1. Gnaritas Monstrum is an animated piece where two young girls flee a terrifying monster. The monster corners the girls and they are forced make a difficult choice. This brief, moving piece was the winner of the Graduate Experimental Category in the Greater Philadelphia Student Film Festival. (HT: The Presurfer)
So you're between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? A worried parent might imagine the answer is something like this: Sex, drugs, a little rock 'n' roll. Maybe some cash, or at least the car keys.
Turns out the real answer is quite different. Spending time with family was the top answer to that open-ended question, according to an extensive survey -- more than 100 questions asked of 1,280 people ages 13-24 -- conducted by the Associated Press and MTV. When asked what one thing makes them most happy, 20 percent mentioned spending time with family.
... And sex? Being sexually active leads to less happiness among 13-17-year-olds, according to the survey. If you're 18 to 24, sex might lead to more happiness in the moment, but not in general. Close to half say religion and spirituality are very important. More than half say they believe there is a higher power that has an influence over things that make them happy.
(HT: Family Scholars Blog)
3. The 121 Best Foreign Language Films (So Far) (I've only seen 25 of them but it looks like a fairly comprehensive list.)
4. Philosopher Victor Reppert on "God did it" explanations:
We are often told that "God did it" explanations are "cheating" that they are "pseudo-explanations."…But what if God actually did it? "The butler did it" is a bad explanation unless, well, the butler did it. Does that mean that we, as rational people, are condemned to not believing the truth because to accept a true explanations would be to accept an unacceptable explanation?
… But why demand that theists provide evidence, if, whatever the circumstances, there couldn't be enough evidence. If "God did it" explanations are really verboten, then it hardly makes sense to complain that theists haven't provided evidence for their position. By definition, that's the one thing they can't do.
5. Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods in America (I used to live--and blog--from #5 Rogers Park, Chicago)
6. Scientists predict that redheads may become extinct as early as 2060:
The current National Geographic magazine reports that less than two per cent of the world's population has natural red hair, created by a mutation in northern Europe thousands of years ago.
Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own.
(HT: Neatorama)
7. A Defense of Biblical Inerrancy (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5)
8. Jason Bourne: a ‘John Rambo for liberals’
In The Bourne Ultimatum, as in the first two instalments, the only bad guys are CIA operatives. They think little of bugging phones, using spycams to track troublesome elements, shooting uppity journalists, and blowing up CIA men gone wrong in the teeming streets of foreign cities. As Cosmo Landesman says in The Sunday Times, Bourne is ‘the perfect liberal hero’. He allows ‘liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage blockbuster: they can see him kick a**, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA’. Bourne is, says Landesman, ‘the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia’
9. United States Poverty Map -- an income map that plots the percentage of people living in poverty based on the 2000 Census. (HT: Neatorama)
Such is the (semi-) Calvinistic anthropology in the Buffyverse. Vampires are Totally Depraved. They are not able to do good; not able to have the slightest spark of moral awareness. It is only the elect who are given the grace to know good from evil and be saved. Angel represents those who are delivered from the abyss by Limited Atonement, for only a handful of vampires have souls.
11. The 33,000 Denominations Myth (HT: Challies.com)
12. A panel discussion at a 2008 Modern Language Association convention will focus on "Queer Nature." From the abstract:
This panel seeks to explore the productive conjunction between queer theory and environmental studies crystallized in the problematic--but extremely generative--notion of "queer nature." It will, at once, take seriously queer theorists historical frustration with the naturalization of nature, especially in terms of the violent repercussions of naturalizing a heteronormative nature, but it will also take seriously environmental theorists call to figure the other-than-human world into our ethico-political theory and praxis.
(HT: The Point)
13. 11 Unconventional Sleep Tips: How to Get to Sleep and Stay Asleep (HT: The Presurfer)
15. We blue-eyed people are likely to achieve more in life than those poor unfortunate brown-eyed folks:
Scientists who conducted the tests said brown-eyed people performed better at reaction time, but those with lighter eyes appeared to be better strategic thinkers, the Daily Mail reported.
