically has nothing to do with the speed or any definitions of time. It is simply the speed of all massless particles that can carry information.

According to current understanding of spacetime, A can still arrive at a location before some light she sent out earlier. To do so, she just has to move through warped space, because there is no speed/time limit on the way space can be warped or accelerated.

You can't win a war of attrition with gorilla fighters ( terrorists )
They will aways find a way to surprise you or sabotage your infrastructure.

True.

In my opinion you should aim to remove the objective of your enemy. Utterly destroy what the gorilla fighters are fighting to reclaim/protect. The scotched earth way. For every suicide bombing kill tenfold of the native population of your enemy.
Failing that just exterminate them all.

In the case of Islamic terrorism though, that's not really possible. Standard procedure here would be to thwart the enemy's objective. An objective which in this case would be the destruction of our freedoms and the preparation for a fundamentalist takeover of our society. Sadly, they already partly succeeded. As things are right now, further terrorist acts are practically superfluous, because we're quite capable of doing the rest of the terrorists' work for them. We already declared war against our own citizens, no outside threats necessary!

This is what makes "winning" the war so difficult, because we would first have to change our society back to a free culture. And even if we could do that, we'd still have to address the actual threat of religious extremism that makes up the support network without which terrorists would simply be reduced to insane criminals with limited means. Of course, we lost that fight as well. It's no coincidence that the founder of the "911 Terror Mosque OMG!!111!" is one of Fox' majority shareholders. The same guys are funding boths "sides" (if you can call them that), both of which actually have a radical and thoroughly religious agenda optimized for their respective cultures.

So, yeah, of course it makes sense to think about attack scenarios and to do what we can to make everybody safer, but the bad news in this case is that as long as our society is actually worth defending, it will by virtue of its free nature always have a huge surface exposed to attacks.

Microsoft management knows full well that the only way to stay on top of their huge bloated codebase and architecture is to continue along the path of managed code. The only thing they're not fond of are dynamic languages, pure and simple. Support for dynamic languages was added to the .NET runtime very late in the game, and begrudgingly at that. Their current development and runtime environments rely on huge amounts of auto-generated boilerplate glue without which the simplest tasks wouldn't be possible.

The reasons for this are probably largely historical, because there are still a lot of people from the old COM days working at MS. There are fact-based arguments as well: Dynamic languages tend to be more concise but are more difficult to automatically evaluate and optimize, especially considering the way Microsoft is relying on interface contracts and access policies (all of which are either generated by static language code or in turn serve to generate such code). Besides, none of the teams working on those much-needed tools and design-helpers wants to be put out of a job, so of course they have to stay firmly committed to their huge heap of statically generated code.

A few years ago some Microsoftie told me about a new research OS they were working on, it was completely .NET-based and probably still reflects how MS would like Windows to be if they could start over from scratch today. I believe the project's name was Singularity, I don't know if it still exists. Anyway, the whole point of the OS was its completely static architecture. There was no support for dynamic languages, all executables were statically linked and completely rigid. There was no self-modification allowed for any application and as far as I remember applications couldn't even dynamically load libraries at runtime. So, in a way, they already made clear which road they are going to go down. Dynamic languages aren't in the mix anymore, but managed code will stay around for a long time at Microsoft.

I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.

I love how the limitations of the time are now being re-interpreted as not only intentional but also as artistically meaningful.
One has to wonder how often that happened in other historical contexts before.

I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.

I love how the technical deficiencies of the time can now be re-interpreted as not only intentional but also artistic and even metaphorically meaningful...
And I wonder if that happened before in other contexts.

One would assume they'd be able to generate the power themselves.

How, with diesel plants? Wouldn't that destroy the whole cost-saving efficiency effort?

Data lines are still an issue, though an optical or microwave link to shore might be feasible.

That's not working either. On the ocean, you can't assume line of sight because weather and waves are going to get in the way. The data rate wouldn't be acceptable anyway and the effort required on both ends to compensate for the motion of the waves doesn't make it feasible.

It'd probably make more sense as a big render farm or compute farm, where the machines can chew on the task for a day and then the result is pooped back out, rather than a bunch of servers constantly being hit by requests.

That's actually a good use, I didn't think of that. But still, if I rented CPU power, I would very likely be interested in monitoring the results as they come in as opposed to firing the button and be surprised by the result and the huge bill one day later. Also, if they generate their own power out on the sea they would probably be more expensive than traditional server farms.

