AtticaFlinch

What exactly did the kid do to recieve the beating?

Who cares? Wouldn't you rather pass judgment before learning any facts? He's a teenager. And he has a cell phone. It's obvious he needs a beating.

Right, LTAWACS?

What/who are the most trusted sources for evolution?

Biological evolution? Let me first say this, the concept of natural selection is now so firmly established as scientific fact, there isn't a scientific crusade led by a figurehead or two who go around prosthelytizing it. ( <-- Niche, good example of language limitations right there.) These days, scientists who focus on evolutionary triggers have narrowed their scope to refinement stages. If you want some good reading material on the development of the theory of natural selection and how it applies to all biological life including humans, you should head straight to the source and read Darwin's On The Origin of Species and TH Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. If you want to read something more friendly to the modern tongue, try Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Dawkins is an easy read, and he explains difficult concepts simply, but he comes with a caveat: many Christians hate the man because he's an avowed athiest and not shy about it.

Other than those, you might try reading the first several chapters of any college biology textbook written in the last century.

Attica, I'm not sure you can separate truth and facts. Facts are true. You just said in your previous post that something was true. So do you still utilize truth yet don't take much stock in it or do you just not rely on it at all?

Lockmat, I didn't explain the difference to Niche because it's something he already understands.

At the risk of way oversimplifying it and sounding like a douche in the process, think of it like a square and a rectangle. You know... a square is always a rectangle but a rectangle isn't always a square. To put it another way, individuals arrive at truth, whereas collectively (and only with evidence) we arrive at fact. To use you as an example, God exists because you have faith he does, which makes his existence to you "true". You don't question it, you just know it. This faith is what you hold to be true, but it doesn't make it a fact. Does God exist? Maybe, but beyond blind faith and the possible misinterpretation of random events, the existence of God cannot be proven. Therefore, it is not "fact".

There's a great line in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones (Hey, I'm a former archaeologist, the original trilogy are three of my favorite movies) is teaching a class and he's explaining to his his students the science of archaeology by saying, "Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If truth is what you're looking for, Dr Tyree's philosophy class is down the hall." I know it's just a pop culture reference, but that explanation is spot on.

But what does it mean?

Meaning isn't in the purview of science. That's an area where physics ends and metaphysics begins.

Mathematics and logic are mere extensions of language. They are systems that humans utilize to reason and communicate more effectively, provided that they have perceived a universe that cannot every be completely or correctly reasoned or communicated. You cannot escape Godel's Incompleteness Theorem; logic is its own undoing.

Logic itself may be nothing more than an extension of language, certainly so if we turn out to be the only beings in the universe capable of thinking critically, but mathematics isn't merely an extension of language. Its expression is an extension of language, but math itself is infinite. Mathematics is the purest form of science. It's uncorruptable by subjective interpretation.

Right, you're talking about paradigm shifts in the first quoted paragraph. And if the history of scientific advance teaches us anything, it ought to be that a civilization's centuries-long conception of how the universe operates can be shattered in a generation.

Academic scientists may be willing to embrace that level of uncertainty, but the vast majority of the population just want answers and they don't care to understand how those answers were derived. They don't want to think; they want to be led. And this being a thread about politics--those people are in the spotlight. They have traded one religion for another, and are now bickering over who gets top billing. Politically speaking, Science vs. Christianity may as well be Christianity vs. Paganism circa 400 AD; and what'll come out of it eventually will be a bastardization of each of them.

Ok, but you're again melding belief with scientific fact, viewing them equally but scrutinizing them using separate standards. The reason your analogy doesn't hold up is with the practitioners themselves. With Christiany vs Paganism circa 400 AD, you had two equally irrational camps that had crazy stories about god(s) and other supernatural beings interacting with men, and directly interfering with their lives. Science vs Christianity is the rational vs irrational. One is long on questions and short on answers and the other is short on questions and long on answers. Practitioners of religions state their "knowledge" absolutely, and condemnation is meted out to those who oppose the official line. Scientists offer up their findings and their conclusions to be analyzed and debated till all facts have been completely and thoroughly understood. Sure, this may lead to paradigm shifts with new revelations, but science and scientists never purport to express "truth" or "belief" any further than a reasonable model can lead them to conclude such, and even then, I've yet to read an academic article that didn't suggest refinements and more testing were necessary.

