Madelaine McMasters

Ceka Cianci wrote: the snakes get a little more active.. i was on a ledge on the the back side of one mountain a couple of weeks back when it was really wet.. and my horse raised up and did a 180 and almost threw me off.. It's been a wet spring/summer and my culvert has numerous snake holes in it. I never see them, just that evidence. I want to set up a camera to do a time-lapse movie of one of the holes so I can catch the li'l rascals. I don't have a horse, nor mountains, so I don't have to worry about freak snake accidents... much.

Ceka Cianci wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: TDD123 wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: i'm more than interested enough to check out the theory..but not by watching that mans video.. as i said..he lost my trust pretty fast..i've learned that if i can't trust them right away or feel leery that i need to look elsewhere for the information.. Have a look here. I hope you find it interesting as a start, although it is very dry matter, but it is without reference to Stephen Davis or other proponents of spirituality. oh i'll be into it..this is the stuff i love.. thank you for the link =) you wanna see some real cool stuff check out fractals in nature..that eats up the clock for me when i'm in the mountains riding.. hehehehe This'll keep ya busy for awhile, Ceka... i wasn't meaning this exact theory..just these kinds of theories in these areas.. because they get my mind going on all cylinders.. Since I know you love finding Fractals in Nature, I was suggesting that while you are out riding in the mountains you might pick up flowers and pinecones and look for the Fibonacci sequence. I think this was the first of Nature's math tricks that I learned about when I was a kid. I'm also always on the lookout for spiral patterns, which often curl along the Fibonacci sequence as the woman shows in the video. I also like watching the wave action on my beach on calm days. It can be roughly analogous to light. I'll stand on the bluff there I can get a larger view, and watch the big waves roll towards the beach, some of them "scattering" off the few remaining bits of concrete pier in the water. The relative size of the scattered waves depends on the relationship of the frequency of the water waves and the size of the pier section. If the waves are relatively long, there's not much visible reflection. If they're short, moreso. Then I'll walk down to the beach and watch the tiny wavelets that were not visible from the bluff as they impinge on smaller rocks or vertical sticks at the surface. I'll see the same thing. The shorter the wavelength is, the bigger the reflection. The larger waves don't "see" the little rocks. It's much like this for light, which scatters more when hitting objects that approach its wavelength. This is why, when you point a red laser pointer out into your yard at night, you don't see much of the beam. The air and water molecules are too small with respect to the wavelength of red light to do much scattering. But if you point a green laser in the same conditions, you'll see a fantastic beam of light. Green is a shorter wavelength, and scattering goes as the fourth power of the ratio of the wavelength to the size of the scattering object, so a small change in that ratio makes a big change in scattering. So, add the Fibonacci Sequence and Rayleigh Scattering to your little bag of understanding. And at sunset, particularly if you are in the mountains and have a clear view to the east, look for the Earth's Shadow, you may even see the outline of your mountain range low in the eastern sky. For me, nothing eats up the clock like finding things out. ;-)

Ceka Cianci wrote: TDD123 wrote: Ceka Cianci wrote: i'm more than interested enough to check out the theory..but not by watching that mans video.. as i said..he lost my trust pretty fast..i've learned that if i can't trust them right away or feel leery that i need to look elsewhere for the information.. Have a look here. I hope you find it interesting as a start, although it is very dry matter, but it is without reference to Stephen Davis or other proponents of spirituality. oh i'll be into it..this is the stuff i love.. thank you for the link =) you wanna see some real cool stuff check out fractals in nature..that eats up the clock for me when i'm in the mountains riding.. hehehehe This'll keep ya busy for awhile, Ceka...

