Facts debate.

[Sun Flash]

August has the most birthdays (I myself was born in August). February has the least.

My take on this (no way based on any studies and is purely my own opinion but makes sense) is that August is 9months from December aka winter so more people stay inside and "keep warm" with it getting darker earlier and colder!

whereas February is 9 months from June aka Summer so people spend more time outside keeping cool!

Weird. All but 3 of my 20 or so family (siblings, parents,grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins) All have birthdays in November.

My family must love boning in the spring.

Even my dog's birthday is on the 29th.

OT: There's a place in Yukon that serves a cocktail adorned with a toe instead of one of those little paper umbrellas. All in the name of lulz, apparantly.

 

[Ascarus]

Can actual FACTS really be debated?

For example, value of speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second.

That cannot be debated. So I ask, can FACTS be debated?

Edit (added): I guess you could debate the measurement accuracy of the equipment. But if we go that far one could expand the question to ask, do facts actually exist?

I'd call a fact something with overwhelming evidence - you can never really have an absolute truth. It may be a fact today, but tomorrow it may not. Therefore, evolution is a fact (despite what some people insist).

evolution as it relates to all things changing could be a fact. but will the speed of light in a vacuum ever change? based on what we know now, no that will not change.

i have mass. that is a fact.

but it's a fact that is true for now - eventually that will not be true.

so might there be transient facts (i have mass) and enduring facts (speed of light in a vacuum)? is there an eternal fact? or more than one? things that will never change?

we are rapidly approaching the supernatural with questions like the latter ...

 

[Fetzenfisch]

Well, I found the quote. Make of it what you will.

Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.
- Ernst Mach

Well thats the problem with some "quotes" out there . The (already shortened) german original is this:

"Die Mathematik ist eine Ökonomie des Zählens. Zahlen sind Ordnungszeichen, die aus Rücksichten der Übersicht und Ersparung selbst in ein einfaches System gebracht sind. Die Zähloperationen werden als von der Art der Objekte unabhängig erkannt, und ein für allemal eingeübt ... Alle Rechnungsoperationen haben den Zweck, das direkte Zählen zu ersparen und durch die Resultate schon vorher vorgenommener Zählprozesse zu ersetzen ... Es kann hierbei vorkommen, dass die Resultate von Operationen verwendet werden, welche vor Jahrhunderten wirklich ausgeführt worden sind ... Ähnlich sparsam verfährt der Kaufmann, indem er, statt seine Kisten selbst herumzuschieben, mit Anweisungen auf dieselben operiert."

It actually says that mathematics as a economy of counting, has split the actual countingactions from the calculations to get rid of this too timeconsuming actions wich have been done perhaps centuries ago, so they do not need repetition.

Perhaps not a perfect summary, but its more or less Machs idea.

A nice Mach quote is his response on the question if atoms do exist " Have you seen some?"

 

[Kpt._Rob]

- Marijuana is not as harmful as it is portrayed. In fact it's one of the most useful natural medical and fiber products known to man, not to mention a terrific bio fuel.

- Music has been proven to induce different effects on plants over extended time.

- Violent video games cause no effect other than desensitizing.

'I believed that my original soul had left my body and been replaced with a new one that had access to all of the old one's memories.'

What the....

I am very interested, yet kind of scared. Would you care to elaborate?

Well, I developed a psychological addiction to marijuana, I was smoking every day (granted, I was using other drugs as well, nitrous especially, which is a dissociative drug), but I used marijuana so often that even when I wasn't actively high, I was muddled in the head from having smoked so much the day before. I eventually developed the persistent feeling that nothing was real, and I was seriously disconnected from reality. The specific dissociative state began after a big smoking session with my friend, I went into a deep trance part way through, and when I came back an hour later everything felt seriously wrong, and somehow I ended up convincing myself that the reason everything felt so weird (and it continued to feel weird for the next three days) was that I was a freshly born soul, and my old soul had left my body because it was tired of living, and it had invited the new one to move in, leaving it all the memories it had from before in order to help orient itself. That is one of the things I remember most vividly, is how strongly I felt at the time that none of the memories I had from before were my own. I didn't feel like I was the one who had lived them, and it made talking to the people who were important in my life really upsetting, because I felt like I was obligated to pretend to have the same relationship the old me had had with them, but I didn't feel like I was the one who had had that relationship with them.

- Marijuana is not as harmful as it is portrayed. In fact it's one of the most useful natural medical and fiber products known to man, not to mention a terrific bio fuel.

- Music has been proven to induce different effects on plants over extended time.

- Violent video games cause no effect other than desensitizing.

