@DoubtingThomas I'm not sure. But you better be careful since I can apparently remove you as room-owner. (The chat system is still a bit of a mystery to me.)
@DoubtingThomas It reminds my of the "why" questions I used to ask my parents as a child. If you follow the trail long enough, you always get back to God.
@DoubtingThomas That phrase refers to how a whole bunch of fundamental physical constants are at just the right "setting" to allow life. If you tweaked any of them juuuust a bit one way or the other, no life would exist.
I did some math a while ago and found that for a particular set of five of said constants, the degree of fine-tuning was like getting a 1 on every single one of over 100,000 6-sided die.
On the first roll, that is.
Five out of like 22. It's ridiculous, and it's awesome. Some of the strongest evidence for a Creator out there.
For a start, we don't actually know how fine-tuned this universe is. If things were a little different, life as we know it wouldn't exist. What does that mean?
@TRiG right; life as we know. But that's the only life we know. Even if there is another type of life, tweaking just a few things would still eradicate our existence.
@TRiG so while that's certainly not incontrovertible proof (and I don't really think science can find any such proof of God), it definitely points to God.
@TRiG you can't just label an assumption as "artificial" because you're biased against it. Just because thinking seems "magical" doesn't mean that it's end isn't true.
and yet this debate is going nowhere, really. "the folly of what we preach" is "foolishness to men"
@TRiG for sake of cheekiness, if we all do it, what's to say a reasonable, logical, scientific explanation isn't actually magical thinking? That, in hindsight 200 years from now, we'll all scoff at today's mindset?
@DoubtingThomas Three good articles there. In fact, the entire content of that blog post is something I once said here in chat. And then I thought to myself, "three links to good, interesting articles, tied together fairly neatly: that should go on my links blog". So I did.
@Flimzy It's going fairly well. Currently preparing for a UK trip at the beginning of next month. Finally got accommodation sorted and most of my trains booked last night.
Birmingham is the big International Con, and happens every second year, and in the off years there are loads of smaller conventions in other countries.
@MarcGravell I might be able to look you up at the end of August, when I'll be in Birmingham. For this upcoming trip I'll mainly be in Nodnol. And just for a couple of days: heading back on Tuesday.
@TRiG: Still to be determined. I've never been to Europe at all. I have friends to visit in Paris and Liepzig, then from there I'll spend 2-4 months just seeing whatever I fancy.
Actually, I lost that, bought it again, and then found the original. So now I have two. That's the one I brought InterRailing with me. The one I bought more recently is more up to date.
@Flimzy Oh, always buy the latest. It's just that the sixteenth edition, which coincidentally happens to be the first one I bought, was also the first to show up on DuckDuckGo.
@Flimzy Well, it was a comfortable modern European Night Train. And unlike most night trains, I didn't have to pay an extra reservation fee: it was included in my InterRail pass.
The Upper Room
The Upper Room