Marcel Popescu

I've long used the expression "real science, so called because it can only be found in books and movies". From a talk at Pycon 2014 : The ideals reality of science: The pursuit of verifiable answers highly cited papers for your c.v. The validation of our results by reproduction convincing referees who did not see your code or data An altruistic, collective enterprise A race to outrun your colleagues in front of the giant bear of grant funding H.T to Daniel Lemire .

I don't believe in Hell. Several years ago I decided to fully accept the preterist theory (short version: everything in the Bible has already happened); this has led me to universalism - everyone goes to heaven. I've held this belief for quite a while now. I just changed it - somewhat. I suddenly believe in Hell, a place of such misery and torture that people can't really imagine it. A horrifying place. I also believe I'm in it right now , I just found a tiny bit which is somewhat less horrible. (I try not to make too many waves so I don't get moved to a more horrible part.) This movie is why I think so - Johnny Got His Gun . It made me realize that politicians and soldiers are, if not the Devil, then something very close to it. They do their best to make other people's lives and homes a Hell. Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been the clearest example, but read this description of the carpet bombing of Tokyo from Wikipedia: On March 9 and 10 1945, B-29 Sup...

Interesting article at http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html . They didn't elaborate on the subject of religion, but I think (as some commented) that this is why the so-called golden rule is emphasized: trying to love everyone as you love yourself is another way of saying "realize they're also people just like yourself". No big discovery, I realize :) but I liked the connection.

Sort of a follow-up to my previous article - I just read " Why did the pig become so unpopular? " which added a lot of economic reasons for forbidding pig eating to the one I considered before (the disease part - pig meat has to be cooked really well to be safe, otherwise you risk a bunch of problems, which in Israel 5000 years ago is serious). Interesting.

... in the vein of this . Jesus says in Mark 11:23 I tell you the truth. Anyone may say to this hill, "Go and jump into the sea." He must not doubt in his heart, but he must believe that he will have the things he asks for and he will have them. What if Jesus didn't mean "if you have faith, I will move the hill (mountain) for you", but "if you have faith, the hill will move because the Universe was built to respond to human volition"? We know that the human body responds to human will sometimes (placebo effect); there's a speculative part of physics (quantum physics) that has as a basic tenet that human observation can influence the outcome of physical processes. Why the need for "unwavering" faith, then? Well, the Universe is probably a simple mechanism, if you're not very sure of what you want it cannot respond to your will. Maybe there's a "faith threshold" that triggers the mechanism; or maybe there's a required...

From this comment : I seem to be known to many of those around me as an all around nice guy, a good guy even. But I'm an asshole, a self-absorbed prick. (...) I often find that I'm doing good things out of an awareness that I should want to do them, than because I actually feel that desire. This could have been written by me. Ouch.

1 Cor 6:12 "Everything is permissible for me" — but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me" — but I will not be mastered by anything.

During the last few years I have slowly come to a conclusion: the reason for a lot of Biblical laws is not actually religious (as in, God has decided that something should not be done and that's that); it is the fact that non-religious commandments would have required explanations beyond the Jews' knowledge at the time or at least that they would have not obeyed them for long otherwise. Take incest, since it does make for a rather glaring weirdness. Most people - an overwhelming number - consider incest to be "yuck"... the term cannot be discussed in polite company, only among porn freaks. When people ask "who did Adam and Eve's sons marry?" and receive the obvious answer "their sisters", they go "that's disgusting". And yet... incest was not forbidden for a long time in the Bible. A quick search on Google reveals this page where we can see that Abraham married his half-sister, Moses' father married his aunt, and even when in...

I believe that the mind and the brain are distinct things, while the mind and the soul are the same. However, memory is pretty clearly located inside the brain... which means that we lose our memory when we die. That would imply that the purpose of our life here is only to educate our soul... to transform us into better people. It also means that we do not know who we were or what we did - which would be good, because otherwise a lot (most? all?) of us would have to somehow come to terms with the shame of what we did. Not really compatible with heavenly bliss. No basis in anything, really, just some idle speculation.

I watched Zeitgeist the movie yesterday. Nice movie, I recommended it to a few friends for the 2nd and 3rd parts :) (Nice = it fits in with my previous beliefs, of course :P) As for the first one... well, the whole Horus/Jesus thing is a hoax. This thread is a request by someone for actual evidence... now, the thread is huge, reading it all will take more time than seeing the movie :D, but the thing is, even Acharya's attempt at one point to substantiate her claims fails flat on its face. The conclusion - even by some atheists commenting on the thread - is that the whole thing is Massey's invention, which Acharya parrots because it sells books. (Who knew Dan Brown will practically spawn a new industry, huh?) So... still a nice movie, and I did learn a lot even from the first part. (Yes, I have long known that the Catholic Church took over a lot of pagan holidays to make Christianity easier to swallow.)

What would be true if creationism were true, but false if not? I don't mean "well, God would exist"; I mean what would we expect to happen differently? Well, there's the whole "the universe is comprehensible" thing, which has been discussed in other places (and I do believe it's a great argument). But I just had an idea: the universe is huge . It has either been created by impersonal natural laws, or by God. In the second case, we expect it to have been created for our use, just like the Earth, and therefore at some point we will develop / discover a practical way of faster-than-light travel - just as we developed a way of crossing the oceans. Such an expectation is not warranted in the first case, since it's irrational to expect impersonal laws to care for our wishes. So there. FTL technology. I can barely wait. grin

Let's define I(E) = -log2 P(E), where E is an event. This is the amount of information contained in (imparted by) that event, or in other words the amount of uncertainty removed by that event, and is measured in bits. (Why uncertainty? Let {E*} be the set of possible relevant events, of which E is a member. Before E, any of the {E*} elements could have occured; the fact that we obtained E decreased that uncertainty. P(E) is, of course, 1 / the number of elements in {E*}.) Using the value we determined earlier, the "cutoff value" of 10^-150, the information contained in an event E with that probability is -log2 10^-150, which is 500 bits. Therefore, another way of specifying the "point of no return" is this: anything with an informational content larger than 500 bits could not have occured without the intervention of an intelligence . What are possible sources for this information? Well, as far as I know (please let me know if you find another one), only 3 exist...