I used to be a rabid marijuana smoker, and let me tell you, it can actually be pretty damn harmful. Granted, physiologically speaking there are much worse things you could do to yourself, but in psychological terms marijuana can do a lot of damage to you. You're free to disagree, but I once spent three days in a dissociative state in which I believed that my original soul had left my body and been replaced with a new one that had access to all of the old one's memories. Needless to say, experiences like that weigh on you for the rest of your life. Canabanoid abuse can seriously affect the relationship you perceive between yourself and reality.

I grow a lot of plants, so I actually looked into that second claim of yours at one point. There were some studies that indicated it was true, but most of them were run on a small number of plants, and all the plants in the studies were the same types of plants. A claim like that simply hasn't been verified in any real way as of yet.

To play the devil's advocate (except in California {prop 19 } )
Marijuana while it does have side effects long term, studies have been done, in fact i found out about them today, it rated alcohol, heroin, cocaine and yes marijuana. Now it should be noted that it took both the effect the drug has on relation-ships and the community, as well as the biological effects on the individual, the most dangerous one... alcohol.

Can using Marijuana damage social relations, yes BUT and i can not stress this enough, it affects people on a case-by-case basis, remember when you and your friends had your first drink at a party, if you look back at lets say your year 8/9/10 class, out of everyone you knew, someone out of everyone had a drink and got very drunk first, at first it was looked down upon, but then everybody starting doing it, much in the same way, if people knew what to look for and understood how it works and what it does, then maybe these new found 'hostilities' from people would be buffered or annihilated by a wave understanding, not a wall ignorance

[the drinking example can work for most things, who in your class first had sex, at first disgust then understanding and reason, i can only hope that humanity one day understands this]

And yes it is true that the potency of 'THC' one of the active ingredients in a weed 'high' IS in fact going up, and yes PURE (sorry again) 'THC' is an addictive substance, but how many of you drink coffee or tea daily, your already drinking addictive chemicals such as caffeine, now take all this into account and remember this, marijuana DOESN'T contain 100% THC, the highest (sorry for the pun) levels of THC in this plant have been around 30%, and at that it is a incredibly hard/rare thing to find, so why is it used so frequently in sensationalist arguments, because it sounds REALLY,REALLY EVIL
{average being between 9-14%}
one a slightly related topic, what another 'poster' was talking about 'weed fiber' and bio-fuel, is in fact true, in 1940 ford (yes the car company) made a prototype that was 70% hemp fiber and was incredibly strong when compared to a sledgehammer, it also ran on a hemp bio-fuel.

Marijuana CAN mess up your life, the individual will only have abuse issues with it if they have an addictive trait within their personality, it isn't as if once you smoke a joint your brain goes to mush, it isn't some spiral that destroys your life, UNLESS the person can't manage to see themselves and realize that certain things in life are important, like an education.

So yes, marijuana can damage your life, in the same way driving at 90 mph off a cliff could be considered the most fascinating debate ever conducted between gravity and Newton's three laws of motion (this is a joke, pretense was sadly shot and killed by unknown text murderer)


p.s i would like to know what caused you to go into a dissociative state for 3, as in did you 'consume' any other substances before hand, was the 'skunk' laced with something, etc. What i am trying to ask is, how an earth did you manage that. You must have been consuming a extremely large amount at a almost constant rate to achieve a dissociative state for not 1 or 2 but 3 days.

p.p.s if i have made any spelling/ grammatical mistakes please forgive me, i am tired (it probably shows) and very exhausted. If i have upset any person or persons, i am very sorry, for this, and would like to talk to you more on the topic.
-Jk

I don't disagree with you, my goal here wasn't to say that marijuana should be illegal, in fact, I do feel that it current legal status causes many more problems than it solves. I simply wanted to point out that the OP was making an irresponsible claim. Of course marijuana can be used responsibly, but I think that people have to take the claim that it can be used responsibly with a grain of salt. Having tried a number of drugs myself, and having come into contact with more than a couple other drug users in my time, I've made a couple of observations in regards to drugs.

The first is that as a general rule when people do a drug they either have a terrible experience and decide never to do it again, or they have an amazing experience, and even if they told themselves they were just going to try it once, they want to do it again (exceptions are, of course, made for people who aren't affected the first time they take it). I started off using responsibly, and I know lots of other people who use way too much now, but who started off using responsibly. The more good experiences a person has with drugs, the more they want to use, and no one tries a drug hoping to have a bad experience.

