AskScience, would I be safe from a Tsunami if I swam 30 feet below the surface with SCUBA gear?

Wingser · 2 days

I think it's different in this case because it's a documented occurrence which directly answers the question "is it possible to survive a tsunami underwater" with a clear yes.

To answer the question "will I survive every time?" you would need some research.

As Mythbusters would say: plausible.

ZorillaGlue · 4 days

Will not as in cannot, or refuses to?

ADefiniteDescription · 16 days

I said the same thing, and then thought about it and found myself wanting really badly to read her work. I'm interested in knowing how she sees her bodybuilding in the scope of feminist ethics.

It's cool to see someone absolutely smashing our stereotypes of bodybuilders though.

slimeyd · 21 days

What? Minnesotans don't hate... maybe we disagree with his politics but I'm sure he's a very nice man :)

NeedsEvidence · 25 days

I don't think I'm qualified to comment on most of this, but I wanted to make a note of my interpretation of the bit from Grayling and Hitchens. When they say "a theory that can explain everything explains nothing", I don't think they mean that literally. A grand unified theory would indeed be explanatory despite fully encompassing what we know about QT and relativity. I understood that phrase to mean "a theory that can explain everything with a wave of the hand explains nothing".

Just something I wanted to point out :)

godWEENsatan · 1 month

I'm not sure if you understand what the Turing test is. A computer passes the Turing test only if a human cannot recognize it as a computer during a normal conversation.

Knowing that, does your question really make sense?

Arnovic · 1 month

Yeah what's really going on here? I don't know much about the SC2 scene yet, but it seems like we shouldn't jump to the assumption that he is throwing games. That's a serious, career ending accusation.

DaGyani · 1 month

Sounds like you're projecting.

lilydogg · 1 month

Yeah UVM! We rock. Although there are some pretty weird people here too...

SpacebarYogurt · 1 month

Exact your pound of flesh.

Mr_heisenburg · 1 month

Man, it's a cool picture, but it's not cool that you're pretending that it's yours. Don't lie for karma...

beemer · 2 months

I don't know if I agree that you need to know ANY philosophical background in order to talk about ethics. Of course it helps to know what all these goddamn genius thinkers thought, and Kant has some brilliant things to say about ethics, but I'm not sure about imposing a sort of standard on a conversation about ethics.

Either way, thanks for the links! I'm looking forward to brushing up on Kant.

misterrager · 2 months

Aw be a little more generous. I was thinking his "innate intelligence" concept could be a poorly articulated idea along the lines of the idea that the universe is fully constructed in the brain. Meaning can be found only in the individual and so on. I'm sure I'm doing a poor job of describing it.

misterrager · 2 months

You might benefit from reading Spinoza's Ethics. It's a rather more grounded (and quite impressive) take on what you seem to be exploring.

As it is, I think you leave a lot unanswered. For instance:

for the world to work the way that we currently see, there had to have been some innate intelligence within the universe.

Seems like an astounding conclusion drawn from... what exactly? Either you're committing an error of attribution or trending too close to a school of postmodernist thought for my comfort.

I did enjoy reading your post, don't get me wrong. A lot of really cool ideas.

shangle · 2 months

Hey wow I didn't know that Jane appeared to Ender before he started speaking.

I think that, with the evidence we're given, you've probably got the most accurate order of events there. I'd just like to point out that both Bean and his son Ender were in constant communication with geneticists and biologists from earth and the colonies. They also had at least tenuous communication with the "agents" who managed the family finances.

Anything could have happened, but I honestly think the least likely scenario is that Jane had no idea about the Herodotus and it's occupants. It's weird to imagine that throughout their travels together Jane was actively keeping Ender in the dark about Bean.

shangle · 2 months

I just finished reading Shadows in Flight, so here's my attempt at an explanation.

Jane evolves as the ansible network grows. The events in the last three books of the Ender quartet take place about 2000 years (I think this is the case, if I'm wrong please let me know) after the events in Ender's Game. The Delphiki's have only been in flight for 400 years or so, this would suggest that the ansible network hasn't built up enough yet for the fantasy game to evolve (build? grow?) into the sentient being which is Jane.

If Jane was around at that point in time, I don't know whether she knew Ender, but it seems clear to me that she never knew about the leguminotes. My conclusion: either Jane wasn't alive at the time the events took place or she was alive and was simply clueless. I'd wager on the former though. Jane was able to find and identify Ender and he was better protected from discovery than Bean's family was.

siriusgrey · 3 months

I repeat "the dawn" or picture a beautiful sunrise in my head. Evocative of this passage from Thoreau's Walden:

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep."

ZorillaGlue · 3 months

Thanks! I'll look into that and similar books.

ZorillaGlue · 3 months

Thanks, your comment cheered me up.

I'm with you on the culture point. Heterosexuality is supposed to be the default; anything else and something went wrong, a switch that should have remained untouched was flipped. The idea scares me in part for the same reason I like reading and the outdoors and dislike drugs and violence: it's how I grew up.

You mention stigma, I'm not sure if this is a very big part of it. It's always hard to tell, but I wouldn't consciously allow that variable to enter into my calculations if I were trying to decide whether to date a transwoman or not.

Deconstruct is a good word that I didn't think to use in my original post, but it's exactly the point of this and you got right to it. I know my fears are unfounded, but the fact is that I have them, and I'm determined to find out why.

ZorillaGlue · 3 months

This is a very good question, and the answer is I don't know. All I know is that I am uneasy with the concept. There's still some soul searching and introspection that needs to be done. But I'll do my best.

Maybe my problem is getting stuck with an immutable concept of "maleness".
The issue could be simple with not knowing. I'm not sure if I'd rather remain in the dark, but there's something that makes me uneasy with the concept that some proportion of the random hookups I've had could have been male at one point in their life.
Maybe it's nothing more than the unease one has with doing something for the first time. It's very possible that if I made a decision to have sex with a transgirl knowing full well her situation, afterwards I'd no longer have a problem with it.

Secret Santa 2011	One-Year Club
Verified Email

ZorillaGlue

TROPHY CASE

you'll need to login or register to do that

create a new account

login