BaalChatzaf

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  1. BaalChatzaf
    If the Democrat lefties get away with this Lying Bastards maneuver couldn't the Republicans do the same to them if the power in Congress is shifted? What one can do, two can also do.
  2. BaalChatzaf
    Interesting conclusion. You are far more optimistic than I am concerning Judge K.
  3. BaalChatzaf
    In the current dust up between Judge Kavanaugh and the Crazy Lady, what do you think the final outcome will be? I have no idea how to estimate this situation. Live Long and Prosper \\// Ba'al Chatzaf
  4. BaalChatzaf
    Hell. I knew that! There are no good governments and there never were. There are only bad governments and worse governments. Totalitarian and collective governments are the worst.
  5. BaalChatzaf
    Having Aspberger's Syndrome is a definite advantage in the computer and software related trades. Also in physical science. P.A.M.Dirac was almost a textbook case of Aspberger's Syndrome. Spock, the son of a Sarek, is the patron saint of the Aspies. Live Long and Prosper \\//
  6. BaalChatzaf
    Newton and Galileo dumped Aristotle's nonsense as did Kepler. Science did not progress until Aristotle was purged.
  7. BaalChatzaf
    And philosophy will be absolutely unable to produce anything useful. Philosophy, by and large, is a failure at being useful. There are some minor exceptions in the field of epistemology. But in ethics, aesthetics, psychology it is useless. Metaphysics is beyond useless. It is a vacuum that sucks thoughts out of the heads of otherwise intelligent people.
  8. BaalChatzaf
    It is partially inductive reasoning. It is literally impossible for a human to workout the tree diagram (directed graph) of all possible moves of a chess game. There are just too many possible legal games. So one assumes the most likely moves a player and opponent will make. This is inductive, not deductive, but the simplification makes it possible for the human player to work out 10-20 moves in advance. Chess playing computer programs can work hundreds of moves in advance, these days. This is why computers are beating humans in Chess and Go (chinese/japanese board game). The '"reasoning" is a combination of classical logic constrained by the rules of the game + a Bayesian estimate of the likelihood of moves based on prior experience. NB: Bayesian estimation and inference is the closest thing there is to a formal logic of induction. Please see: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/philosophy_online4.pdf and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#BayeSolu
  9. BaalChatzaf
    It is not an absolute scientific statement. I don't think there are any such. The best physical science can mange are assertions so backed up by experiment that it would be unreasonable to doubt them in the absence of evidence that they might not be true. No reasonable person doubts the second law of thermodynamics at this time, but if evidence were found against it, we would have to reconstruct the physics of energy. The conservation of energy is similar in that fashion. No one doubts it, but it could, in principle, be empirically falsified. No scientific theory or hypothesis is beyond possible falsification. The is why physical science succeeds where philosophy fails.
  10. BaalChatzaf
    No scientific statement is absolute. Scientific conclusions are held provisionally as probable but nevertheless subject to empirical falsification. There statement "No scientific statement is absolute" is not a scientific statement. It is a metastatement, a statement -about- science.
  11. BaalChatzaf
    All of Hillel's commentaries were made in an ethical and religious context. I suspect R. Hillel accepted the Genesis count of the beginnings of things as correct. R. Hillel lived, thought and wrote in a pre-scientific time.
  12. BaalChatzaf
    I wonder if Marx ever wondered who was going to buy all of these mass produced products. If the worker is reduced to subsistence he could buy little. The owning-class being small could never clear the market of the goods produce by workers running the the machines owned by the owning-class. There is a contradiction here. Henry Ford found a piece of the solution to this conundrum. He paid his workers enough money so that in the aggregate they could purchase their subsistence AND the product they made from their wages. Why did Ford do this 1. Obviously to help him self the product which his factories made 2. He hated labor unions like poison. He paid his workers enough so they would not likely go out on strike against him. In a word, rational self interest motivated him to pay his workers a fair and good wage. This was contrary the Marx supposition that the owning class was not motivated by reason, but only by "class interests".