While the ships themselves are immune to flooding, their cables would still be susceptible to any large movements. Re-attaching the ship after the conncetion has been severed, even if it had been done deliberately, is not going to be a simple matter of plug-and-play, too. There'll be hundreds of cables to connect, then comes the task of actually booting up the servers again. And if you were a company, would you buy webspace/storage/whatever on a vessel that could go offline at any moment for an uncertain duration?

They still need massive data and power lines coming from the grid, and because servers need to be connected to the internet without even the slightest interruption, a floating server rack cannot be mobile. In fact, special steps would have to be undertaken to make sure it stays in one place during storms and other maritime crises. Wouldn't it make more sense to just buy a piece of land near the sea and simply pump the ocean water around for cooling? Throw in a few photovoltaic cells and a wind turbine and you'd get a far cheaper, more reliable land-based data center.

Yes, earth is definitely the point of origin. But it's still possible (though unlikely) that a previous civilization left Earth to colonize space or ascend in a singularity-type event, not leaving anything behind. While unlikely because we would usually assume that some structures would be left behind by such people, it's not all that unrealistic either if we consider how fast our current stuff would deteriorate into nothingness once we're gone.

I think Apple's intentions are way more sinister. In fact, patenting stuff like "Where to"s UI only makes sense if the company has already recognized that prior art is a concept that doesn't really hold up in court like it's supposed to. In fact, many (if not most) software patents are granted and enforced despite completely obvious prior art ("but our app does the same thing on a mobile device, completely different thing!!11!"). And even if prior art was still a meaningful concept, which it isn't, patent trolls like Apple would still win every court battle, because the average software company cannot possibly defend itself in court on account of the absolutely preposterous amounts of money necessary to even give it a try. In addition to all that, most countries have institutionalized a reversal of the burden of proof in patent cases, so the defendant has to first conclusively prove they don't violate a given patent and if they cannot do that (by any arbitrary measure), the accuser wins by default.

But as far as I know, the question is still unresolved. If space is curved in on itself, we could in fact go (with a spacecraft) a finite distance in one direction and arrive back where we started. If not, we'd just go on and on forever, at one point our spacecraft would overtake the current extent of matter and we'd pass into unoccupied space where the only thing left is radiation from the (slow) matter-filled part.

So the universe has no center is space is curved, but then only if the curvature is smaller than or equal to the current extent of matter. As far as I recall, we still don't really know because the distances are so vast a curved universe and a flat universe look pretty much the same from where we stand. If the curvature were really small, we would be able to see multiple versions of galaxies further away, kind of like bouncing reflections between two mirrors. But alas, it is not ;-)

In fact, the notion of fire being an element is something the ancient Greeks thought up, not something you'll find in the Bible. Ironically, they came to this conclusion after the rejection of religion and insistence upon observation of nature.

I was talking about alchemy, and the point was that this was the last time when chemistry was compatible with and encouraged by the Christian leadership. Which is still correct, but I apologize if I failed to bring that point across. Have mercy on a non-native English speaker ;-)

We don't read the Bible as if it's a scientific treatise.

No, most of "you" replace the Bible with scientific treatise and the rest of "you" thinks the Bible should supersede science whenever it seems necessary. But so as not to generalize too much, I'll just talk about your position as I perceived it, which is more closely related to the latter.

When it says that God created Man, we can believe that without knowing all of the details of how he did it.

I believe that you do indeed try to live according to that. It's a few lines further down when you state the opposite by professing that religion does not cherish ignorance where I have trouble keeping my sarcasm in check. But let's not dwell on that, let's instead talk about facts, not perceived intentions. Trouble is, God did demonstrably not create Man (or woman for that matter). You see, science cannot just glance over certain areas of nature, just because "we can believe the Bible without knowing the details".

We investigate everything, because we have to. Science would not even work if important pieces of the puzzle were off-limits. So we researched. And we found out how the universe came into existence, we found out how matter interacts, and we found out how life works. In great detail, and we're not even close to finished. In some areas, and for some of us, those results may be troubling or directly contradict the teachings of our ancestors. But they exist nonetheless, and wishful thinking cannot rewrite reality. It becomes a question of whether you either accept what you found out and move on, or you willingly ignore what you learned and stay with a world view that is entirely based on fiction.

I'll now move on to the depressing Bible passage you posted that, if nothing else, apparently demonstrates to both of us how scripture is designed to be interpreted however one likes it:

That men may appreciate wisdom and discipline, may understand words of intelligence;
May receive training in wise conduct, in what is right, just and honest;

I liked that, but in the back of my head there was the creeping suspicion that those words meant something else for the author than they do for us today. And indeed, here comes the resolution:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; wisdom and instruction fools despise.