Brown-eyed people succeeded in activities such as football and hockey, but lighter-eyed participants proved to be more successful in activities that required skills in time structuring and planning such as golf, cross-country running and studying for exams, the scientists said.
(HT: Reformed Chicks Blabbing)
16. In Praise of Public Servants
Seriously, would you rather live 30 days without a politician or 30 days without a sewage treatment facility in your neighborhood?
The septic tank pumpers, the garbage collectors, and the electricians are the only folks who hold back the threat of a new Dark Ages. They stand alone along the thin, brown line between anarchy and order. Some of the dirtiest jobs are the most vital. And over in Velociville, the truly reliable public servants certainly are doing yoeman's work keeping back the tide of vile bile that would certainly decimate the surrounding civilization.
If the world was a fair place, the sump-pumpers and bilge-bailers of this world would make as much as a Congressman. They do more for the public good than both houses of Congress.
(HT: Instapundit)
17. Texas to Europe: Go Back to Your Quiche Eating. The European Union called on Texas Gov. Rick Perry to eliminate the death penalty in Texas. Perry sent back this response:
“230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.”
(HT: HolyCoast)
18. Why Christians Should Have Nothing To Do With Snowmobiles
19. Study: T-Rex Was a Sprinter, Not a Marathoner. Tyrannosaurus rex, originally believed to be something of a plodder owing to its massive bulk, was capable of speeds up to 18 mph, according to some new calculations.
20. Sewage tells tales about community-wide drug abuse
Recently, scientists have sought ways to gauge illegal drug use by measuring the levels of drugs and their by-products found in rivers and wastewater. Last year, Italian scientists found ways to detect metabolites for cocaine in the Po River, giving law enforcement officials more accurate estimates on cocaine use in the area. The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy has obtained samples from a dozen different waterways in an effort to assess illegal drug use, as well.
21. Quotable -- Hart Pomerantz on Law School: "Law school taught me one thing: how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different." (HT: Through a Glass Darkly)
22. Brains Learn Better At Night
If you think that the idea of a morning person or an evening person is nonsense, then postgraduate student Martin Sale and his colleagues from the University of Adelaide have news for you.
They have found that the time of day influences your brain’s ability to learn—and the human brain learns more effectively in the evening.
23. Quite possibly the worst response to a pageant question every given:
24. Philosopher William F. Vallicella on the "epidemic" of drunk driving:
If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal. I heard this morning an otherwise intelligent C-Span presenter speak more than once of "an epidemic of drunk driving." But an epidemic, by definition, is an outbreak of a contagious disease in excess of what might normally be expected. To describe drunk driving as an epidemic, therefore, is to imply that it is a disease, which is precisely what it is not. Drunk driving is a freely chosen a act. Use of 'epidemic' in connection with drunk driving aids and abets the cockeyed liberal view of the world according to which well-nigh every type of negative behavior is a disease.
Words mean things. Language matters.
25. The Economist: 'Country Briefings'
26. New Method Lets Cops See If a Suspect Pulled the Trigger. Brazilian scientists discover an easy, accurate way to find out whether an individual fired a gun by analyzing trace metals left on the suspected shooter's hands.
27. Wikipedia has a list of retronyms, terms renamed after something similar but newer has come into being.
George H.W. Bush -- A rare example of a living person with a retronym. Until his son, George W. Bush, also became President, George Bush rarely, if ever, used his middle initials.
Orthodox Judaism -- Before the advent of the Reform and Conservative movements, all Judaism was orthodox.
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope -- Originally released in 1977 under the title Star Wars. The new title was applied in a 1981 re-release after the decision to make additional films, allowing Star Wars to refer to the entire series.
(HT: Neatorama)
28. Astronomers Find Gaping Hole In The Universe
University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen "dark matter." While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all.