  13. BaalChatzaf
    That is almost certainly true. We now have good evidence that space itself is is expanding and at an accelerating rate. Which means there are portions of the physical cosmos where the space is expanding at greater than the speed of light. This does not contradict relativity, which postulates that no local motion IN spacetime of a wave or object can be such that the local motion is at greater than light speed. Spacetime can expand (or at least is not forbidden by theory) at greater than light speed. Which means there may be portions of the physical cosmos which we can never see which means we can never know them.
  14. BaalChatzaf
    You may look to the beginning of things but you won't see them. You can only guess what there possibly were. There is just so far we can look back in time.
  15. BaalChatzaf
    As do all scientific laws. Any scientific law, hypothesis or theory is one empirical falsification away from being modified or discarded. That includes the second law of thermodynamics. However as physical laws go the second law of thermodynamics is a close to "a sure thing" as any physical law yet propounded. Put it another way. If the second law of thermodynamics is falsified, most of physics will come down with it. It was found out recently that certain neutrinos had small but non-zero mass. The standard model had to be modified slightly to accommodate this finding, but the Standard Model remained intact. If the second law is ever falsified then the Standard Model will come crashing down, although the General Theory of Relativity will remain intact. That is how central thermodynamics and the second law is to non-gravitational physics.
  16. BaalChatzaf
    the priority of rational and reasonable self interest was not invented by Rand. 2300 years ago R. Hillel said If I am not for myself then who is for me? If I am only for myself what am I? If not now, then when? (Of course he said it in Hebrew. אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי. וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי. וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתַי Of all the Abrahamic religions, Judaism is the most rational (as religions go) and the least altruistic. Live long and Prosper \\//
  17. BaalChatzaf
    Basic law of thermodynamics. Entropy increases. When entropy becomes maximum temperature everywhere is the same. No more work can occur. The so-called heat-death of the Universe. No exception to the second law of thermodynamics has ever been observed so if the second law is really true then the cosmos will reach a stage where nothing else happens. Heat death. It does not matter how the cosmos got started. The entropy is increasing.
  18. BaalChatzaf
    Excellent question. Even as the cosmos expanded into what it is now it was doomed from the start. Entropy increases. How things really began? I do not know.
  19. BaalChatzaf
    I am saying eventually our species will become extinct. And so will life on this planet. When the sun gets hot which it will in one billion to two billion years, the oceans and seas will evaporate and life on the surface and what were the oceans will cease. Any life that hangs on underground will be ended when the Sun expands into a red giant and vaporizes the earth.
  20. BaalChatzaf
    Dead and burned tree sequester no carbon. Trees do more for us than we do for them.
  21. BaalChatzaf
    Even the cosmos is not going to "live" forever. The second law of thermodynamics appears to be true. Entropy will increase until no more happens in the cosmos.
  22. BaalChatzaf
    That is not what I am saying.
  23. BaalChatzaf
    In two and half billion years. Don't worry. complex life on earth will be dead and gone by that time. The Sun will have used up its hydrogen fuel by then, and will be fusing helium. This will make the Sun 40 percent hotter than it is know, causing the oceans and seas to dry up. With the water gone, complex life on the surface will become extinct. That includes us, unless we can find another star with an earth like planet to live on. There are two chances of that happening: slim and none.
  24. BaalChatzaf
    If I had "aristotelian knowledge" I would believe 1. a ten pound weight falls twice as fast as a five pound weight 2. women have fewer teeth than men 3. The earth does not move and is in the center of the universe and 4. there is no inertia. That is what "aristotelian knowledge" would bring to me. No thanks.
  25. BaalChatzaf
    Here is the text of John Bolton's address concerning the ICC, the United Nations kangaroo court. It is a sizzler. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/full-text-john-bolton-speech-federalist-society-180910172828633.html BTW Al Jazeera has done some pretty good news presentation. Don't let the Arabic name mislead you.