Sonja Smedley wrote: Ok, you said: "it is not possible to prove a theory right, but it is possible to prove a theory wrong" Then lets take for example the question...is the world build by god or is the evolution theory true? How can people prove that the evolution theory is wrong?I guess there are many scientists who can prove that it is wrong yes, but who can prove that god does not exist?.....no one can And this comes from a person who does not believe in god...I have no religious confession and I do not know the bible. But I CANNOT prove that this theory is wrong. Can you? And about ignorance. Yes it seems we are all ignorance...but I do not force you to see the things the way I do. Where did I say that? I started the thread to hear opinions actually from people who are interested in these kind of things. And I never wanted to convert people to this belief I have. It changed the view for me...and this was not only cause of this workshop...I was always interested in such things and I always had the feeling there must be more behind this all. And it influenced me in a positive way...so no one will thereby suffer harm. I wasn't saying you are trying to force me to see anything in a certain way. I was (clumsily) differentiating between accepting that different beliefs exist vs. accepting different beliefs. I do not accept Stephen Davis' beliefs, as I think there's evidence to refute him and he's not used sound logic to craft his argument. You can't prove a negative, so yes, there's no point in attempting to prove there is no god. Science doesn't try. Science doesn't care. But that is much different than theorizing that Evolution is responsible for the myriad forms of life on Earth. That could be proved wrong if evidence appears to contradict the theory. That hasn't happened yet, and I don't expect it will. But let's imagine we discovered, under the deepest sea floor, an area the size of Australia two kilometers thick, of sedimentary rock in which were embedded a bizarre array of fossilized creatures, with the deepest (oldest) layers containing the most complex creatures, and each succeeding (younger) layer containing less complex creatures. Let's imagine there are creatures in every layer of sediment, no gaps, and that from layer to layer, the DNA is wildly different, the creatures are unrelated to those in other layers. That would be a huge body of evidence entirely at odds with our current fossil record, and would probably topple Evolution... and geology... and archaeology... and... Regardless of how much evidence we discover in support of the evolutionary theory, we can never declare certain victory. There is always the chance, however microscopic, that something as contrary as that huge chunk of seafloor will someday pop up to crush the theory or at least dent it badly. Science isn't losing sleep over that worry, but scientists do at some level make their peace with the idea that some day they might wake up to discover that everything (or at least a significant part of what) they know is wrong. Scientific theories get toppled or modified all the time. Newton's theory of gravitation lasted some time before being toppled by Einstein. We still use it for those applications where it's accurate enough, but we now know it's not the whole truth. The orbit of Mercury proved it wrong. Don't argue with Mercury. I share the belief that there is more out there than we perceive. I've proven this to myself during a career in engineering during which I had the great pleasure to measure physical effects well beyond my senses. But nothing in my own experience, nor in my years of reading of the discoveries of others, has led me to believe that I have any special place in all of this, any purpose, nor any connectedness to something greater via some quantum back channel. But, I'm still having a heck of a time!

Sonja Smedley wrote: Why are you so negative? Why you do not allow people to have their own opinion about things no one can really prove here in this world? Instead of pushing people down with your sarcastic statements you should be happy that you are in a line with your point of view. Everything else should not be important for you. I accept the way you see the things why you are not able to do the same? This is a thing I will never understand with people. You can call me crazy...good and? This does not change my mind in any way. I can live with that.It does not bother me at all...why should it? And who has the right to judge here, when someone is ignorant? You?? Sonja (I apologize for spelling your name wrong in other posts), it is not possible to prove a theory right, but it is possible to prove a theory wrong. That's how science works. People may choose to ignore proof that conflicts with their beliefs, we've been doing that forever. Nature doesn't care, she'll go on being what she is. And I'm not terribly concerned about the belief systems other people hold, so long as they don't interfere with my rights and welfare, nor the rights and welfare of others, and in limited circumstances, their own welfare. The power of positive thinking, even if it's not based in fact, is acknowledged to a degree by the scientific community. I wouldn't deny anyone the benefits of that simply because they believed differently than I do. While I am able to accept that you see things differently than I do, you cannot expect me to accept things the way you see them. We simply agree to disagree. We all judge. We judge all the time, often incorrectly. That ability, flawed as it is (you saw just how flawed in Davis' video), works well enough for, and is crucial to, our survival. We're also all ignorant of something. So, the questions are... what do we do with the judgments we make? How do we improve their accuracy? How important is it to reduce our ignorance? How do we do that? --||-

