Does the result even show the traditional formulation is in need of revision? The article seemed to be saying that there might already be enough uncertainty in value of position/momentum (or other non-commuting variables) in the system before measurement that the uncertainty added by the measurement itself could be…

I think basically you mean that our language is insufficient to properly answer the questions we're dealing with?

Are you that same individual now than you were ten years ago? So far as we know, yes.

Do you claim that this statement can be justified in purely materialist terms? Hard to see how, the basic laws of physics only deal with fundamental particles, not with questions about which large-scale groupings of these particles deserve labels like "things" or "copies". Can you define these words in well-defined…

The idea of an "upload" is just something which functions like the original brain and is behaviorally indistinguishable from them (it would pass a "turing test" by friends/family of the original who didn't know whether they were interacting with the real person or the simulated version), it doesn't presuppose any…

Annalee wrote:

He acknowledges humans activity "contributes" but doesn't say if he thinks we are the main cause of the warming in the last 50 years (something nearly all climate scientists agree on)—a lot of climate deniers make such token acknowledgments while claiming there's too much uncertainty to have any confidence about…

If you like this, you might also like this home movie of Einstein at a garden party—the only color movie of him!

Great article, it reminds me of this discussion of the new Batman movie over at 3quarksdaily, where the author writes:

Inner Light actually has been updated already, it was one of the episodes they chose for the sampler of remastered episodes they put out earlier this year: Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Next Level

I would almost recommend recommend waiting until the third or fourth season is released, the first two seasons are pretty low-quality compared to later ones, if you start with one and two without having the later ones to watch immediately after, you and/or your girlfriend might just find them too cheesy and boring and…

You say "snob" like it's always a bad thing. If someone says they're sick of all the reality TV, are you all like "Fuckin' snob! You think you're too good to watch The Kardashians with the rest of us?"

I don't necessarily think McGilchrist would agree that logical/analytical thought is purely "left-brain"; his book, along with some by V.S. Ramachandran, seem to suggest the left brain is good at coming up with verbal rationalizations for what a person already thinks or believes, not so good at open-minded analysis or…

So happy there's a fix! This needs to be publicized on more threads...

"Rationality" need not imply suppressing intuitions (like those from the right brain that McGilchrist talks about) or emotional reactions, it just means subjecting them to some rational consideration instead of trusting them automatically. I haven't seen the videos above but I've read both Peterson and McGilchrist's…

Well, even with ornithischians and theropods I don't think we can say definitively that there were no groups or species that experienced a secondary loss of protofeathers—we have some pretty good skin impressions of hadrosaurs that don't seem to show any, for example. So the article title is a bit overblown, it would…

Nope, if you read Leon Lederman's book it's full of jokes and one of them is that he wanted to call it the "goddamn particle" and his publishers wouldn't let him, but it's clear from the context he wasn't serious, in fact there's a long section justifying the name "god particle" using an analogy between the "tower of…

Nope, if you read Leon Lederman's book it's full of jokes and one of them is that he wanted to call it the "goddamn particle" and his publishers wouldn't let him, but it's clear from the context he wasn't serious, in fact there's a long section justifying the name "god particle" using an analogy between the "tower of…

Nope, if you read Leon Lederman's book it's full of jokes and one of them is that he wanted to call it the "goddamn particle" and his publishers wouldn't let him, but it's clear from the context he wasn't serious, in fact there's a long section justifying the name "god particle" using an analogy between the "tower of…

Nope, if you read the book it's full of jokes and that's one of them, but it's clear from the context he wasn't serious, in fact there's a long section justifying "god particle" using an analogy between the "tower of babel" story from the bible and the way the higgs field caused all the other particles to become…