Frankly, I'm not even remotely concerned that you may believe your own over-simplification with this. I think for you and I, this palaver is so much boredom alleviation and nothing more. I think the disservice you and I both do here, is we provide some random internet readers with overly simplified explanations of complex concepts without first explaining that these are very complex issues that have taken us years of reading and studying to understand in the first place. I also think it's important to point out neither of us is even debating the literal existence of God nor the validity of natural selection as we've left that topic long ago. Now we've dipped into the issue of semantics which seems to always bog down our debates. I bet when you were in high school you were a CX debater, right?

As for your analysis the realistic outcome of an entire society embracing epistemological nihilism (which I think has won the day, at least in this thread), I'd argue that the interpretation of sociopathy is too narrow. It should be treated as a spectrum encompassing nearly everybody, and the extent to which one considers himself virtuous or righteous ought to be considered as a category of being power-driven and self-serving because that's something that they want, regardless of whether it is creative or destructive to society. Really, I think that the spectrum is ranged more along the lines of Type A vs Type B personality. You have people on one extreme that aren't motivated to do very much at all; and you have people on the other extreme that are motivated to be self-serving according to differing individual preferences.

My analysis is based on anecdotal evidence and is by no means scientifically sound. I'm certain yours is the same. Adequate experiments should be developed to test both our hypotheses, and modify them as more information becomes available. If one or the other begins to coalesce more rapidly than the other, and more evidence is gathered to support one over the other, then that hypothesis will likely become the dominant hypothesis. It still won't be conclusive, but if we can get to that point, then we can at least say one hypothesis is more right than the other - though more refinements and testing will be necessary.

Science deals in observations, not facts. The problem with observations, however is that they are inherently subjective and may or may not be fraught with randomness, noise, or forces that are not understood or even known to exist.

Science deals in observable facts. Deductions are extrapolated based on known information, and those deductions have the ability to be interpreted incorrectly. That is true. I'll concede that. But, like basic mathematics, certain known facts lend themselves to patterning and modeling which, while not completely unassailable, are at least considerably more conclusive than anything remotely requiring "faith" to "believe". I don't have faith that 2 to the power of 10 is 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 is 1,024. It just is. The pattern holds, no matter what, until we delve into astro- and quantum physics. And even there, new rules of governance take over.

Very few scientific theories, in fact none I can recall off the top of my head, were ever perfect in their original form. They've been modified to reflect the greater understanding of randomness, noise and forces not understood or even known to exist. When there is a gap in knowledge, even if a hypothesis is formed to fill the hole, there won't be a credible practitioner of science who won't readily admit that any absolute definition is unknown. "I don't know" is a common refrain heard among scientific types. And this is really the big difference. People who believe in absolutes, people who do need faith to define their thoughts, are incapable of saying, "I don't know." This isn't a problem with science. Science doesn't feel a need to fill voids with specters and goblins and Cthulu (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster). This uncertainty, and the comfortability with the uncertainty, is what drives faith-based believers nuts. And this uncertainty, and the comfortability with it, is what separates knowledge from faith.

This is why academic scientists must acknowledge that for a theory to be valid it must be capable of being disproved. And that is the difference between academic science (which is not necessarily in disagreement with a nihilistic perspective) and pop science that is used as a substitute for religion, political authority, or any other source that purportedly advance the notion that life ought to have meaning.