29. The Anatomy Tattoo Gallery (HT: The Presurfer)
30. Eh, I always thought it came from the sun? "Princeton scientists confirm long-held theory about source of sunshine"
31. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found a link between alcohol consumption and HIV disease progression in HIV-infected persons.
32. Breaking up may not be as hard as the song says -- The devastation caused by a broken heart has been a dominant theme throughout the ages of great literature and pop culture alike. But a new Northwestern University study shows that lovers, especially those madly in love, do much better -- almost immediately -- following a breakup than they imagined they would.
33. A Typical Conversation With My Mom
Can a person be a Christian and a Muslim at the same time?
This Priest says YES
http://webandchurch.blogspot.com/2007/08/muslim-priest.html
Insane!
Two comments --
For anyone who has seen 25 foreign language films, that person needs something else to fill his evenings. I say Magnum, P.I. reruns.
I've been considering that apparent gap between the galaxies. If there were a "big bang", should there not be an empty are at the center of the universe? If there is not, does that mean that the Bang was not the formation method, as supposed by many?
Collin
http://evangelicalperspective.blogspot.com
Hey thanks for the link!
Remind me to invite you to come along the next time I go snowmobiling ...
... oh wait ... I'm not supposed to do that.
Anyway, thanks for the incoming linx!
I'm with you on the fish thing - only it's not my mom it's my wife's family. I have never ever eaten a piece of fish I liked, except for some fish and chips I got in Boothbay Harbor Maine where the fish was fresh off the boat that morning and it was fried completely to death with about an inch of batter all around - the batter masked the taste of the fish enough that I could eat it. But, my wife's family has made it their mission to prove to me that fish is good and I get served fish frequently.
About number twenty-four... I was always under the impression that a secondary definition of epidemic was something to the effect of an unusually high occurrence of anything undesirable. While epidemic was originally limited to epidemiology (obviously), it seems evident to me that the definition has expanded with time.
Regardless, it's helpful to speak of drunk driving as an epidemic because it's an issue of public education and social norms. I've lived in a number of places around this country, and I've been interested in how there are still a few places in this country where individuals will boast of drunk driving escapades to the amusement of others.
As long as this is the case, is it really helpful to think of drunk driving as an issue limited to individuals complying with local laws, as if it were completely unrelated to social norms?
Number 23. Too painful to watch. Seriously.
Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own.
Quoting myself from another blog that also linked the story:
Teen Virgins Happiest
The story doesn't mention virgins, just whether the respondents were sexually active; furthermore, half the age range covered is legal adults, and almost half is post-teens. Yet it appears that they lumped all answers into two age groups: 17 or below, and 18 or above, which is a pretty bad grouping for questions about sexual activity, since it breaks right about the age at which most people become sexually active, and lumps barely-pubescent teens in with some of that age range, and post-college grads with others.
Even so, the answers make it pretty clear that it's not sex that affects happiness - it's anxiety about sex. Teens as young as 13 are happier not having sex, and adults up to 24 are happier having sex (though it doesn't change their whole lives). That actually seems pretty reasonable. I would also strongly suspect that if you broke the answers down by 1-2 year age blocks, you'd find a rough correlation between happiness and sexual activity, trending upward with age.
Finally, there is a good reason to suspect that sex-negatives would be happier about their condition than normal people, but which does not suggest that sexual anxiety is a good thing. And that is simply that people who commit themselves to some sort of a lifestyle for ideological reasons take gratification from keeping that commitment, while others who just do or don't do that thing as the mood takes them have no reason to feel gratification by that fact alone. For instance, vegetarians often feel pleased about maintaining a strict vegetarian diet, aside from whether it's healthy or whatever; meat eaters enjoy eating meat but they don't feel gratified to be meat eaters as such. But that alone doesn't make vegetarianism a good thing - it just means that, by definition, those who think it's a good thing take more pleasure in being vegetarian than those who don't care about it take in not being.
