"@Borror0: considering that the US is 6.5% of the total world surface and 4.5% of the total world population, it is small by any reasonable measure. Therefore, I think this question applies to a minority of the visitors to the site, and would be better be internationalized"
“is this question going to help other users or just the asker” could, as I understand it, be broken down into two separate questions, “Is this question going to help other users? Is this question going to help just the asker?”
It could, but the real question is "is this question going to help other users?" That's what I answered to. The "or just the user" is just to clarify the alternative.
The Boy Scouts of America are an admittedly Christian organization. They have "policies which prohibit atheists and agnostics from membership in its Scouting program, and prohibit 'avowed' homosexual people from leadership roles in its Scouting program as directly violating its fundamental princi...
@Ami It explains how order is formed from disorder. How patterns emerge from nothing. That's what Chaos Theory is. A simple mathematical equation with constant feedback can produce highly complex outputs which are unpredictable. eg: Mandelbrot.
@StefanoPalazzo Your question is so thorough that I'm surprised that you didn't point the msot obvious: the Qur'an was written AFTER the invention of mummification so that's not a prediction.
I'm not sure I would understand what you were saying, if I wasn't already aware of it
I have no idea if the process was understood or even known at that time. However, anyone of that time that saw an "ancient corpse" this well preserved would know that something is not normal. In other words, it wouldn't be too surprising if Muhammad knew of "undecaying Egyptian corpses"
@Borror0 please go ahead and edit it if you can improve it, I'll take a look at it later in the day (it's quite early here :-) and I'm not quite awake yet)
And thanks for the honesty, I'm not a native English speaker
I assumed the idea that mummification was known by the learned and not by the people was common sense, for the time. But perhaps I should just reference your answer instead of trying to paraphrase
No idea, I got some snide comment earlier today about my answer being not well sourced. Which, since they are, I can only interpret as someone taking offence to my tone
I also got a comment to "drop the professorial tone"
I'm German, and I try to speak British English as best I can, it's the language I've learned at school, and I'm always trying to be consistent. However, much of my English vocabulary and phrasing I picked up from British television programmes, films and books. Which is why I often use phrases lik...
Somewhat. It depended on the area and the officials involved. There is rarely anything Total in Totalitarianism. And at any rate, the Bloc were autonomous. If you really mean the Soviet Union, even here you have a lot of unevenness. The USSR was a BIG place.
Some officials found religion useful....
I upgraded to Maverick and now I never get the password dialog that 10.04 had for installing packages - it just NOOPs from the GUI. Ran update-manager with user privileges from terminal and no error output.
I understand that 10.10 now uses APT. Is there a simple fix in the policy mods to enable...
The first one is a joke. Just laugh it off. It's not because someone is hurt by what you said that there is necessarily something wrong with what you said. Fair and constructive criticism can still hurt some people's feelings. It's their problem, not yours.
I agree with you' as a general rule, you should link to stuff. "Common knowledge" can often be wrong: look at how many people believe in god. Unless you have some evidence to prove what you say, you can be wrong and anyone answering on this site should be aware of that fact.
Take into account also that he must be a bit frustrated with his problem
At AskUbuntu, we're sort of the official support channel for Ubuntu - which means people expect of us to solve their problems (and rightly so, that's why we do it)
None the less, I have been told before to sound professorial even If I speak German. So I like to be sure
In that second case, it does seem that the problem is not with your English but with th technicality of your vocabulary though I can't be quite sure because I don't quite understand much of what is going on.
@Borror0 I see three possible reasons. First, he might have wanted a refutation of the refutation. Second, he might have wanted to attract attention to the question. Third, he might have decided to do something random.
Looking for statistics about Atheists I encountered the same statistic over and over, "0.21% of Americans in prison are atheists." I have found one source that asserts this(it is in the form of correspondence between the proprietor of an atheist web-site and a research analyst with the Federal Bu...
We will. We freely will. In your face. Phi… er… Yahw… er… Nevermind.
I have been talking about a bounty trick earlier. You have to provide a good answer to a question, wait until you get upvoted, and start a bounty on that question. That way, you don't get to lose reputation points, since people would be lured into the question and would compensate the reputation loss by upvoting the topmost answer. Oh, and as a side-effect, they might give new answers.
Its told in Quran, that the Pharoah's body will be preserved until the world ends. So how can a book like this if it's not from God, predict or write something like this? What can I think about this from a atheist point of view?
How come the things written in Quran, the predictions, come true ?
Say that you did admit your interpretation of the verses may be lacking in your answer and that, if he missed it, he should read the second to last paragraph.
I would suggest against trying to change the organization from within. It's a group you join voluntarily, so joining with the intention of changing one of their founding principles is disrespectful and most likely futile. Since they preferred losing government sponsorship over stopping their reli...
I heard he was a troll (I know his rep was like -800 or something like that), which was a shock to me because he's one of the most reasonable users here.
For religious guys this question is the ultimate response and justification for their religions. What is the purpose of life, universe and everything for an atheist?
It's a bad story, I think. While there are problems with the publication methods used, this story should instead be focused on how scientific stories are picked up in the press.
"A greater realization of these effects by journalists, scientists, and everyone else will lead to more caution in reporting results, more realistic expectations, and, I would guess, a decline in the decline affect (more accurately, the stat-psych effect)."