TDD123 wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: What Davis does is, I think, pseudoscience. He takes two concepts that operate on very different levels (QM and epigenetics and perhaps other ideas in parts of the video I didn't watch) and makes the perceptual/logical error of putting them in the same scope. How is this different than thinking that two lines of equal length when they are not, a perceptual error used to convince us that we can't believe what we see, but should believe what Davis says? Davis video is not about HP, it's not about epigenetics, its (from what I've seen) a mashup of uncorrelated ideas into a recipe for anthropocentic enlightenment. I think Davis is as much a victim of his own errors in perception as anyone. We agree on Davis misinterpretation of HP. I watched the first video and did notice that Davis' reference to HP is probably a setup to anthropological, spiritual or 'new agey kind of'-connections that simply aren't my kind of bag. I distantiate from anything Davis' has to say on this matter and I already said so to Nyll Bergbahn in her reply to me. Nevertheless the thread' topic was inviting enough to me to google on HP and what it said about it by theoretical physicists. And what is said about it, at the World Science Festival, is not just some bogus made up by quacks. I found it very interesting to read about it and view the video of the Festival, which was already presented earlier by Leehere Absent ( sorry .. missed that completely ). To write THAT off as pseudoscience is untrue. It IS about science, one can differ on the matter, but it has nothing to do with Davis or his views on life. Eventhough I would have prefered the OP hadn't mentioned Davis at all and just stuck to the possibility of a holographic universe, I cannot blame her for anything but an open mind to opinion. I cannot say that of some of those barging in here and immediately shooting at anything the OP said and therefore claiming anything said by anybody in that video is total nonsense. Although Davis took a lot out of context , the context is still there , imo. Leonard Susskind's "The Black Hole War" is on my reading list. I encountered Susskind in a TED talk about Feynman and became intrigued when I discovered he had done "battle with Stephen Hawking". I love to watch great minds come at each other from different directions, with the goal of figuring something out. I'm also intrigued by Susskind's debate with Lee Smolin about the "Anthropic Principle", which Susskind defends, even though, like String Theory (so far) it can't yield any falsifiable predictions. Since science can't prove anything right, it can only prove things wrong (you'll hear Feynman say that in the video I linked), scientists get understandably huffy when they see theories that make predictions which can't be proved wrong. I must say I find the Anthropic Principle alluring, but maybe that's just me looking for an easy answer that's not a god, or a safe corner in which I can't be proved wrong! ;-)