If "God did it" explanations are really verboten, then it hardly makes sense to complain that theists haven't provided evidence for their position. By definition, that's the one thing they can't do.
In his discussion he provides two examples of events that atheists explicitly stated would convince them.
He then complains that atheists keep "demand[ing] that theists provide evidence", suggesting that that is unfair because no such evidence will be accepted. But there's no reason supernatual explanations of events can't be accepted - you just have to find natural events for which supernatural explanations make the most sense. There are two ways to do that - the honest way and the dishonest way. The honest way would be to develop a decision procedure which adduces adequate criteria of sufficiency for supernatural phenomena and identifies when they occur. (And in point of fact, the two atheists he quotes did state under exactly what conditions they'ad acccept such an explantion. Alternatively, I suppose you could call the Ghostbusters.) The dishonest way is simply to claim supernatural sources for everything you see that you personally can't comprehend (and then either retract the claim without embarrassment when it proves to be explainable by natural causes, or simply refuse to believe the natural explanation even after it's been demonstrated to be reliable).
Now, science has taken the honest way to natural explanation - there are methods for acquiring and applying knowledge of natural phenomena, and tests of repeatability, reliability, best inference, and so on that are accepted as decision procedures. The ID people claimed to have a decision procedure for their supernatural explanations, but never put it in operational form, and in fact when challenged Dembski explicitly refused to do so, or even to explain how ID creationist events even took place.
("Stuff just happens. We don't have to say anything at all about why or how, but you have to explain every possible detail of what did happen to support your theory of how it can happen. The fact that there's no explanation at all for what we say is the reason it's true.")
He explicitly states that he is not merely entitled to assume supernatural explantions because he has no natural explanation, but further more that the complete lack of any decision procedure that would give a positive reason for doing so actually justifies that assumption. This is not just dishonest, it's fraudulent. Mere supernaturalism of the ordinary kind - assuming God helped you win the lottery - is merely dishonest. Reppert appears to be dishonest in this way - assuming supernaturalism for no good reason, rather than dishonest in the ID way - assuming supernaturalism while denying that reasons are even necessary.
The "defense of Biblical inerrancy" is actually just a defense of the claim that the Bible itself implies that it is inerrant (as opposed to deducing that for some other reason). There is no real argument there that the Bible is actually inerrant, which is a good thing because otherwise it would be a hilarious instance of the classic example of the circular reasoning fallacy ("I believe the Bible is the Word of God because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible doesn't lie because it's the Word of God.").
[Jason] Bourne is ‘the perfect liberal hero’. He allows ‘liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage blockbuster: they can see him kick a**, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA’. Bourne is, says Landesman, ‘the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia’
This is actually sort of true, but very superficial. There are a lot of important differences between Bourne and Rambo, that make the Bourne stories much more intelligent and worthwhile.
Rambo, first of all, is just a thug. It's convenient to forget this, but it's true. In the first Rambo movie, he's not fighting for any goal or principle other than libertarianism of the violent-misfit kind. The first act of violence in the movie is when he defies authority, gets picked up on a bogus charge, and the dimwit country sherriffs try to cut his long hair in keeping with jail regulations. He beats them all up and flees to the woods, then spends the entire rest of the movie in violent combat with the forces of law and order, who are shown as prejudiced, stupid, and corrupt, thus justifying Rambo's self-serving vigilantism. Rambo is basically a hippy Michigan Militia in what Ronald Reagan - former president of the Screen Actors' Guild - claimed was his favorite movie ever. It was only with the second movie that they began catering to reactionary mythology and sent him to re-fight the Vietnam War.