The second observation I would make is that even though there are plenty of people who try marijuana a couple times, and then never do anything else, there are very few people who use harder drugs that didn't start with marijuana. If I hadn't started with marijuana there's not a chance in hell that I would've ended up a couple years later tripping research chemicals, combinations of harmala and mescaline, and when I hit rock bottom even diphenhydramine (Benadryl). I came really close to trying pure MDMA once, and I'm really lucky I didn't, because I think that would've sealed the deal, and in all honesty I'm fairly certain that instead of being clean right now, I'd probably be using heroin and meth right now if I had taken it and had a good experience, which I almost undoubtedly would have. I can't blame marijuana for that, but I can say that if I had never tried marijuana, that I never would have even considered trying any of the other drugs.

The final thing I would say is that even if you get clean, after you've been an addict you carry it with you for the rest of your life. I still want to get high so bad some nights that all I can do is just curl up in a ball and ride it out. I've had flashbacks, and I have a more literal conception of existential terror than I could ever have had without using drugs. I still have days where it's really difficult for me to differentiate between what is and what is not real, because my perception of perception itself has been so fundamentally changed. For all the good experiences I had, I wish I could go back and never have had any of them in the first place. This is one case in which ignorance truly would be bliss.

It's fine to say that marijuana can be used responsibly, and that when it is used responsibly it's probably the safest drug you could use. What's not fine is to treat it as if it's not without its risks. You're right when you say that how marijuana affects a person will vary from person to person, but you don't know if you're the person who can handle it or the person whose life it will set on a path to ruin until its too late.

 

[Palademon]

Chocolate is actually lethal to humans.
It's just that the lethal dose is about 30-40 lbs.

 

[Cpt_Oblivious]

- Roughly over 40% of all gamers are females. Yeah it's a level playing field.

A hundred bucks says 80% of those play exclusively on their Wiis, and another 10% prefer their Wiis over anything else.

Most actually play on their PCs on flash games.

 

[Jonluw]

What I'll add to this is that people who have birthdays in September-December tend to be more successful in life because they are 6-10 months older than the rest of their class when they attend school, this is especially pronounced in athletes.

What? How does that work? I was born in September. An old classmate of mine who was born in December was younger than me. Those of my classmates who were born in January would then be older than me, wouldn't they?

Edit: Let me also add, that over here, the most common birthday is April 1st.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

What I'll add to this is that people who have birthdays in September-December tend to be more successful in life because they are 6-10 months older than the rest of their class when they attend school, this is especially pronounced in athletes.

What? How does that work? I was born in September. An old classmate of mine who was born in December was younger than me. Those of my classmates who were born in January would then be older than me, wouldn't they?

Edit: Let me also add, that over here, the most common birthday is April 1st.

No.

School years start in September. So the earliest intake would be in September (or possibly late August, I forget these things).


Axolotls can turn into salamanders when injected with iodine.

 

[Jonluw]

What I'll add to this is that people who have birthdays in September-December tend to be more successful in life because they are 6-10 months older than the rest of their class when they attend school, this is especially pronounced in athletes.

What? How does that work? I was born in September. An old classmate of mine who was born in December was younger than me. Those of my classmates who were born in January would then be older than me, wouldn't they?

Edit: Let me also add, that over here, the most common birthday is April 1st.

No.

School years start in September. So the earliest intake would be in September (or possibly late August, I forget these things).

What do you mean? All the people in my grade are born in 1993. Of course those of us who are born in January are older than those born in, say, September.

 

[zehydra]

There is a Peruvian mountain goat that can jump 9 feet vertically and has glow in the dark fur from the mushrooms it eats

I require knowledge of such a goat and where I can obtain one.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

What I'll add to this is that people who have birthdays in September-December tend to be more successful in life because they are 6-10 months older than the rest of their class when they attend school, this is especially pronounced in athletes.

What? How does that work? I was born in September. An old classmate of mine who was born in December was younger than me. Those of my classmates who were born in January would then be older than me, wouldn't they?

Edit: Let me also add, that over here, the most common birthday is April 1st.

No.

School years start in September. So the earliest intake would be in September (or possibly late August, I forget these things).

What do you mean? All the people in my grade are born in 1993. Of course those of us who are born in January are older than those born in, say, September.

Hmmm... where do you live?

I live in England, and basically, when it comes to schooling, imagin the year starts in September. So everyone in my year was born inbetween September 1990 to August 1991.

 

[Jonluw]

What I'll add to this is that people who have birthdays in September-December tend to be more successful in life because they are 6-10 months older than the rest of their class when they attend school, this is especially pronounced in athletes.

What? How does that work? I was born in September. An old classmate of mine who was born in December was younger than me. Those of my classmates who were born in January would then be older than me, wouldn't they?

Edit: Let me also add, that over here, the most common birthday is April 1st.

No.

School years start in September. So the earliest intake would be in September (or possibly late August, I forget these things).