TDD123 wrote: Celestiall Nightfire wrote: Davvek wrote: Awesome comments people!!!...I found the series very decent. Nice to see intellectual content still alive and well. It's the kinda topic you want to read & research. Well done Sonja!!!! There's nothing intellectual about this thread, nor is the topic anything worth "researching". Well, unless one wants to research how the videos are propagating pseudoscience. This is about theoretical physics. I think there's too much being too rapidly overconcluded here : the holographic universe - theory is perhaps getting confused with words like 'holistic' . This is NOT some New Age - propaganda. This is NOT about intelligent design. This is NOT Scientology rewrapped. It IS about our current perception of real physics and many will have a hard time figuring this out at all. We are talking about a theory and people here who correctly refuted Hawking's conclusion about black holes and the preservation of information ! Even Dr. Hawking himself confirmed it. It's a colission of scientific principles which could be as important as quantum physics itself. It's a scientific discussion indeed ,eventhough only theoretical, with more scientific basis and credibility than any statements here in this thread made by anyone ( myself included). Featuring John Hockenberry Journalist Gerard ’t Hooft Nobel Laureate, Theoretical Physicist Leonard Susskind Theoretical Physicist, Author Herman Verlinde Theoretical & String Physicist Raphael Bousso Physicist Bluntly categorizing this as pseudo-science is just, well, ... plain ignorant or stupid. Or both ... :robotindifferent: To the OP : You are being , perhaps deliberately, misunderstood. I'm cutting you some slack : I find you raised a good topic . Too bad apparantly many here are just not up to it or confuse you with Lucinda\Boudicca\Leon. :robotfrustrated: I've not read everybody's response to Sonya, but I've probably been one of the most vocal and elaborate of the dissenters. I have not categorized the Holographic Projection (HP) as pseudoscience (well, I hope not. It's just not germane to the larger ideas proffered by Davis). I have said that the leaps of logic from there to an anthropocentric interpretation are unsupported by evidence. If you listen to the lecture you've linked, you'll see my understanding of HP was flawed, but within the ballpark. The essense of HP is that it produces a world in which information is not lost. When I first heard of HP (on the radio), this was explained as the information that describes the matter that "vanishes" into a black hole as being retained at the event horizon in the strings there. What I may have erroneously recalled there is that this was just a special condition of our ability to detect only four of String Theory's 10-11 dimensions. From what I've read of String Theory, the seven extra dimensions it inhabits are curled into a space of "Planck Size", which puts them beyond our ability to detect (hence making the theory untestable). What I either misunderstood, or was missing from the explanation I recall, is that the event horizon is a 2D thing which captures all the information of the 3D world that vanished beyone the event horizon. I've yet to read why the event horizon is 2D, but I maybe I can work it from first principles by noting that everything eventually spins. Clouds of gas coalesce into planet and stars, and because of their distribution in space and the laws of gravitation and conservation of energy/momentum, virtually every coalesced system ends up spinning. Around a black hole, which collapses to a "singularity", there is only one spinning shape that works... a circle. There's your 2D surface, which is the last thing you "see" before vanishing into the black hole. That's the "event horizon" we see depicted in movies. HP says that the information describing the state of the stuff lost into the black hole is contained in the event horizon and, from what I've read elsewhere, it's thought that the Hawking radiation that emits from the event horizon might contain some indication of that information. The EOS600 experiment didn't detect that. That does not mean it doesn't exist. I don't take issue with that interpretation of HP. It's certainly well above my pay grade, but HP lives only within the realm of Quantum Mechanics (or as they state in the video you linked, perhaps "pre" QM). In this regard, although it may be damned exciting to the QM community, I don't know if it has meaning in the macro world that's any more intriguing than String or Multiverse theory. It's just another strangeness underneath the already bizarre world of QM (or maybe it'll be less strange than QM, as mentioned in the video.) To explain the problem I have with Davis, go to about the 80 minute mark in your video and listen carefully to the QM scenario proffered by Herman Verlinde, in which two experiments involving the collisions of particles possessing identical states in both experiments can produce two different results. Verlinde asks Hooft if his pre-QM theory will accept the validity of that. Hooft says "yes, within the confines of QM". And this is a crucial thing to understand. Verlinde's description of two identical experiments producing two different results is a QM level phenomena which pop culture has metamorphosed into ideas like good/evil Captain Kirk and the like. You simply can't make that leap and Hooft recognizes that by limiting his acceptance of the two identical experiments/two different results idea to the QM realm. You'd never get Hooft to allow expansion of the scope to include epigenetics, as Davis does. What Davis does is, I think, pseudoscience. He takes two concepts that operate on very different levels (QM and epigenetics and perhaps other ideas in parts of the video I didn't watch) and makes the perceptual/logical error of putting them in the same scope. How is this different than thinking that two lines of equal length when they are not, a perceptual error used to convince us that we can't believe what we see, but should believe what Davis says? Davis video is not about HP, it's not about epigenetics, its (from what I've seen) a mashup of uncorrelated ideas into a recipe for anthropocentic enlightenment. I think Davis is as much a victim of his own errors in perception as anyone.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: the average number of people online, going by memory here, in 2007 at 8 am EST was about 10,000. Currently there are 31,599 online users... How is that tapering off or losing users? Here's a plot of concurrency from Dec 2006 to Dec 2011. Concurrency was about 10K in 2007, as you recall. It peaked at about 66K in early 2009 and has been falling ever since. Here's concurrency for the last 12 months, still falling... I may not agree with Del over the reason for SL's declining concurrency, but I do agree that it's declining.