Scientists do realize this.
It's the journalists and everyone else that have that problem.
If we want to call it anything, lets call it the Bad Anime effect. There seems to be a lot more bad anime today than in years past, but that is largely because there is a certain percentage of all anime that is bad, and there is a lot more anime being produced.
I would bet you're reacting this way because it says not nice things about science and you like science. Basically, it's "someone is picking on my team" and you feel you have to defend your team.
@StefanoPalazzo How is that a non-sequitur? If we admit that scientific results do vary somewhat, and we consider publication bias, the results that tend to be on the upper end of the variation are more likely to be published than those on the lower end.
@Borror0 That is a natural reaction, and I have a special sore-spot for people that attack science based on misunderstandings of the scientific method or terms used.
Science cannot tell us the purpose of Life, the Universe, and everything. See, science doesn't work. Oh, and those scientists have not even invented biological immortality.
@Borror0 "Extreme results, ..., are .. generally followed by less extreme ones." → that suggests an equivalence that hasn't been established, no? Why assume that chance plays a role, and if it doesn't, is the comparison still fair?
The pilot equivalence involves chance, a big and important factor that hasn't been established in the topic. The example makes perfect sense, but regarding scientific publications, it's no more than a metaphor.
I'd assert that chance plays no rote at all in the process of publishing scientific findings
@Borror0 I accept that. As I said, I suspect that I just don't like examples. A was a bit quick to type those two Latin words, criticising without thinking about it properly
I was wrong. I don't like it, but it does make sense now that you've pointed out that I confused finding with publishing
And I do know what publication bias is. It's the reason I've never published anything :P
I also don't have the follow-through to finish studies that don't seem to lead to anything. Even though finding no effect could potentially be very useful. I've stopped two of my projects because I found patents covering them, for example. Didn't follow up on it, checking if the patents really explain absolutely everything
Search your patent office for something covering "topological sort". And you won't find a thing, but I assure you its well publicised and patented. probably more than once
Communism is great, bitches. We in the USSR have had no copyright laws, no patents, and no whatever! A book, once published, always became public-domain.
(Incoming weasel-words, ETA 1 second) People say that a quarter to a half of all scientific discoveries in the 20th century were made in the USSR.
I find it difficult to verify that claim, but I find it easy to believe it as well, seeing how many ideas originating from Russian scientists or Russia-educated scientists are used in modern technology and science
Mathematics really flourished in the USSR
Perelman, Kolmogorov, Gromov, Kontsevich… They are legion
Where should I being, Mr. Newton?
My teacher says that the answer is 2, but I don't get it.
She's right.
Therefore, the sum of the two waters... is water! And by the same token, 1 + 1 must equal 1.
True... my brain + yours = my brain.
I just wonder, is it a coincidence that the guy mimicked Gottfried Leibniz so well?
In our educational system, great scientists come off idealised
Does the same hold for the European and the North American educational systems? Is it common knowledge over there that Leibniz considered himself the Single Most Important and Intelligent Person on Earth?
@StefanoPalazzo They all suffer from the same problem: first-comism, and rewarding thought rather than action. There is nothing so great about any single idea, that merely thinking of it first should grant you a monopoly on it for the durations that patents are suggesting.
I have an idea, lets me a game-controller rumble, by affixing a pager to it! Then let's not even attempt to market this idea. Someone will eventually come upon it, and we can sue them!
I still think patents will be the great undoing of capitalism, but no one wants to listen long enough or seriously enough to get the threat.
I still read them as an anti-scientific intelligent-designesque way for the US to maintain super-power status well into the future. But, India and China won't respect them at the expense of their own prosperity.
Despotism is a form of government in which a single entity, called the 'despot', rules with absolute power. That entity may be an individual, as in an autocracy, or it may be a group, as in an oligarchy. The word "despotism" means to "rule in the fashion of a despot" and should not be confused with 'despot'.
Despot comes from the Greek despotes, which roughly means "master" or "one with power", and it has been used to translate a wide variety of titles and positions. It was used to describe the unlimited power and authority of the Pharaohs of Egypt, employed in the Byzantine court as a ...
No, StackOverflow should buy some more hard drive space and stop deleting content. This kind of stuff is pathetic, my gmail account has over 7GB of space now! That's probably enough to hold the whole question/answer db.
I upgraded to Maverick and now I never get the password dialog that 10.04 had for installing packages - it just NOOPs from the GUI. Ran update-manager with user privileges from terminal and no error output.
I understand that 10.10 now uses APT. Is there a simple fix in the policy mods to enable...
Its told in Quran, that the Pharoah's body will be preserved until the world ends. So how can a book like this if it's not from God, predict or write something like this? What can I think about this from a atheist point of view?
How come the things written in Quran, the predictions, come true ?
For religious guys this question is the ultimate response and justification for their religions. What is the purpose of life, universe and everything for an atheist?
Where should I being, Mr. Newton?
My teacher says that the answer is 2, but I don't get it.
She's right.
Therefore, the sum of the two waters... is water! And by the same token, 1 + 1 must equal 1.
True... my brain + yours = my brain.
No, StackOverflow should buy some more hard drive space and stop deleting content. This kind of stuff is pathetic, my gmail account has over 7GB of space now! That's probably enough to hold the whole question/answer db.