Links With Your Coffee - Thursday
- Boltzmann's Universe | Cosmic Variance
The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy. According to this argument, in such a universe you would see every kind of statistical fluctuation, and small fluctuations in entropy would be enormously more frequent than large fluctuations. Our universe is a very large fluctuation (see previous post!) but a single brain would only require a relatively small fluctuation. In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain. But we (or at least I, not sure about you) are not individual Boltzmann brains. So the prediction has been falsified, and that kind of theory is not true.
- The woman vs. the black guy / Who's more terrifying to red states, smart Hillary or savvy Barack? The nation trembles
. . .the left is falling all over itself trying to digest and parse and comprehend it all at once, and simply can't.
It is this: Just how the hell did it come to pass and which planets finally aligned and what sort of Kool-Aid has been gulped by the universe that the two white-hot Dem frontrunners, the two brightest lights on the political spectrum for the 2008 presidential election also just so happen to be members of the two most controversial/least represented groups in modern uber-white ultra-patriarchal American snake-oil politics — which is to say, a smart, savvy woman and a smart, savvy black male? - The Skeptical Surfer: Skeptics' Circle #78 - The "Still High From The Chelation" Edition
- A Kafka-esque Nightmare in Elder Abuse
- New Humanist Blog: Dinesh D'Souza: Winner of the 2007 Bad Faith Award
In a field crowded by heavyweights like the Bishop of Carlisle, Chuck Norris and Pope Benedict XVI, D'Souza came from nowhere to seize the award ahead of many of the world's leading bigots, charlatans and proselytisers.
- BBC NEWS | Europe | Papal visit scuppered by scholars
The Vatican insists the Pope is not "anti-science" - but in light of the protests they have decided it would be better for him not to attend.
(tip to Marc P) - Democracy Now! | Breaking the Sound Barrier: Democracy Now! Re-Hosts NBC Las Vegas Debate to Include Kucinich After NBC Wins Appeal to Exclude Him
Comments
One of the grand ironies of life is that the only people who seem obsessed with the color and gender of the Democratic frontrunners ... are Democrats.
Cmon you know everybody who's not a democrat is a sexist racist. If they werent they would be democrats....
Actually, the only people who are obsessed with the color and gender of the Democratic front runners are those main-stream media looking to increase their ratings with sensationalist reporting and Republicans looking to malign the Democrats.
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2008/01/huckabeeequateshomosexualitywithbestiality.php
Check out Huckabee's latest radical statement.
I can't, because this site's Markdown implementation is broken and thus it has destroyed your link.
However, I think "stupid", or perhaps "deranged" or "deluded", is more likely to be the correct term instead of "radical".
Perhaps it was all of the above.
It was his comments yesterday about how gay marriage is like marrying an animal, or marrying three women.
In the same quote he said that he didn't think it was radical to say that. That no doubt inspired me to refute him.
I am still surprised that no one caught his polygamy dig.
"this hypothesis — that our universe, complete with all of our records and memories, is a thermal fluctuation around a thermal equilibrium state — makes a very strong prediction: that our past is nothing like what we reconstruct it to be, but rather that all of our memories and records are simply statistical flukes created by an unlikely conspiracy of random motions."
Cosmic Variance, egg-cell-ent link. Huw Price's book, "Archimedes's Point" is also pertinent. His point is not a point at all, it's more of a three dimensional Rorschach blot, or Ding-an-psych. Time's evolution, evolution's time, becomes perspectival, like the "converging" in the distance railroad tracks, or the Big Bang. Also Sprach...
Arthur C. Clarke.
The Carl Sagan video, Sagan is a Rational Treasure.
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