What do you mean? All the people in my grade are born in 1993. Of course those of us who are born in January are older than those born in, say, September.

Hmmm... where do you live?

I live in England, and basically, when it comes to schooling, imagin the year starts in September. So everyone in my year was born inbetween September 1990 to August 1991.

That might explain things, yes. Here in Norway the school year starts in August, but people are enrolled in school the year in which they turn six, so all the people in a grade will be born in the same year. When talking about people from a different grade, we often just refer to them by the year they're born. e.g. if I was to mention the people in the grade above me, I would refer to them as "-92ers", or "the 92 litter" rather than 13th graders.

 

[Dessembrae]

Chocolate is actually lethal to humans.
It's just that the lethal dose is about 30-40 lbs.

Heh, almost anything is lethal in these amounts. Eat 30-40 lbs of pasta, I dare you.

Yes but in this case there is a specific substance in the chocolate that is poisonous but only exist in very small amounts, so you could say extract the poison from the 40lb of chocolate and have only a gram or so of poison that would still be lethal. try and do that with pasta ^^

OT: When people say "this snake is poisonous" they almost almost always mean "this snake is Venomous" since poisonous and venomous are two different things. You can absorb Poisons throu the skin or intestines, venoms have to be introduced into the bloodstream or tissue mechanically (as in needles, claws or in this case fangs.) this is the reason it is usually harmless to drink snake venom.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

Chocolate is actually lethal to humans.
It's just that the lethal dose is about 30-40 lbs.

I think almost anything would be lethal to humans at 40 lbs.


I mean, Luke almost dies eating fifty eggs.

 

[GeorgW]

Can actual FACTS really be debated?

For example, value of speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second.

That cannot be debated. So I ask, can FACTS be debated?

Edit (added): I guess you could debate the measurement accuracy of the equipment. But if we go that far one could expand the question to ask, do facts actually exist?

I'd call a fact something with overwhelming evidence - you can never really have an absolute truth. It may be a fact today, but tomorrow it may not. Therefore, evolution is a fact (despite what some people insist).

evolution as it relates to all things changing could be a fact. but will the speed of light in a vacuum ever change? based on what we know now, no that will not change.

i have mass. that is a fact.

but it's a fact that is true for now - eventually that will not be true.

so might there be transient facts (i have mass) and enduring facts (speed of light in a vacuum)? is there an eternal fact? or more than one? things that will never change?

we are rapidly approaching the supernatural with questions like the latter ...

Actually nothing can be 100% sure since we always base a fact on other facts, and they could always be wrong. For example 1+1 only equals 2 in a 10 based system because we say so. What if it actually equals 3?

OT: There was an identical thread a few days ago, and there I posted something like:
Donkeys kill more people than airplanes every year.
Pumpkins, cucumbers, tomatoes, lemons and bananas are all technically berries.

 

[Hellz_Barz]

It's hard to know. Diary accounts (especially from London) at the time suggested that the British were losing morale. Also, despite the fact that Hitler ordered that bombs be dropped in Belfast, the IRA were in league with the Nazis. And the British knew full well and back then, the IRA was a much bigger threat than it is today. Had the Nazis begun invading, Britain knew no one would be able to defend Northern Ireland, and it would be only a matter of time before they hit Wales. London was already in bits, and supplies were strained.

As I said, it's really hard to know. Churchill's speeches were still suggesting they would never surrender, morale was still reasonably high, and I'm know the British aren't a pack of cowards, but that was the situation, and the British goverment were very aware of it.

EDIT: I just want to say I don't know of any proof suggesting a surrender, so I probobly shouldn't have even mentioned it. I feel really ignorant know, but it was just a little tibit I picked up over the years, and thought it would be a neat thing to mention. Sorry about that.

Ireland was neutral at the time not in league with the Nazis. In fact many British pilots that crashed in the republic were secretly snuck into northern Ireland to be taken back to England, Where as German ones weren't. However alot of Irish wouldn't have minded seeing England lose. Even alot of Irish Americans wanted to see Germany win.

 

[BonsaiK]

Tuning a guitar by ear, by comparing harmonics and beat frequencies between strings, assuming you could do it 100% perfectly, actually will always leave your guitar a little bit out of tune.

Hmm, how does that work?
Is it anything to do with say a D on the A string not being exactly the same as the open D?

No. If you're using the actual fretted notes, you're using equal temperament, which means that the comparative system works fine. However, if you're using harmonics on the 7th and 5th frets (and the 4th fret for the B string) then you're using ratios of the overtone series to get each successive note, and these series don't quite match up to an equally tempered scale, so you wind up slightly out of tune. Not by very much, mind you.

More information on the mathematics behind it: http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html