I've never disagreed with this. Unfortunately, this understanding of the universe invariably tends to lead people down one of two paths. Either a person views life itself as the meaning and does their best to see, do and learn as much as they can for the short time they're here leaving behind a positive legacy for subsequent generations, or they become sociopathic malcontents whose solitary goal is their own self-advancement regardless of the means necessary to do that. When I've had conversations in the past with believers, regardless of their faith, most of them admitted they could never disbelieve because they thought society couldn't function without the threat of divine punishment for wrong-doings (aka sin). Most people fear the worst in themselves, that they'll become the sociopathic malcontent, and worse that everyone else will too, and so they grasp solidly to the idea that life must have meaning. For those people, if they admitted life had no meaning, they would be unable to justify acting good. And for their sake, and for the sake of society at large, I'd rather those people held their beliefs. I'll just continue to disagree with them when they offer up creationism as a valid scientific alternative to natural selection. They can call it whatever they want, but science it ain't.

But he still relies on someone TELLING him its red.

Regardless of whether he chooses to believe people with perfect vision or the interpretations of fellow colorblind people, the fact remains, the square is red.

Unless you're colorblind.

The viewer's colorblindness doesn't make the object any less red. It just makes the viewer unable to see the red. That square is still red.

Scientific "truth", biblical "truth"...same thing. Faith is a prerequisite for belief.

Epistemological nihilism offers the only truth, that logical reasoning is necessarily incomplete or incorrect--therefore all truths are uncertain. The uncertainty of the infinitude of truths that we only believe that we truthfully perceive calls into doubt the very possibility of knowledge. And with that in mind, there really isn't any point in attempting to educate TJones, or he you, or that I should bother to explain any of this.

...or to continue breathing. Since there's no point, why even bother living? Let's just kill every living thing on this planet by detonating every single nuclear device in the world at the same time.

Nihilism is inherently false. Life itself negates it. But, I'm glad you brought up the word "truth". Truth is undoubtably unreliable, but quantifiable fact is non-negotiable.

We may disagree on the color, shade, tone and texture that defines the color below, but undeniably it is red. Fact and truth aren't the same thing. Science deals in facts. Philosophy and religion deal in truths. Truth will never be complete, but facts, well... facts are red:

Remember boys and girls evolution is NOT the only theory out there.

It may not be the only hypothesis, but yeah, it pretty much is the only scientific theory supported by any shred of evidence.

I just typed a lengthy response in an attempt to educate you on the subject but then deleted it. If you haven't familiarized yourself with the overwhelming mountain range of evidence that proves natural selection as scientific fact by now, then there's not really any point in trying to educate you here. You wouldn't read it anyhow.

Also Attica, you sound really white. Nobody is going to explain hip-hop to you in 2010 in any sort of meaningful way; it'd be like kids trying to explain to an 70 year old in the 1960's what the word "cool" meant.

Say what you will, but modern hip-hop and r&b lack soul. You can say I'm uncool for not "getting" it, but the fact remains most of the performers have zero credibilty as musicians. They might be poets, maybe, and I'm prepared to admit as much if you'll admit dada is art, particularly that Duchamp's toilet is art:

What, don't see the "art"? Maybe you're just not cool.

Odds are, if it can't be explained in any meaningful way, it doesn't really exist in the first place. I stand by what I wrote earlier; hip-hop, in it's current iteration is irrelevant. My opinion doesn't doom hip-hop to the dustbins of history. I just don't see much need to give two craps about The Krackernutz losing his job on a pop radio station for playing music that doesn't fit their format.

Also, out of curiosity, what exactly sounds "white" about me? Is it that I think modern rap sucks, as if only blacks (or otherwise only non-whites) can appreciate it? Or, is it that I write in complete sentences, and what does that mean you're implying about the writing skills of non-white people? I hope neither of those two reasons are why you say I "sound really white". Besides that, what difference does it make if I am white? Does that mean my opinion on the merits of various forms of rap don't matter? Is this an us vs them mentality you're applying to race? If so, good job setting the movement back several decades. You're a real credit to your race, whichever one that might be.

Hot on the heels of Jan Brewer signing another law with a huge potential for xenophobic and racist abuse, cops in Seattle prove that cops can, despite so many people's beliefs to the contrary, act racist.

It's ok though, the offending cop issued a tearful apology.