Second, the underlying theme of the Bourne movies is that Bourne inherently rejects his own violent streak. The CIA's crime is that they made him a violent killer; his quest is to get to the bottom of it so that he can put his identity back together, and the irony is that he has to use those skills against the same people who gave them to him, to prevent them from killing him so he doesn't find out they made him a killer. He goes out of his way not to kill people if he doesn't have to - especially in the third movie - and when he finally gets the information he seeks, he renounces what they've made him and from that moment on refuses to kill. Rambo's story arc over several movies is toward greater and greater violence in defense of more and more absurd conservative fantasies. Bourne's story arc over three movies is toward less and less violence, and more and more effort to create a normal life in which he is not a killer. As for civil liberties, he explicitly refuses to shoot the man who tortured and brainwashed him, and instead relies on the press and the courts to bring him to justice. The final scene in the last Bourne movie is the announcement of criminal charges - not violent retribution - against the Director of the CIA and the brainwashing doctor.
Third, the Bourne movies are inherently more patriotic and idealistic than the Rambo ones. The Rambo conceit is that the military stands alone against a hostile society (plus the old whiney bullshit about how the politicians lost Vietnam ["Do we get to win this time?"]), and so it's understandable that occasionally they go off the deep end and start massacring civilians until they're shunted back into more pleasant tasks like massacring Asians. The Bourne conceit is that America is basically a decent country with misguided people using violence to bad ends, and that stopping that violence is the road back to our ideals - that full-gonzo assassin programs and amoral bureaucrats coolly ordering secret killings inside and outside the US with impunity are not what the country is about, but public opinion and the law will put a stop to it once it is revealed.
Nobody thinks the Bourne movies are anything but action-escapist entertainment. But, granted the implausibility of both movies' indestructible killing-machine heroes, the Bourne movies are both truer to what America is, and more idealistic about what America should be, than Rambo could possibly imagine.
If the world was a fair place, the sump-pumpers and bilge-bailers of this world would make as much as a Congressman. They do more for the public good than both houses of Congress.
Instapundit's phoning it in again.
First, a hyper-free-marketer like himself should surely realize that those jobs are low-paid because they're low-skilled. Is he arguing for "comparable worth"? Second, public-works workers make a more immediately visible contribution to public welfare, but it's hard to say that's more important than having a government. Third, the actual, personal contribution each such worker makes is pretty marginal; one bilge-bailer can only bail so much bilgewater, but one member of Congress can get bill passed, fund a program, intervene for a constituent, nominate a judge, etc. Finally, who does he think thought up, authorized, funded, and regulated all those public works programs? Does he really imagine we'd have a universal, environmentally sound waste-treatment system if we didn't have a government?
This is just another conservative crank pretending to be for "the little guy" while really complaining about having to pay taxes.
Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.
Ha!ha!ha!ha!ha! . . .
And the funniest thing about it all... the CIA is mostly politically liberal anyway!
We are often told that "God did it" explanations are "cheating" that they are "pseudo-explanations."…But what if God actually did it? "The butler did it" is a bad explanation unless, well, the butler did it. Does that mean that we, as rational people, are condemned to not believing the truth because to accept a true explanations would be to accept an unacceptable explanation?
In this context what would it mean to say then if "God didn't do it"? Or if God did it what didn't he do? If he did everything then what type of explanation is it?
If your definition of what God did basically fits everything then it's not much of a definition at all.
Often, though, I think the 'God did it' explanation implies something like "God made natural laws that do lots of things but this happens to be one case where he did it without using the natural laws he made".
In that case the argument stands on very weak ground if the person making it cannot demonstrate that whatever 'it' is really was impossible under the laws of nature.
In The Bourne Ultimatum, as in the first two instalments, the only bad guys are CIA operatives. They think little of bugging phones, using spycams to track troublesome elements, shooting uppity journalists, and blowing up CIA men gone wrong in the teeming streets of foreign cities. As Cosmo Landesman says in The Sunday Times, Bourne is ‘the perfect liberal hero’. He allows ‘liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage blockbuster: they can see him kick a**, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA’. Bourne is, says Landesman, ‘the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia’
And who was the villian in Rambo? I seem to recall it was representatives of the 'military industrial complex' as well as local authority figures.
Collin
I've been considering that apparent gap between the galaxies. If there were a "big bang", should there not be an empty are at the center of the universe? If there is not, does that mean that the Bang was not the formation method, as supposed by many?