Celestiall Nightfire wrote: There's nothing intellectual about this thread. ... pushes her reading glasses up her nose and glares at you through them with an intensity that she hopes will vaporize the top of your head before you can start laughing.

Sonja Smedley wrote: Basically, everything is just a createdness of the humans...... all the sciences, the languages, simply everything here on earth. ( I do not mean nature of course or the planet itself). People give names to things ... they wrote the Bible ... actually all made by human hands. So I ask myself seriously, who gives us the right to say actually what really is and is not in this world? No one knows what this world really is and why we are here and were we did come from. I do not believe all that stuff we got teached in school ... Soooo ... maybe I am different and seem crazy to all the other people but this is how I am and I do not need to hide my feelings I am honest. I think we have to be careful about making statements like "we created language" as if it was a conscious decision on our part to do so. We evolved our capacity for language, as have other animals that we do not consider as being conscious (self-aware). The scientific method is something we did consciously design, and it may be the coolest idea we've ever had. It strives for objective truth, knowing full well that the people applying the method have subjective biases and flawed perception. We've been working on this idea for thousands of years, as long as any religion. Unlike religion, the scientific method makes predictions and requires that every hypothesis be tested against verifiable evidence. Science does not say what is and what isn't with absolute certainty. Science is about probabliities. We posit theories which make predictions about the world, and if the world provides evidence to counter the theory (the moment a theory is postulated, somebody wants to find evidence to disprove it), it dies. Now and then, nature offers up evidence that confirms the predictions and we yell "Yay!", but we do not claim certainty. We're maybe just one step or layer closer to the truth. But the theories of science forever remain theories. So in that sense, nobody knows for sure. But we can achieve enough certainty to accomplish great things, like fly or cure illness. Every time you fly on an airplane, press the brake pedal of your car or take antibiotics for an infection, you are demonstrating your faith in the science that made it possible. You are expressing your faith in the collaborative endeavor of mankind to push our biases and errors of perception to the side and get at the truth of a thing. The kinds of perceptual and logical errors that Davis and Lipton mentioned have been known for a very long time. Magicians, illusionists and con-men of old may know more about human perception than many modern psychologists. Socrates conned more than his fair share of people into hanging themselves in argument and seeing the error of their ways. Every day we learn of yet another way that we fool ourselves, but the general idea that we fool ourselves is ancient. I do it, you do it, Davis does it and several of us here have caught him doing it. In watching over an hour of Davis' video now, I've encountered several theories and claims that have already been disproven by physical evidence. His claim that the GEO600 detector found evidence of "holographic projection" has been shot down as "noise" and his characterization of that projection as being Earth centered is simply wrong. Quantum Mechanics knows nothing about Earth or humans. Throughout the video, there is a constant drumbeat of anthropocentrism that just sounds like religion, not science. Sonja, you are probably no more or less crazy than me. (I neither intend that as a compliment nor an insult, just my assessment of the probabilities ;-) We share a curiosity about the world around us and our place in it because, for reasons known and yet unknown, the nature of the human intellect makes us the fittest to survive. Where we may differ is in our comfort with uncertainty. In that sense, I've long known that I'm not like many of my friends, who disdain uncertainty so much that they'll believe wrong things. My conscious reflective self would rather be uncertain than certain of the wrong things. My subconscious is prone to all those errors mentioned by David and Lipton, so I have to keep an eye on it. I am not bothered to discover errors in my perception and beliefs. I can try to work around the former and change the latter. After my Father, the mind I've most admired is that of the late Nobel Physicist Dr. Richard Feynman, who Davis quoted early in the first video you linked. I've read all of Feynman's layperson books, learned physics from his "Feynman Lectures on Physics", and listened to or watched nearly all of the available recordings of his lectures and interviews. I am reasonably sure he would declare Davis as "nutty", or even worse, as a philosopher. I have watched over an hour of your Mr. Davis. Now I ask that you watch at least of little of my Dr. Feynman. I can imagine that what you feel when watching Davis is like what I feel when watching Feynman. Feynman can bring me to tears with the power and elegance of his intellect. I think you'll find that he addresses many of the points you've raised in your responses to us here. ETA: I just read Tari Landar's response, which I find thoughtful and heartfelt. I too don't mind if people think differently than I do, most of you seem to. And though I believe I embrace uncertainty in preference to being certain of the wrong things, I am not supremely confident in my ability to actually know the right things. I simply do the best I can.

