Links With Your Coffee - Sunday
- Science News / Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will?
“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.
Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.
The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.
- Black Sun Journal » Pastor Acknowledges Arguments of New Atheism
- The Corpus Callosum : A Cunning Disregard For Security
This seems very odd. The Internet -- including web sites and email -- has been found to have a very serious security flaw. Civilized places such as Sweden and Puerto Rico are already fixing the problem. There are plans to improve security for US .gov and .mil sites (government and military , respectively). Yet, the most important fix for the rest of us, which is under the control of the US government, is being delayed.
- John McCain Hits the Streets with Questionable Anti-Obama Campaign - NYsportSpace
- Joho the Blog » Best. Explanation of sub-prime mortgage crisis. Ever
- Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2008 Results
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."
Comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY
A brief anti-creationism video with a solid narration and sense of humor.
re: fiction contest results
norm, isn't the exerpt you chose a classic example of "purple prose"?
zaphod, thanks for the video. it speaks directly to a post i just made on the darwin thread, and i wanted to run this point (made most convincingly on the video you linked to) up the flagpole:
that, to slightly rephrase what i was saying there, dawkins often conflates/confuses "creationism" with "religion" and this weakens his arguments both against religion and for science education untainted by creationism. the video expands on my point, making clear that even people and organizations that i (and i daresay you and norm and most readers here) would consider unreasonable fundamentalist fanatics (for instance, as i learned from the video, the catholic church) have not hesitated to distance themselves from "creationism", and furthermore that "creationism" is itself a separate "religion" that crosses all religious boundaries. for instance, there are well organized and funded hindu and islamic (and, to my personal regret) jewish organizations promoting "creationism", none of which will be touched by dawkins specifically christian-focused rhetoric.
again, i think dawkins is right- he's just going about it wrong.
Re: particular free will, Whiteheadianist wise guy, does the graph of an algebraic equation "choose" its path? Or is it its choice by definition. Step into the timeless world of the Hopi, when you can snatch the pebble (read "atom") from my hand. Otherwise you're one of the Sipapoo ants, err on the side of my question.
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