h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's just a desire to stick by his team. As long as he is not breaking windows, there is nothing to do but ignore (unless you are a masochist).

As a programmer I'm sure he'd appreciate the idea that the statistical likelihood is that we're not living in a universe at all, but in a computer simulation of one. And that things like the speed of light limit and the gravitational constant are simplifications of the "real" universe in order to make the simulation more easily computable. I saw an excellent cartoon about this last week but I'm blowed if I can remember where.

There is no statistical likelihood with 0 cases to assess (other real universes to include in a statistic), but I know what you mean. That is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

Many of the churches I pass on my daily mazeway
have those sign boards on the lawn with dates and
notices and clever messages like 'For Eternal Life
Insurance See Agent Inside'.

Today's was particularly compelling and relevant
to this current discussion:

"Creation is a finger pointing to God"

Made me laugh as I wondered which finger.


~jwf~

'For Eternal Life Insurance See Agent Inside'.

A shame no-one has written "(but read the small print)" below it.

The one that gets me - and I've seen one still out front of a church today - is the one that says "The Millenium is Christ's 2000th birthday - come and worship him inside".

Now:

(a) Wake up, dude, it's twenty TWELVE. Oh, hang on, being stuck in the past is kind of your thing, I get it.

(b) To my knowledge, not even the most batshit kkkerrraaaazy Christians ACTUALLY believe that Christ was born in 0AD - they're all OK with the fact that, e.g. Herod had already been dead for years by then so the date was actually something like 6BC or something - so this is a factual accuracy FAIL. Oh, hang on, factual accuracy NOT something you people are real obsessed about, yeah, I remember. Very good.

(c) Worship? Why? Never got a good answer to that one.

Perhaps now time for something completely different:

The cubic polynomial, P, such that P(1)=2, P(2)=3, P(3)=5 and P(4)=7, has real zero beginning with 7.444147, so that the first multidigit prime in its digits is the emirp (reversible prime) 74441, where 74441 itself is the 1049*7th prime and 14447 is the 242*7th, and the latter number is also the 60*7th emirp (DNA watch: 420) and the 6*(7^2)th lesser emirp of pairs.

The real part of the conjugate complex zeros begins with .777; and the first 49 digits (Remove decimal point for this all to make sense) have an additional three 7s, factors as a trio of primes each having exactly three 7s themselves, and these primes are remarkably close, with a ratio of 7.7 to two decimal places between largest and smallest or 7.670000 to seven (precisely, more like 7.66999981...).

Slight correction: An emirp is a non-palindromic reversible prime. Emirps and palindromic primes--or 'palprimes'--combine DISJOINTLY to make up the reversible primes. In case anybody might be interested (), here is the 49-digit number (that when preceded by a decimal point makes the beginning of the real part of the conjugate complex roots of the cubic that carries indices to primes for the first four of them) with its factors:

7779260572135845549294933731898605245405700341051=

7311783256030711*18971267471165521*56081376224707021

Note: 'roots' should technically be replaced by 'zeros' in the prior. A polynomial has zeros, while a polynomial equation has roots (but people make this particular error regularly and sometimes consciously).

Give it up Julzes!

Just trying to entertain. No offense intended, Clive.

If! a certain sense of order were hopefully to prevail, it would be reasonable to surmise , that the concept of time, would allow for the comprehension of values, as liken to, beginning , middle and an end.
So if we were to use the Sun as a loose analogy.
In the beginning tribes worshiped amongst other things the sun, not that they knew two jots about it, in time, the sun attained a symbolic status, as within the Inca Empire. It was born out of some mystical importance and its effects on their day to day existence.
Ritualistic practices often formed to recognise the suns positive presence and as with all opposites, sacrifice to appease the now sun god when times got bad.
Some many years later( we will call it the middle bit, not very scientific but I did say this was a loose analogy) with the evolving science, the sun loses its mystical powers and is generally better understood and has less significance in the governance of society.
Today (end) we know it for what it is, and harvest its energy in the creation of power, maximising crop yield and recreational pursuits.
So, even with Science, society’s still have this primeval instinct to practise worship of god like figures.
Seems for religion there is no beginning, middle and an end, just a beginning.

>>.. just a beginning..<<

And the sun is forever, it's eternal.

And it still graces our lives as a symbol,
as compelling as a mandala, the smiley face.



~jwf~

Okay, I've gotten a bit further into "The Ancestor's Tale" and I'll confess that Dawkins mentioned something that I don't remember a mention of before and that I find very interesting and that seems so obvious now that I'm embarrassed I hadn't thought of it myself:

It is extremely unlikely that *all* of our ancestors have contributed any genetic material whatsoever to the collection of DNA we carry in our cells' nuclei.

So, I'm glad I bit the bullet and looked into the thing.

Interesting question comes to mind (consequent to the last). I wonder how good a guess/calculation can be made to the maximum number of generations (over the whole living population) before necessarily a person's ancestry includes duplication.

Hi, to continue the discussion of #29919, #29921 (and earlier posts) ...

... I believe we now have consensus for the following:
"If evolution is directionless and without purpose then life (defined as the biological process) is also directionless and without purpose"


There remains I believe a contention over the following inference:
"If evolution is directionless and without purpose then life (at the level of an individual organism) is also directionless and without purpose." [Where the meaning of direction and purpose in the first part is identical to their meaning in the second part].


So I’ll ask another question:
Qu: If evolution is directionless and without purpose would a correct corollary be "life (defined as the collectivity of all living organisms) is also directionless and without purpose"?

Even with plants you get mutations, a F1 Hybrid is supposed to be a pure strain, reflecting perfectly its ancestry root, yet sow a F1 Hybrids seeds that it , itself produced and the is out of the bag.
Darwin didn’t predict a cyclical return to all that’s been before, if think environment casts to big enough shadow on things to prevent that from happening.
I would not like to think that I reappear many many years from now, especially if I was not make all the silly mistakes again that I made this time round

"If evolution is directionless and without purpose would a correct corollary be "life (defined as the collectivity of all living organisms) is also directionless and without purpose"?"

Yes.

Next question.

Less facetiously: individual organisms have direction and purpose. Their direction is towards food and the opposite sex, and their purpose is to eat and reproduce. And that's all. Any other "purpose" we may believe we have is an illusion.

Life as a whole is entirely without purpose in exactly the same way that the rest of the universe is without purpose. What is a star "for"?

In particular, it is certain that there are stars that exist but that we cannot detect. What are they "for"? It should be obvious that they're not "for" anything, they just *are*.

I have never understood why people are not satisfied with the explanation that the universe and everything in it just are, and do not require a purpose for their existence.

"Less facetiously: individual organisms have direction and purpose. Their direction is towards food and the opposite sex, and their purpose is to eat and reproduce. And that's all. Any other "purpose" we may believe we have is an illusion."

If that is the case could it not be argued that evolution has direction (the production of organisms that are directed towards food and the opposite sex) and purpose (the production of organisms whose purpose is to eat and reproduce)?

As I have previously mentioned all I ask is that we use the same definitions for direction and purpose when considering the premise (evolution is ...) and the contested inference (hence life is ...).