Perrie Juran wrote: I wonder if they are as tastey as those troobles were? CiaoBella Mirabella cooked one up right proud, though she complained mightily about how difficult it was to peel.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Czari Zenovka wrote: Drake1 Nightfire wrote: X3aV wrote: Funny, lots of people like to claim they are part Native American, usually Cherokee. I doubt the spirit fathers would approve of a virtual trollop. /me glares at the person who clearly has a death wish, "What did you just call her?" *Continues standing behind my Captain of the Guards, making mental note to increase his salary* Hey, if you're not gonna be a virtual trollop, I'm happy to volunteer! Sooo, what are you doing later, Maddy? I've entered an Irwin Corey lookalike contest. Come and cheer for me?

Czari Zenovka wrote: Drake1 Nightfire wrote: X3aV wrote: Funny, lots of people like to claim they are part Native American, usually Cherokee. I doubt the spirit fathers would approve of a virtual trollop. /me glares at the person who clearly has a death wish, "What did you just call her?" *Continues standing behind my Captain of the Guards, making mental note to increase his salary* Hey, if you're not gonna be a virtual trollop, I'm happy to volunteer!

CookzEvermore wrote: I want to purchase a graphics card for my desktop. My computer system is Windows Vista Model: s5150t Rating: 4.0 Processor: Intel® Core2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz 2.94GHz Memory (RAM): 8.00 GB System Type: 64-Bit Operating System What card would be best with my system? Hi Cookz! Welcome to the forums. The concensus seems to be that nVIDIA cards are better than ATI for use with SL. Another forumite recently selected an EVGA nVidia GTX 660, 2GB, Superclocked. You can read through the thread here... http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Video-Card-Question/m-p/2052725 I don't think we've heard back from Czari about its performance yet, but for the money, forumites seemed to think it was a good value. There may be little reason to get 2GB of graphics memory on the card, as SL uses only 512M, but if you run other graphics intensive programs alongside SL, that might come in handy. Good luck! ETA: As Frawmusl mentioned, it'll be important to know more about your motherboard and PSU to be certain that any card you pick will actually work in your PC.

Good Monday morning, Hippie!!! Wanna start off the week with a li'l smootch for the pooch?...