There is no 'center of the universe'. The Big Bang argues that for any two points in our visible universe, they were once just about right next to each other. The actual beginning of the Universe, though, need not have been a point. Only the piece that became what we can see today was a point, the universe back then could have just as easily been infinite with massive density all over and it all then suddenly expanded.
Anyway, a 'hole' wouldn't imply the big bang couldn't have happened. Only that there was once a small space in our own universe with no matter in it...or alternatively some mechamism threw the matter out of that space leaving us with a big hole today.
Nobody thinks the Bourne movies are anything but action-escapist entertainment. But, granted the implausibility of both movies' indestructible killing-machine heroes, the Bourne movies are both truer to what America is, and more idealistic about what America should be, than Rambo could possibly imagine.
Ditto. You're right about the implausibility element. Not only is Bourne an indestructible killing machine, it seems every major and minor city in the world has a half-dozen twenty something killing machines whose only job it seems is to hang around until they get the magic text message to off someone. The other implausibility element is Bourne's magic ability to manufacture what seems to be a near infinite amount of money, passports and other necessities.
All in all, the Bourne movies are much better than Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible movies & I say even better IMO than the Bond movies. Now bring on the flames!
I wish the CIA was as capable in real life as it was in the Bourne movies. The real CIA is an institution of fecklessness, incompetence and inability to predict threats before they arise.
Perhaps if the President didn't give the CIA's leaders awards for screwing things up they would be a bit better.
Boonton,
Ya, give 'em all black berets. That'll make 'em more productive. Or at least feel like it.
BTW, how many schools of thought on the Big Bang/cosmology are you familiar with? I trust more than one.
Collin
Infinite (not to mention massive density in infinite directions) and still room to expand? Color me skeptical.
Okay, I give up and confess. I must be a serious backwoods, culturally impaired hay-seed, but I am not getting the Gnaritas Monstrum. I'm wondering how this won an award, and what the competition must have been like.
Infinite (not to mention massive density in infinite directions) and still room to expand? Color me skeptical.
We fundamentally just don't know since we can only see within the visible universe. There's no rule that says the universe isn't basically the same all over, with stars, galaxies and clusters everywhere you go. Then again our visible universe might very well be just a bubble inside something else that is very different.
Anyway, the thing about the universe not having a center is correct. That you can look up if you really want to keep going with it.
Hey, Joe, going back to your "Are Atheists Autistic" description of most atheists you've met as argumentative, socially awkward men, have you ever noticed their tendency to write book-length dissertations debating everything they don't like in your mostly innocuous Thirty Three Things entries?
It is precisely my contention that the universe is basically the same all over in every infinite direction, i.e., no expansion.
See item #27 about retronyms. If the 'visible universe' is just a bubble inside of something else that is very different, it's not really the universe in totality now is it? Unless the meaning of universe is redefined as something finite, it will always be all inclusive, i.e., no expansion.
If there are edges to an object (which is implied with an object that is expanding), it's got a center. Only if the universe covers totality (i.e., no expansion) can it be said that there is no center.
Infinite can be a tricky concept in this case. There are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, but there’s a larger set of infinite numbers between 0 and 2. Similarly, if I were to travel in a circle, I would travel for an infinite distance, never reaching the end, even though the circle has a definite size which can be made larger.
The two analogies I’ve seen most often with regards to an expanding universe are a balloon or a loaf of bread. The balloon analogy likens the three dimensional space of our universe to the two dimensional surface of a balloon. As the balloon is inflated, the space between any two points on the surface increases. Thus, any point on the balloon can be seen as the center as all other points are moving away from it. The loaf of bread is similar with the space between any two points in the loaf increasing as the bread rises.
All of which is to say that it is possible for the universe to be infinite, and still expand, and that any such expansion does not require a center. Whether the universe is infinite or finite is unknown to us, as we can only gather information on that portion of the whole which is visible to us.
