Sal9000

What are those gaps?

http://www.livescience.com/7275-coulter-hoax-ann-coulter-exposed-intelligent-design-movement.html

No it doesn't. Science is a method to distinguish proper statements from bullshit. A particle cannot become a wave. This is nonsense. Max Planck would like to have a word with you. Utter nonsense. The frequency of light is determined by oscillations of fields. That's all that there is to it.

Actually, it is pretty common in astronomy that orbits of planets form a ratio of small integers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance

Can you read Hebrew or Aramaic?

I ran across this interesting article some time ago which made me think http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html No surprise if you ask me.

We used Kanban boards at work. By doing so, we could see who was lagging behind and who did not want to take up big tasks. I highly recommend them when comparing people within a team.

He's dead Jim

It works in the sun too, why shouldn't it work here on earth?

Great post A few corrections though. A hypothesis is a statement that can be tested.You formulate it in such a way that it is open to verification or falsification. Not everything that cannot be falsified is sophist. If this was the case, you would have to throw out history, psychology, and art out of the window. All those are products of our mind that are not scientific, but that does not make them sophist. A theory is a bunch of hypotheses, that describe a wide ranch of natural phenomena. Deciding which theory is more likely to be correct is heavily disputed in the real of the Scientific Method. Notable suggestions include shortness, the ability to make more predictions, coherence and so on.

Exactly. People have a misconception. They think they purchase a product while they don't. And when they realize that, they are shocked.

Well this presupposes that you make a purchase of a product when buying something from Amazon. However, this is an illusion. When you 'buy' a book, you don't 'purchase' it, rather you get a license that can be revoked at any time. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/do-you-ever-own-your-e-books Lets imagine I sell you a hammer under the condition that I can take it away any time I want and that you may not give it to your neighbour. This is ludicrous, but exactly reflects what Amazon, Google, and Apple do. While a hardware cannot get away with it, media corporations have enough pull to legalize their actions. You have two options. Either, you don't purchase these products or you buy them and treat them as your property. That is you remove malicious software or parts of the software that impedes with its use.

When you buy something you can make any use of it the way you like. If you can't, you did not buy it but rather lease it.

A nice, thought provoking video. However, his stance that a text file is only file is not accurate. If you want to write a scientific paper, you use tex or latex. While you can create one large file, most use different files that can be put together quite easily (not to speak of tex's stability that is unparalleled). In addition, better file systems like ufs2 have been developed in the meantime, that take up many of his criticisms. Edit: here is something that i am very interested in lately

One of my favourite poems. Apollo's Archaic Torso We cannot know his incredible head, where the eyes ripened like apples, yet his torso still glows like a candelabrum, from which his gaze, however dimmed, still persists and gleams. If this were not so, the bow of his breast could not blind you, nor could a smile, steered by the gentle curve of his loins, glide to the centre of procreation. And this stone would seem disfigured and stunted, the shoulders descending into nothing, unable to glisten like a predator's pelt, or burst out from its confines and radiate like a star: for there is no angle from which it cannot see you. You have to change your life.

It was a bit more complicated. The first estate was purely religious, all nuns, priests, bishops and so on belonged to it. However, it was not uniform. During the course of time, there was a separation. Simple clerics came from the third estate, while important religious leaders were of noble descendant. The second estate was the nobility, which was either hereditary and connected to feudalism (noblemen as leaders of soldiers and owners of land) or hereditary and functional (magistrates and civil deputies). Only in the latter case, could you move up from the third estate. The third estate was the rest and paid virtually all taxes. In theory, there was no difference between a rich merchant and a poor serf toiling on the field. Royalty was not considered part of any estate, but to be independent of those and to mediate between conflicts.

In the last call in show, Stef brought up the concept of noumena, these are concepts that are won without data from the senses. Stef claims, that Kant was a mystic claiming we get information by revelations. This thesis contradicts Kant's Critique of Pure Reason however, that answers the question of synthetic knowledge a priori (there is none too make it very short). Also, Kant directly says that noumena are not objects in the proper sense and that any claim to have knowledge about them is void.

The Little Boy design was used once. Later models (and Fat Boy) used an implosion to condense Uranium or Plutanium to reach the critical mass. Later on, secondary or tertiary stages were added to induce a fusion.

Do you even physics bro?

R is an incredible useful and powerful computer language. Good luck learning it. It has a steep learning curve, but it is very rewarding. I recommend those resources in addition to the video series: http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/doc/html/ http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/KB/R/index.html http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596809164.do Once you mastered the basis, you can check out O'Reilly's fantastic collection.

How do you explain that there are nuclear reactors and accidents with those? After all, it's the same principle. Are the nuclear reactors fake too?

Are the logical laws (law of identity, law of the excluded third) true independent of the senses or not? When you say they are, you put them on a pedestal, they cannot falsified nor tested. They serve as a building of a system that exists independent of physical reality (maths is one example of that). When you say that those logical laws are true a priori and that they give an accurate description of reality and that those laws can be tested you run into a bunch of problems. A major one is, that you need additional restrictions for those logical laws to be true in reality. However, you could not come up with those restrictions on your own, hence these laws cannot be true independent of the senses. They are subject to falsification like any other statement. Lets have a look at a concrete example: There is an apple on your table. You leave your room for a minute and find the apple still at your desk. You conclude from the law of identity that it is the same apple. But is this a factual correct statement? I would argue it is not, since the properties of this apple changed. There were redox processes, sugar oxidized, the atoms moved around, the apple lost a bit of water, the energy level of electrons is different or so. What you find is that there is a connection between apple from a minute ago, but since the properties of that apple changed it is not the same apple. So for the law of identity to be true you would have to restrict it, using a posteriori knowledge (like the laws of physics and chemistry) for it to be true, thus rendering your axiom useless.

If you want to get to know that Marx said, you have to read Marx. Chances are high that you will find misrepresentations of his work from both sides. What Marx meant is that any value (Wert in German is purely materialistic) that can be found in commodities consists of two parts. You have fixed costs (machines, rent, resources...) and marginal costs (labourers). This means if you want to run a factory you have a certain output. While the fixed costs stay the same relative to the output, your marginal costs go up relative to the output while you increase your output.

Oh, but they are for tax reasons! In addition, single factories within a company compete against each other when it comes to manufacturing new products in the future.

This (https://archive.org/details/SurrealNumbers) is a good introduction for laypersons on how numbers are constructed these days. A good read for non-mathematicians. If you are interested, any introduction to number theory will cover the issue, but at a price. Unlike humanities, you have to work hard to understand the issues covered.