Nyll Bergbahn wrote: Only a few minutes into the video and I come across one of Davis's so-called experts from my own country, someone who hit the headlines some years ago and it wasn't for his insights into a holographic universe. Yes, like I'd believe anything that 'expert' says: http://www.rte.ie/news/2002/0531/26280-maynooth/ Anyway, weren't the Geo 600 conjectures Davis talks about at the start of the video disproved by gamma ray observations by the ESA's Integral Gamma Ray Observatory? Yep. http://news.discovery.com/space/we-might-not-live-in-a-hologram-after-all-110701.htm There's been increasing criticism over String Theory (from which the Holographic Universe springs) because it's unproveable and has made very little progress in the 40 years or so that people have been banging on it. Some of that criticism stems from the politics/economics of the scientific community (which is why science's healthy skepticism should be applied to the business of science as well). What really bugs me about Davis' video are his huge conceptual leaps that simply have no basis in fact. He goes from the idea of "holographic projection" of String Theory's 10-11 dimensions into our four to the wild fabrication that that projection is centered around Earth, as if we're Nature's favorite child. This torturing of logic continues in the second video linked here, where Davis' claims that Lamarck's epigenetics has turned biology upside down (30:02 in the second video). Has it? Lamarck was a contemporary of Darwin, and though we were aware then, and are increasingly aware now of epigenetic evidence, it has hardly turned biology on its head. Cell differentiation, which gives us bones and muscle and blood, is epigenesis in full bloom. Without it, we'd be homogeneous blobs of goop. The environment really does effect gene expression, even in ways that survive into offspring, but that effect pales in comparison to the information carried from generation to generation via the DNA itself. If epigenetics were the prime mover, cell differentiation would be more affected by environment than DNA and my being a blonde female human would be more the result of Mom's environment (and if you believe Davis, mental disposition) than the fact that I was born of two northern European humans. Epigenetics is wiggling biology, not capsizing it. And there again, Davis' and Lipton make a huge, unwarranted leap from environmental effects on gene expression to conscious awareness controlling DNA. Most of life on Earth is not be considered "conscious". I've not watched the entire video, but how does Davis' account for the little bits of epigenetic inheritance seen in plants and microbes? It's not news to anyone that mental health has an effect on physical health, for reasons we understand and reasons we've yet to understand. But to make the leap from that to the idea that you can think your way to health, and to the health of your offspring, isn't supported by the evidence.Somewhere in the video, it's claimed that placebo is as effective as 33% of medications and surgeries. That's true in the studies, but those studies are for specific medications and surgeries. To suggest that because placebo is as effective as arthroscopic knee surgery in relieving pain, it's as effective everywhere else is nuts. Would you want to be placebo'd out of a burst appendix, ruptured aortic aneurysm, plague or venomous snake bite? There may be grains of truth in the video, but they are being washed away by the river of manipulation.

Dillon Levenque wrote: Why do I get the feeling a number of these are tried and tested? Because we nefarious are adept at inserting feelings into the unaware. Some of us are able to insert them into the aware. The best of us don't even know we're doing it. Yes, we're that good.

Dillon Levenque wrote: "Paul Simon claims"? Nay. Paul Simon made no claims. He was merely repeating what he'd heard. He told what 'she' had said. She was, it seems, nefarious. He don't know nuffin' 'bout imagining a nefarous woman. Here's the beginning of my list of ways to either leave your lover or get him to leave you... 1) Move and leave three forwarding addresses, none of them correct. 2) Move in with another lover, and leave the correct forwarding address. 3) Call the pizza place and order pizzas in his name until he goes bankrupt, then assume the lease on the apartment. 4) Borrow his cell phone and make calls you are sure will bring the NSA to his doorstep. The metadata won't show that it's not his voice. 5) Call an escort service and hire a hottie to visit during your dinner hour. Feign indignation when she arrives and tell him to "get the hell out, you rascal!" 6) Tell him you are pregnant. 7) Tell him you are a lesbian. 8) If neither 5 nor 6 is sufficient, tell him you are lesbian, and pregnant. 9) Borrow an infant for the afternoon and claim s/he is yours, that you are a lesbian, and pregnant. 10) Keep eating the edges off his hamburgers until he can't stand it anymore. 11) Ask him to paint your toenails while your fingernails dry. 12) Tell him you're tired of shaving and have joined the circus as the bearded lady. 13) Blacken three teeth with a Sharpie, tell him you've joined the circus as a carnie... and smile big. 14) Become BFFs with his mother and incorrectly learn all her recipies. 15) Buy a duplicate of the TV remote control so you needn't wrench it out of his hands to switch the TV back to "Ellen". I could go on...

