Recent content by Nelson

Step 1: Find a lyric you can clearly hear from the song. In this case, I picked out: "there's always something to get me down" Step 2: Google that lyric in quotations + the word "lyrics" Step 3: ????? Step 4: Profit: Artist: Stonegard Song: Triggerfinger

If I may make a suggestion... If you are trying to emphasize the vast difference in those timescales, it may be better to do it with an analogy. For example: The difference between an 80 year human lifetime, and the 4.6 billion year age of the earth is roughly equivalent to the difference of...

This. But, I'll expand just a little. GR explains how gravitational fields can be thought of as a curvature of space-time. The "most natural" or free-fall path through this space is following the curvature. If we jump from a plane and fall toward the surface of the earth, we are following...

Then the argument is still invalid for the exact same reason, and the premise that is required in order for it to work is: Comets have been losing mass at the same rate since the formation of the Earth. For one thing, comets don't even lose mass at a constant rate throughout one orbit. I...

I'd like to put forward a similar argument if I may. On average, fruit flies only live for a few weeks. Therefore, the universe can't be more than a few weeks old, otherwise all of the fruit flies would be dead. This argument takes the following form: Premise 1: Fruit flies can't live for...

This is not due to actual features in the x-ray spectrum of the sky. The features are caused by missing data due to gaps in the scanning pattern of the survey. In this case, it looks like the data came from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. Those sinusoidal arcs would actually appear as straight...

Re: Nasa scientists discover evidence 'that alien life exist I don't think these are directly related. That article was posted 6 months ago, and even at the time it was wild speculation. The press conference notice has only been up for a few days. Phil Plait actually just wrote a blog entry...

Yes, science can be vulnerable to fraud. The best way to avoid this sort of thing is to have have different groups who work on the same sorts of problems independently. However, it does still happen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal About this nose theory. Are you claiming...

After skimming the wiki page, I believe I would fall into the category of Logicist. However, I am a physicist/astronomer, and while I have spent a good bit of time pondering the philosophy of science, I haven't spent much time at all thinking about the philosophy of mathematics in particular...

I've used this argument before, mainly the point that Gods don't really offer any sort of explanation in a scientific context. Typically our standard for what we would call a satisfactory explanation is the ability to explain complex systems from as few simple assumptions as possible...

Strange. I think someone just happened to upload the exact same article here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LEYOSHYB What a coincidence.

Interesting story. I'll share a similar experience of mine: I was jogging along a trail through the woods a few weeks ago, and I happened to be running through an area that had a fairly regular arrangement of trees along the right side of the path. These trees were spaced in such a way that I...

If I understand you correctly, you are ARE in fact agreeing that your reasoning is circular? Once you accept the existence of god, it becomes obvious that god exists? In this way, you claim that you can still believe in god despite lack of evidence, or in most cases evidence to the contrary...

I think maybe you could try searching "Simpsons downpour" or "Simpsons flood", no wait that's not right. What's the word I'm looking for here? It's something like a heavy rain, but a different word. :D

I'm joining this party late, but to me it seems like the topic has been majorly derailed and I'd like to address the original hypothetical if that is alright. This initially seems like a question of "what is consciousness". If the hypothetical is that the simulation is indistinguishable from...