"Perhaps if the President didn't give the CIA's leaders awards for screwing things up they would be a bit better."
Yes, I'm certain the CIA would be much better if the President had a more truly merit-based awards system. What's the matter, couldn't find a way to blame the Christians?
The universe can be the same all over, infinite and also be expanding. To visualize how that's quite logical look at the 'Hotel Infinity'. In the hotel all the rooms are on the number line and are in integers (1,2,3 etc) and filled. Then more people start showing up. The manager accomodates them by simply moving everyone over (guest 1 is moved to room 2, guest 2 moved to room 3 and so on). The number of guests is expanding yet it began as an infinite set and still is an infinite set.
See item #27 about retronyms. If the 'visible universe' is just a bubble inside of something else that is very different, it's not really the universe in totality now is it? Unless the meaning of universe is redefined as something finite, it will always be all inclusive, i.e., no expansion.
This was a long and heated discussion we had with Gordon a long time ago. The visible universe is the portion of the universe that we can (at least in theory) view due to the speed of light. We can make no observations beyond the visible universe. Often, though, the term universe is often used when what is really meant is visible universe. The whole universe could be just like the visible universe (expanding) or it may not. Likewise the whole universe may be infinite or finite. We simply cannot say at this point and may never be able to say.
If there are edges to an object (which is implied with an object that is expanding), it's got a center. Only if the universe covers totality (i.e., no expansion) can it be said that there is no center.
True but you can expand with no edges hence no center. Look at the surface of a balloon (just the surface). Darrell does a good job with it but when I first read it my mind kept insisting the balloon really had a center at, well, its center. But if you were just a little fly on the balloon there's no point on the surface that indicates itself as 'the center'.
Of course, "how many points are there in this line segment" is a different question than "how long is this line segment"; mixing up the two kinds of infinity is guaranteed to get you nowhere but darn confused.
Someday I hope to write comments that good. I mean, dang. I'm impressed.As for the Rambo/Bourne thing and the curious lack of memory as to what exactly Rambo was fighting against in the first movie, is anyone else reminded of "Born in the U.S.A."? Huge, huge conservative anthem, widely hyped by people who apparently hadn't paid attention to any lyrics other than the song's title. Rambo is a symbol of weird conservative jingoism, and that's what's being referred to--certainly not the actual character of John Rambo himself as he appeared in the original role.
Speaking of the first Rambo movie, there's a pretty interesting anecdote in Stiffed describing some shenanigans which went on during the making of First Blood--there was a concerted effort in which what had been the walk-on part of Colonel Trautman was expanded into this father-figure catharsis thing. Big metaphor and all.
Conservatives do not have the market cornered on jingoism... yet.
The Bourne debate reveals more about the critics than it does about the movie. The movie is described as anti-American because it's premise is that a agency of the Federal gov't abused its power and an individual American fights to assert his freedom from a rogue group in the gov't. More than that, in all three movies (semi-spoiler alerT!!!!) at the end of the day a higher American authority reigns in the abusive gov't employees and sides with Bourne...who is your typical all American hero. He is independent, intelligent, resourceful and has great fun turning the tables on pompus bureaucrats, using their own weapons against them.
Isn't it interesting that Conservatives have spent decades telling us public schools are horrible or before that the US Post Office! (way back guys, when Bill Buckley had a lot less grey hair). So much for limited gov't. Let's imagine liberals started trashing movies like Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me, or Stand and Deliever as anti-American because they depict public schools in a negative light. Even better, how about Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 for being anti-Post Office (or that infamous anti-American, Newman from Seinfield!). Conservatives would have a field day laughing at that but right wingers like O'Reilly expect us all to keep a straight face at his Bourne bashing.
Isn't it ironic when Conservatives reveal themselves to be closet statists. Even nicer than when they play the class warfare card or end up getting arrested in mens bathrooms.
Boonton,
Please tell me you are NOT an Air Traffic Controller?
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