So many things wrong with that, on so many levels, where to start... First off, if your God rules through fear, he is first and foremost a complete douche-bag and following tyrants is generally considered an act of cowardice if not treason. However, once again I have to concede that this argument is not exactly on-topic anymore.

Let's stay with the part where God is placed on top of every scientific observation. That's just not possible anymore, even if a scientist somehow tried it, their results would be severely compromised. This is exactly what pushed Einstein over the cliff and why Boltzmann killed himself. Now, nearly a century later, it has become even more futile to unify science and religion, especially for people who want to stay true to both.

You see, religion isn't content with merely the explanation of natural phenomenon, but seeks to understand all aspects of reality - including the supernatural, the spiritual, and the moral as well.

Religion does not really explain anything, it just defines stuff arbitrarily. Yes, it provides definitive answers on everything, but in the context of objective reality those answers turned out to be provably untrue (which is the entire reason this thread exists) and don't even get me started on the intangible stuff like morality where both of us just just be infinitely glad that we don't have to live in a world governed by the literal law of the Bible anymore. After subtracting the concretely objective and the intangibly psychological, we are left with just one aspect of scripture which refers to omnipotence, a self-enforcing concept designed to end any discussion.

Since mathematics is the only pure science, perhaps you can enlighten me how exactly it contradicts scripture.

For what definition of "pure" would that be? Mathematics provides basic logical reasoning tools that help us deduce complex causal relationships and create models that show impressively how phenomena work without the need of a deity standing behind the curtain pulling the strings. Mathematics also gave us direct access to information technology that we use to simulate interactions accurately, including but not limited to evolutionary mechanisms. By providing these means mathematics contradicts religion on a daily basis both directly and indirectly.

I'm sure there's some scripture somewhere that contradicts one of the laws of chemistry - can you name it?

First, it's not as if chemistry is based on a set of commandments where I can now just invoke something like "the 9th law of chemistry", but yes there are a few concepts that come to mind. For example, pretty much all of biochemistry that provides concrete insights into how organisms work and interact with their environment. These models are based very concretely on evolution, so I'm pretty sure everything that happens in a cell is not something that is compatible with scripture. Heck, you can't even begin to grasp proteins without evolution. But it goes deeper than that. Alchemy was the last science based on and compatible with Christian religion. Once we discovered fire wasn't an element, we departed from the bible for good.

Surely there's a commandment against information theory, something about not computing on the Sabbath, maybe?

There may not be a commandment, but I do recall the demonization of knowledge being a fundamental concept in the bible. Wasn't there even some Tree of Knowledge or something that made God really angry at humans for eating its fruits? I may have that mixed up though, correct me as necessary. I do also seem to remember that Satan, who is apparently the personification of evil, is known as the bringer of light and knowledge. As such he is probably a direct descendant of Prometheus with whom the ancient gods got really upset for bringing the humans fire and thus technology. From a sociological viewpoint that makes sense, because knowledge really is the nemesis of belief and vice versa.

Or perhaps the problem is that there are people who observe variations among species in nature and automatically jump to the conclusion that such variations are somehow proof that God doesn't exist.

Sort of, yes. There are countless areas of scientific knowledge that lead you to the conclusion that the concept of an invisible deity is not only superfluous but also counterproductive reasoning. So, it's not restricted to evolution, you can arrive at this conclusion from almost any field of science.

That the possibility of life adapting to its environment - rather than a sign of God's genius - is proof of his absence.

No. There are really two concepts of God we're talking about here. The first is the literal biblical god, whose existence really has been disproved over time through countless breakthroughs in understanding. The second is the general idea of an omnipotent being that guides all of the universe, but has taken every conceivable precaution so his existence can never be demonstrated but also can (on account of omnipotence) never be ruled out. Of course the number of hypothetically existing but unprovable things that can be constructed from sheer imagination is endless and not restricted to gods. Creating unprovable hypotheses is easy and you cannot logically infer truth from the mere fact that they cannot be demonstrated as false.

Or to put it differently: I can postulate that the world is in reality powered by invisible unicorn excrement and top that off with a statement about how the unicorns are infinitely clever about hiding it. There is really no way of disproving that and the discussion is over at that point. Which is exactly the reason why I suggested that you should stick to a purely religious argument because it makes you immune to logical attacks.

Don't you find it odd that evolution is the only scientific theory to which fundamentalists object?

In fact I do, as I already said. If you guys only knew what else is out there in the body of basic scientific knowledge, your heads would explode. You need to think way beyond evolution if you want to stop this. Of course it probably makes sense to attack one scientific model first and then use the social leverage against the next and so on. But hey, you have pretty much already won on the biology class thing, you need to expand. Strategically, physics would be the logical choice to attack next.

