hugh4

But proofs always come back to axioms, and on what basis do we accept axioms? That they sound intuitively right. So we've just kicked the problem upstairs a bit, we can't avoid using our intuition.

Personally I'm more likely to believe 2 + 2 = 4, something I can easily check to my own satisfaction using four objects, than I am to believe the Axiom of Choice.

But are people more likely to accept the axioms of Principia Mathematica (and the soundness of every logical step from page 1 to 300) than they are to accept the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 based on intuitive notions of what twoness, fourness and plusness are?

But they could have extradited him before he ever went into the embassy. They didn't. Only Sweden is currently attempting to extradite him.

Angkor Wat was built in the twelfth century AD, and is well within the known technological capabilities of the Khmer empire at the time.

A vimana, which from googling appears to be some kind of flying temple in Sanskrit myths, does not appear to have actually existed.

> Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory

I'm not convinced we can. For starters, the nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it was back in the 80s when those sorts of statements were popular. And secondly, as I understand it, it was always a bit of a lie, an estimate based on some silly assumptions (e.g. that everybody in the world lives in cities), which in repetition eventually lost those assumptions.

And yes, I agree with the other poster that it's pretty much impossible to kill everyone on earth with climate change.

Species-ending diseases I do worry about, but maybe that just means I don't know as much about immunology as I do about nuclear weapons.

Oh, right, now I understand.

Agreeing to do something impossible is easy. Committing to doing something impossible is no harder.

It's just that doing something impossible is tricky.

Wait, you just got $44 million in funding and you don't have 100 users yet?

It's not about portrayal, it's about actual physiology.

The percentage of alcohol users (ie almost everybody) who become alcoholic is quite low. The percentage of heroin or meth users who become heroin or meth addicts is very high indeed.

Alcohol still of course does plenty of damage, unsurprisingly since it's the only such substance which the majority of the population consumes. Maybe the world would be a slightly better place if we hadn't started drinking booze all those thousands of years ago. But I don't buy the idea that because we accept one particular form of stupid behaviour that we should tolerate all the others... any more than I buy the idea that just because I tolerate my unemployed brother living in my apartment that I should open the doors to let everyone else live there too.

Indeed they do, because the guards' union want to maintain their monopoly on the contraband smuggling business.

True, although I'd guess that the massive decrease in mortality in infants under 1 (who are still massively more likely to die than older children) is probably due to improved medical intervention.

For older children and teenagers it's probably better safety equipment, particularly in cars. I guess we've also got improved treatments now for the few diseases which actually do kill children, such as various cancers.

But hey, it's still good news, even if "healthier" isn't the way to describe it.

> If you think about it logically for the era, it's incredibly unlikely that Jesus was actually unmarried

Only on the assumption that "being married" is uncorrelated with "starting some weird travelling hippie Jewish tradesman cult", which I assume it isn't. Having a wife and family obligations tends to hamper the travelling-and-preaching lifestyle somewhat.

Also, people who spend their 30s claiming to be the Messiah and getting crucified for it probably spent their 20s being a bit weird as well, even if nobody bothered to write about it.

Has SpaceX actually cleaned out and reused any of their recovered rockets yet? I'm guessing no, they're still analysing them, but it'll be interesting when they do. (Damned if I'd want my payload on the first recycled rocket...)

Or, y'know, Paris. Or Brussels. Or Paris, the time before. Or Paris, the time before that. Or Madrid. Or London. Or...

What a ridiculous single data point to cherry-pick.

It's true, when terrorists attack Israel (as they so regularly do) they don't usually use guns. But nor do they use knives. They use explosives.

An engine doesn't get 100 mpg, a vehicle does.

Attach it to a normal-sized vehicle and get 100 mpg under realistic driving conditions, and I'll be impressed. ('til then I'll be internet-snarky!)

> Heck, so are single farms.

There's single farms bigger than a lot of countries.

That's not even a word.

Maybe, but if the new cross-pollination just confuses the issue rather than clarifying it, what's the point?

"Suppose you have a bunch of flowers in a field, and they're planted so that the east-west direction corresponds to the diameter of the flower and the north-west direction corresponds to the length of the leaf."

"Huh?"

"Suppose you have a bunch of data points in an n-dimensional space"

"Oh, gotcha"

If there's always someone saying there's a bubble, regardless of whether there is or not, does it mean there's never a bubble?

If my watch always says it's 3:22, regardless of whether it is or not, does that mean it's never 3:22?

True. On the other hand, nobody was trying to build them fifty years ago.

I was actually thinking about this earlier in the day. Could we derive the law of universal gravitation if all we had was a bunch of data about the positions of objects at times plus a bunch of machine learning algorithms, and were otherwise complete idiots?

But in this case, no, because there's nothing in the particle data that we have that can't already be explained by the standard model, plus any number of other possible models. If only we could find something in the data that we couldn't explain, we might be able to make some progress, but that data doesn't exist.

> my wife has no fear of getting shot in China

As long as she doesn't say anything nice about democracy or anything.

Have we really forgotten the Tiananmen Square Massacre so quickly?

> What libertarian could possibly support Trump?

A pragmatic one.

And that's just one universe. Just think how many more there might be...

Indeed. Either the people 10,000 years from now will be smart enough to figure out something better, or they'll be hunter-gatherers who won't be too deterred by a little sea level rise on the very edge of their territory.

But what language do true Scotsmen use?

Exactly.

Maybe, but I'm not convinced that they're anything other than some lucky coincidences.

>He said his people were forbidden from going near the craters, as that was where the fire-devil ran down from the sun and set the land ablaze, killing people and forming the giant holes.

Australian Aboriginal mythology attributes every geographical landmark to the action of some kind of spirit in the dreamtime. These rocks are three sisters who ran away from their family and were turned to stone. This river was formed by a giant snake. The vast majority of the stories are, of course, just made-up guesses, so there's a pretty uphill battle to make a convincing case that one isn't.

A crater, well, it looks like what you get when you throw a rock into the sand, so that part of the myth is an obvious guess, that it was caused by some big force acting from above.

What's wrong with entrenching the existing social order?