Heh. Good to see you, Brinn. Like me, you must be looking in every now and then, thinking, "Oh, there's no way they can defend this." Followed by, "Nope. Looks like they can." And every time I look in here, it's like walking into my son's room. This is how you guys want to deport...

Esmer was the contradiction after which he named himself. He could be a confounding or occasionally insufferable bastard (kindred spirits, us), yet I was never mad at him and I'm more than a little bummed out to hear of his passing. He never put up with bullshit, and I respected the hell out of that...

For my part, I've worked in tech for the most part of 17 years--4 years in the Navy, 3 years and change at one semiconductor company, a bit more than 7 at another, with some college for personal fulfillment in between. I know my job better than most other techs, know some of their jobs better than t...

Real communists would say that this is part of the problem. By monetizing your value, you're separating the meaning of work from the value. You should learn new skills to better enjoy your trade and contribution (or possibly to decrease your effort required, allowing you to pursue goals outside of w...

Chaos systems are not actually chaotic. Tautologically speaking, chaotic systems are, in fact, chaotic. As it was originally defined, however, (not by the Greeks, I mean) chaos is the sensitivity of open/dynamic systems to changes in initial conditions. They're deterministic and can be modeled give...

As he points out, evolution is perfectly reasonable once there are enough varieties of genetic material for natural selection to start "selecting." But the problem is explaining where the variety came from in the first place ... or even where life came from in the first place. DNA is a be...

The movements are silly, especially toward the end of the second season. Dancing robots? . But that doesn't make me dislike it. And although silly isn't quite the right word for it, I think that's partially the point, to be strikingly dissimilar from normal human modes of being. I mean, it's not too...

I was really looking forward to this series but also kind of worried, especially as I'm not a huge fan of mockumentary TV series like The Office even if I do enjoy them as films, like Man Bites Dog. Anyway, my worries appear to have been misplaced. The show is hilarious. In fact, I can't remember th...

Yeah, the OA is pretty much Brit Marling. By that, I mean it kind of has all the magical realism/ new weird markings of Another Earth or The Sound of My Voice (still waiting for the rest of that story, btw). I really enjoyed the slow burn tension of trying to figure out if OA is an unreliable narrat...

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: Earlier in the thread, I found Wayfriend's dismissal a bit like Einstein's dismissal of quantum mechanics ("God does not play dice.") In its infancy, QM was a bit like SR or even the holographic principle theory (though I vaguely recall someone publishi...

Um, the guy who introduced the topic at hand to the guy who wrote the article (on Vice, no less, which while it has some great stuff, also has a less than infrequent tendency to suffer from being the result of the character flaws of the guys who started Vice) was a former advertiser. The guy who wro...

Yes, Zar, I've gone to bed every night wiping away a tear about how I felt you were mean to me in a response to a theory I didn't believe one way or another. (though a few years later under the influence, I was absolutely convinced that this was the case, even if I lacked the same conviction once so...

Did you read the first sentence of the thread where I admitted that I used to think the idea was silly? Indeed, I did. And my internal response was, "Silly? You responded antagonistically toward the one who proposed it." And considering I linked the paper from an Oxford professor where yo...

You proposed that we're in a Matrix, and yet unicorns are too ridiculous to contemplate? You want to claim that anything can happen, and yet unicorns are impossible? It's just a horse with a horn on its head. I'd say that unicorns are about 1,000,000 times more likely than the idea that the entire ...

I have no clue how you got there from what I said. Z seems to have gotten it with a little help from the good doctor. Perhaps you should reread and come back when you have something I can respond to.

How can coverage be "weak?" It's either true or false, biased or objective. Not weak or strong. Support for that claim, or did you become a journalism expert while I was gone. Well, let's start out with your claim, since mine is a response to it. How can coverage be "weak?" It's...

How can coverage be "weak?" It's either true or false, biased or objective. Not weak or strong. Support for that claim, or did you become a journalism expert while I was gone. Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 (same source as Link 2, FWIW.) Link 4 (that liberal rag, Forbes) The media covered Trump rel...

Don Exnihilote wrote:Can anyone recall the press ever making a mistake in Trump's favor?

I rest my case.

The main stream media's weak yet incessant coverage of his campaign pretty much made him president, so, yeah. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.