Perrie Juran wrote: About the closest thing you could get to a guarantee on the Interwebs would be to get on Web Cam and have the other person hold up five forms of picture ID for you to look at. This'll have to do until I can find four more IDs...

Sonja Smedley wrote: The makers own part comes in part five as he said at the beginning. Please don't judge something when you only saw 40 min or less. No one forces anyone here to watch it. If it is nothing for you then fine. Don't waste your energy here. My knowledge of quantum mechanics (or even classical physics, really) is barely skin deep, even after two years of undergraduate physics courses and a semester of Quantum Mechanics in grad school. Yet, within the first 40 minutes of the video, the definition of "observer" had been misrepresented to the point that if I'd given it in my QM class, I'd have been told that philosophy and theology were taught in the building next door. I understand that you may feel "cut off" by my stopping at the 40 minute mark, but the errors to that point tell me that I'll not be moved until they are addressed. I would not continue building a house if I saw that the foundation was unstable. Sonya, we have very different backgrounds and will come at these deep questions from different angles. Nevertheless, I think we just might share both awe of this beautiful universe and gratitude for the chance to experience it. If Stephen Davis brought you to this place and chance brought me, the result is the same. We're both here. :-)

Profaitchikenz Haiku wrote: I think this might be an attempt to do the next "What the Bleep..." without J Z Knight's input. Now, if somebody decided to make a Quantum Physics exploration island in SL, that would be worth linking to. These kinds of pitches are so very familiar, having sprung from aspects of humanity that were reasonably well understood (and taken advantage of) long before science popped up to start clobbering claims. Although I find the video unconvincing, I do find it very human.

7-28-1845 Elizabeth Barret Browning describes a grand total of seven ways that she loves "Thee", which is consistent with our ability to visualize a maximum of five to eight things at one time. Further analysis of the poem reveals that the "ways" aren't actually methods, but measurements and qualifications, leading researchers to conclude that Browning had no idea what she was talking about. 7-28-1975 Paul Simon claims there "must be fifty ways to leave your lover" but describes only four. One of them... "make a new plan, Stan", is as indefinite as anything Browning described, leading researchers to conclude that Simon had no idea what he was talking about.

Deltango Vale wrote: Hey Maddy, It's a mistake on the page. The UK prices include VAT. Any idea why they don't absorb it for the EU, then? I like you Brits, but not enough to subsidize you! ;-)

I hope you two are having fun, Hippie! I wanna go kite flying today. If the wind doesn't pick up, I might actually have to get some exercise...

Deltango Vale wrote: CCP Games is a very successful company. It has offices in Iceland (high costs, high tax), Georgia (low costs, low tax), New York (high costs, high tax), Shanghai (low costs, low tax) and Newcastle (low costs, high tax). It sells its product in the global market at a uniform price. All costs, including sales taxes, are included in that price. (Note, UK prices include VAT, even though it is not marked.) CCP games sees itself as a global company in a global marketplace with global customers. Linden Lab, on the other hand, sees itself as a California company with US customers. That is one of many reasons why EVE Online is growing rapidly and Second Life is in decline. Del, if I read the CCP pricing page correctly, VAT is only included in EU prices. (Note the asterisks on this page). The US cost is $131.40/yr. The UK price is GBP89.90 ($138, or $6+ higher than the US) and does not seem to include the 20% VAT, which would put the total price at $166. The EU cost is Euro131.4($174). I don't know what the EU VAT rate is, but it looks like it might be north of the UK's 20%. By the OP's numbers, LL is charging exactly the VAT for the UK, as $295*1.2=$354. So, if I'm not reading/calculating wrong, CCP is actually charging a higher price for subscriptions in the UK, if not the EU. LL appears to be charging the same price in both the US and UK, unless the OP meant to say that UK pricing was GPB354.