Not a Divergence Meter, but it's close enough.

g0rth · 9 days

Hmm. One of those Russian nixie tubes that has an upside down 2 for a 5.

davidreiss666 · 14 days

It is a Guardian article, a straight copy.. And it is linked from the Alternet article via the "wind energy" keyword.

jenniferwillow · 14 days

Yep, that's a bit OTT. Could troll better.

jenniferwillow · 14 days

Hmm, yes, the chapter that says that you only get into heaven if you believe in the Christian religion. So if you happen to be born somewhere in the 70% of the world that is non-Christian, then you're out of luck. And the other main religions in the world mostly say something along the same lines, although in their case, you have to believe in their God, of course.

MxTINKxM · 14 days

True. However. I should point out that this problem seems a whole lot worse for those people with subtle hearing damage caused by having their iPod at max. Not being able to distinguish voice from background noise is a classic symptom. Anybody having real trouble with this might want to go for a hearing test.

alllie · 15 days

Amazing! That page just has to have been written by a satirist troll. The Conservapedia admins have said that they've had to undo the work of satirists in the past. And yet you'd think that they could never have read that page because the stuff on it is so self-evidently ludicrous. But a Google search turns up numerous articles that identify it as a high-profile Conservapedia project and it's even highlighted in the Wikipedia article on Conservapedia. So they have to be aware of it. But they can't be aware of it. Fuck, the page even endorses the Colbert Report. Poe's what?

jokes_on_you · 17 days

The black colour of the needles means that I can't seem to get an overall visualization of the magnetic field, although I can see where each individual needle is pointed. It'd have been better if they'd been bright red. I've dragged around the colour curves of the image to give a quick fix that goes some way towards what I'm getting at:

http://i.imgur.com/z6CLy.jpg

humortogo · 17 days

Yes, I noticed that the wording in that poll was odd, and had to read it 3 times before I figured what it was saying. Then I figured that it had to be a rider to another poll question, without which it was meaningless.

GentlemanREX · 18 days

Well, back up a couple of posts to where I mention how you might regard each moment of existence as self-contained, so if you follow what I wrote there, you can have existence without continuity. And if you look at what others in this thread have said about mind-uploading and digital-immortality, then if that happens, there really will be serious problems about how to define identity for legal purposes.

GentlemanREX · 18 days

The fear of the ending comes from evolution programming the animal to protect its genes. As "intelligent" beings, we try to rationalize the preservation of "self" as the preservation of the continuity of our mind. But it's something of a false rationalization given that the continuity is arguably an illusion, anyway.

GentlemanREX · 18 days

But "now" or even time itself doesn't exist as such -- it's a continuum. i.e. there's nothing special about "now", this moment in time, above any other moment in time. Even the direction of time is an illusion of sorts, because you only remember the past rather than the future due to a property of entropy (that bit's complicated).

Continuity of self is an illusion, caused by the storage of memory in your brain. If some super-advanced alien were to create an exact copy of you while you were asleep, then destroyed the original, the copy would wake up the next day and would truly be you as much as you ever were from one day to the next, anyway.

One way to look at it is to imagine your conciousness as existing only for each separate instant in time, but instantly creating its own past from stored memory, thus creating the illusion of progression through time. As far as the continuity of "self" is concerned, the laws of physics say that you might as well worry about where you were before you were born than after your death.

Why do you seem to be your current age rather than five years old, say? Because five-years-old-you is effectively a different person, as future-you is a different person, even as I, Swipecat, am a different person. As I've said, it's just storage of memory that gives your conciousness the illusion of connection to your past self.

There ya go. Study advanced science, and you'll know these truths for certain, because nothing else can possibly fit the observations. So you can either get existential angst about it, or just don't worry about it and enjoy life because continuity of self is a convincing illusion. Have fun.

Edit: typos.

jmcantrell · 24 days

Obligatory

thewrathofmary · 26 days

Your last point is what it's all about really -- that we're in Europe and most posters here are in the USA, land of people that would create a 100000 page Encyclopaedia dedicated to insisting that every word in the Bible is true and that there are no valid counterexamples.

Callicious · 29 days

Yes, the change of the Earth's rotation rate can be extrapolated back in time from the minute changes that can be detected now using atomic clocks, but direct evidence can be found in Precambrian "sedimentary rhythmites".

Swipecat · 1 month

Sorry. The Mt. Rushmore thing was probably legit but the process for this sorta thing is well known to filmmakers. Daylight photography, reduced saturation & brightness and boosted contrast. Blue-matched cutout to remove sky and add starfield or whatever.

ampersand117 · 1 month

Dammit, why not link to the original article rather than somebody else enthusing about that article?!

HornyRhino17 · 1 month

It's more likely that they wanted the previous executives' brainchilds to fail so that they could concentrate on their own brainchilds. It's unlikely that they gave a fuck about the previous executives -- they just wanted their own projects to succeed to further their own careers.

prwlr · 1 month

Being a Brit, if I find some large spider in the bath in the morning, I just pick it up and chuck it out the window. I presume that wouldn't be a smart thing to do in the Americas?

wazit · 1 month

How was that done?

With mine, I used the GIMP to resize it to 62px, which seemed to be the original size, then resized to 248px with "sinc" interpolation.

wazit · 1 month

In the interest of science, just tried to see if any enhancement was possible...

http://i.imgur.com/otbHS.jpg

theolcollegetry · 1 month

That wording gives away the fact that they're using the Blue Coat filter. Blue coat are owned by a bunch of fundamentalist loonies and are notorious for this. Atheists have written a shit-ton of letters to them, using the full range from extreme vehemence to extreme politeness, but they always get back letters saying (again with various degrees of politeness) that they're shit out of luck. Blue Coat are determined to lump atheism in with devil-worship and the like, and thus ensure that atheism gets blocked in most installations of their filter.

KC-53 · 1 month

Electron micrographs of microscopic life-forms always have this odd "fake" look about them. As though somebody sculpted it from plaster by hand and then gave it a coat of emulsion paint. But that's a consequence of the way that such specimens have to be prepared for electron microscopy. They are given a conductive coating, usually of a metal like gold, deposited by vacuum evaporation.

kurtkaboom · 1 month

But an image loads faster than most web-pages. It shouldn't be that way around but it is. Most web-pages are filled with hundreds of objects in ridiculously elaborate javascript that take several seconds to render.

Swipecat

TROPHY CASE

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