Science?

http://www.thephysicsforum.com/trash-can/121-ctmu-b-s-brilliant.html
This is a thread on a grand theory of reality by Chris Langan, purported IQ 180+, which Langan claims is based on pure logic. Yet, I rather suspect some lapses in logic. Plus, it's deliberately written in a manner contrived to exhaust the reader. Nevertheless, the last post on the thread above quite annoys me: a debate on science is here ended because it is not based on "current scientific understanding." Does the moderator not realize that this understanding is always evolving when it is not revolutionizing? Science that stands still is dead. Also, the thread contains no substantive criticisms of the grand theory--that is, no indication that the theory is even out of the bound of current understanding. But, it's not PC--he claims to prove God's existence, and the big no-no that tends to follow, intelligent design. Also, he favors eugenics.

Fun with Religion

Herewith Bertrand Russell's Parable of the Celestial Teapot:

"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of
skeptics to disprove received dogma rather than of dogmatists
to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to
suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china
teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody
would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were
careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed
even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on
to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is
intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt
it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If,
however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in
ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday,
hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of
eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the
psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an
earlier time."

Matrix Musings

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/522/statistical-mentality

I'm too much of an agnostic to buy into this bit, since we do not know the number of simulations or the number of original histories:

Is ‘this’ history or its simulation? More precisely: is ‘this’ a contemporary biological (brain-based) simulation, or a reconstructed, artificial memory, run on a technological substrate ‘in the future’? That is a question without classical solution, Moravec argues. It can only be approached, rigorously, with statistics, and since the number of fine-grained simulated histories (unknown but probably vast), overwhelmingly exceeds the number of actual or original histories (for the sake of this argument, one), then the probabilistic calculus points unswervingly towards a definite conclusion: we can be near-certain that we are inhabitants of a simulation run by artificial (or post-biological) intelligences at some point in ‘our future’. At least – since many alternatives present themselves – we can be extremely confident, on grounds of statistical ontology, that our existence is non-original (if not historical reconstruction, it might be a game or fiction).

The Nature of Thought

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html A clean, concise, and colorful reminder that metaphor is the foundation of human thought and creativity. It came to me in college that the first and most decisive sign of genius is facility in metaphorical thinking--I always look for this characteristic when I encounter a new writer.