This is what happens when such vile rhetoric reaches this current pervasive level. People need to slow down, breathe, count to ten and seriously think about why they're actually mad. There's so much misdirected anger out there right now, growing and feeding on itself. I, for one, think it's time to muzzle the talking heads whose job it is to do nothing but incite and increase this anger.

I want to see Rupert Murdoch and his gang of clowns hauled off to court on charges of sedition.

This place is great. Went to a wedding there and it was fabulous. Held the dinner inside and they got married on th patio. So glad it's still a restaurant.

It's great unless you live across the street as my wife and I once did.

Let me strike that. It was great unless the bride and groom went cheap on the band or worse, entertained their guests with karaoke. Some evenings my lullaby was sung by the human equivalent of a rutting tomcat.

<fade out> Imperial Death March... </fade out>

It's like waking up after a particularly heinous bender only to discover huge gaps missing from memory. I could swear there were more things that happened, but for the life of me, I don't know what they were.

Got to give it a chance, just like many other things that lately have suprisingly turned better to much better than expected.

What, beastiality?

Still think I'll pass.

Kids these days, with their cell phones and the rock and roll music!

*shakes fist angrily in the air*

Explain! Why would you mention Atlanta?

Haven't you heard? Atlanta is heaven on earth. The streets are paved with gold (those that aren't rail anyhow), and the rivers flow with Coca-Cola and honey. Every person in Atlanta is super-rich ($100 mil and above only, please), and all the orphans have been adopted by Ted Turner and Tyler Perry.

Also, God vacations in Atlanta.

I won't mention any names because I might get scolded for mentioning certain cities that have succeeded in these areas without sending talent to NYC and LA.

Atlanta?

AttacaFlinch is right, but still, if we get something that stands out, I don't want it to be emo rock star, I want it to be like princess Diana and I think this is it.

Emo Building?*

* I only have Paint at work, not Photoshop, so don't be too critical of my artistic genius.

I was being sarcastic.

Too late. I already broke into your house and set your Tivo to record it.

Hope you don't mind.

I like this building. We just need something that stands out... we have nothing that stands out.

Totally. In Downtown alone, Pennzoil, BofA, Heritage Plaza, the Chevron buildings and Wells Fargo don't stand out in the least.

Booooring.

Thorough economic analysis of the Double Down.

Its impact to KFC's bottomline may be deeper than our mere jokes could have anticipated.

I think it was a pretty good piece mostly because of the things they selected. It could have been a much stupider list if it were a lesser writer, imo.

I suppose. Still though, it seems every travel article about Houston has the same general outline:

1. I bet when I say "Houston", all you can think of is ugly and flat and hot.

2. Well, you're right, but it also has cool things that oil money bought.

3. It has Montrose! (complete with gays and other trendy things.)

4. The Menil: brought to you by oil money.

5. The Galleria is a freakin' big mall!

6. Restaurants, restaurants, restaurants, all either in the loop or within the Galleria area.

7. That's it. Nothing more to see here.

This one was different in that it included a blurb about architecture (brought to you by lack of regulations and oil money) and Disco Green (brought to you by a dig at how dead Houston's downtown is).

i don't think anyone's covered this yet, but not a bad article in the new york times travel section:

http://travel.nytime...el/09hours.html

They did, but it got listed in the mod section.

Interesting article, but it seems to me this writer just tread on the same old ground that every travel writer has been before. And while the tone of the article was generally positive, it appeared he couldn't help but dig in with the typical New Yorker sneer: "And the view from an airplane isn’t exactly inviting: a flat and featureless plain of generic towers sprawling into the horizon." In the same paragraph, he also made sure to mention Enron, as if that dead company defined the city. As we all are aware, NYC has never had a corporation that has violated business ethics codes.

I buy my power from wind.

I get my power from breaking wind.

It's my superhero power.

Or why some resemble and act more like Neanderthal man than others.

Neanderthal:

Vin Diesel:

"That movie's so bad, even a caveman can act in it."

hate to say it, but i told ya so ;P

it's like opening a bad birthday present.

In theory, it's brilliant. In practice, it's, "Thanks for the socks, gramgram."