1. To be clear: Fashion is the invention from chrononauts from the far future, so they could tell in an instant roughly when they were at any time in Earth's history, in case something went wrong with their time machine.  That's why fashion changes so much more rapidly recently, because any time around the year 1000 is pretty much the same, but ( Read more... )

Dr. Chaos suggested that I might enjoy The Waking Up podcast by Sam Harris, because, while he is very vocal about his atheism, and I am very vocal about there being no way to be sure there is no God, that he reminded her of arguing with me.  I did.  It was a hoot ( Read more... )

Reading on the VRE the initial chapters of a book by Lee Smolin, Time Reborn. (I get the impression he is controversial in his field of physics.) He is claiming that the Platonists have won, that modern western scientific thinking is that time is an illusion and that the laws of nature are out of the flow of time, that they exist on some eternal ( Read more... )

The key to Ray Bradbury is that he unspools yards and yards of verbiage and you have to go in and snip out the golden threads. I had a friend like that (well, before he became a chronic user of weed) and he was a delight to be with, because you could start a topic, sit back, and just watch him go.

Interviewer: What is space travel going to do for ( Read more... )

This is an addon to a previous post, where I said this:

I've heard some b*llsh*t wherein we leave ourselves some wiggle room to be actual free actors by saying, well, the brain works with chemicals, and the chemicals are made of objects small enough for quantum effects to throw on some randomosity, but on the average ...

and explodingbat asked if I had read ( Read more... )

I been thinking about this for a while now ( Read more... )

How do we prove it?