Maybe, just maybe, there's something about teaching evolution that is more than just science?

Let me think about it. Uhm... no, I got nothing. Seriously, what do you have in mind?

Evolutionary theory teaches that there is a physical process by which living organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, the environment over periods of many, many generations. Though we can't explain it completely yet, we believe we will someday discover how life came about on this planet.

No. Abiogenesis is not part of evolution. And that's not an arbitrary distinction either. The chemical processes that lead to the spontaneous assembly of the first complex self-replicating macromolecules are poorly understood because we don't yet know the composition and environmental conditions of the early earth. Abiogenesis is a concrete chemistry problem and active research field in biochemistry. Evolution on the other hand, is an abstract mathematical model that describes a universal process of change and adaptation. Biological organisms are just one of many possible substrates on which evolution can take place, for instance the process has also been observed and implemented in many areas of information technology. We can, indeed, explain it very well, profoundly and completely.

That science has been wrong more often than not.

Not in the way religion has, and must be, per definition. Science creates models that serve to predict outcomes. When the actual outcome does not fit the prediction made by using the model, it's time to refine (or in some cases rebuild) the model. As such, science invites failure because scientists are eager to learn from them. Failure is one of the mechanisms that make science stronger as time progresses. You can't even say that science has been wrong more often than not. Our models have become very, very good. Most people don't realize how immensely we rely on them every single day to make billions of decisions, most of which are completely correct. (You made that point yourself, but I had to throw my 2 cents in here)

That science often believes things on faith - for example, there's faith that someday we'll discover the means by which the first living cells came to be. It may even be a well founded faith - backed up by years of experimentation and data. But it's still faith.

This is a potentially misleading argument. Science does not really require faith. Science could be done by automatons that don't have any capacity for faith. The danger of this wording is it creates the impression that science and faith are somehow on the same level and are interrelated if not interchangeable. Science believes things based on models that are supported by measurements and abstract mathematics. Furthermore, no scientific theory stands on its own, it exists in an ecosystem of proven and reliable ideas that supply a mutually supporting and robust outlook on the world. Even hypotheses, often conceptually mistaken to be equivalent to theories, rest on some evidence and usually offer models that are at least plausible. But nobody really goes out and equates a hypothesis with proven theory, since that would indeed mean taking things on faith.

Having actually met a person in college who chose not to believe in God because of her HS biology class, I find it troubling that evolution is taught at all. Not because I take issue with the scientific theory, but because for so many, the fight over evolution is a fight over teaching against the existence of God.

So you encountered one of the few cases where encountering actual facts made a person think and change their mind about religion and you find that alarming. Rest assured, it doesn't happen that often. Many people instead compartmentalize their minds into ridiculously incompatible world views, each used when it seems opportune. And the vast majority, like you noticed, simply doesn't care how the world works. You could tell them the earth is steam-powered by unicorn excrement and they'd swallow it without question. Which is, incidentally, the essence of religious teaching and brings me back to your original statement: you find it alarming that evolution is taught in classrooms? So basically you propose that children should be told about science as long as that science does not directly contradict scripture? I've got news for you: evolution isn't the only field of science constantly spewing anathema your way. You'd have to outlaw mathematics, physics, large parts of chemistry, information theory, parts of history, geology, ah fuck it: you'd have to outlaw pretty much everything. For some reason, you guys have singled out evolution, but the rest of science is kicking your collective asses just as badly.

The science doesn't take a position one way or another, but so many have minds so small that they cannot understand the Genesis account of creation tells us who created us and why we were created, while science postulates about the process by which it came about.

I really hope you're trolling, for your own sake. If so, well done sir! Let me just answer this steaming pile of ignorance with the basic observation that you cannot divide everything up between those two opposing concepts and expect to keep your sanity. Even if there was no science, your arbitrarily chosen piece of scripture does not hold up to the simplest philosophical examinations. So you're on pretty shaky ground to begin with. But to make it worse, you practically invite science to explain the world in parallel (as long as it doesn't come to close). In case you haven't noticed the folklore-based creation story you chose to build your world view on has already been disproved by science. You could escape this by adopting the old "we don't take that old stuff literally anymore" but it seems you even blocked that last escape route for yourself. You would fare much better in discussions if you just summarily discarded science. But the way you're doing it now you're just inviting intellectual ass-kicking, leaving you with no valid answers to respond back. At this point, your only hope is basically throwing logical fallacies at everyone and hope they get confused long enough until the discussion is over. Hence my well-meant advice: sack up, drop the pretense science stuff, stick with religion, you'll be way better off.