On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > Las Vegas has no function either.
Yes it does, Las Vegas functions to make money and give people pleasure, the pyramids gave nobody pleasure at the time they were built except perhaps for the Pharaoh; and they failed spectacularly in doing what they were supposed to be doing, protecting his body and soul for eternity. But Vegas has nothing to do with human folly? > No. > Why don't you explain to me what General Relativity has to do with > defining Cause and Effect? > General Relativity says that the cause of an effect cannot be located at a distance in spacetime greater than a specific length, Quantum Mechanics says that under certain conditions that may be untrue. 350 year old philosophy books have nothing of value to say about this controversy because the philosophers in question wouldn't even have a clue about what we were talking about. > Right, but I was quoting the numbers in the non-Flynn column, where > Leibniz does in fact get a 205. > That entire 1926 study of the IQ of historical figures was a bit of a joke, it did highly questionable things like noting the profession of the figure's father, estimating the average IQ of people in that profession and assuming that the IQ is passed on to the son, and it was only concerned with sons not daughters. > I'm not saying IQ is a great measure of anything, only suggesting that it > is possible that intelligence does not depend on how recent your pool of > knowledge is. > But how large your pool of knowledge is DOES depend on how recent it is, and in matters of physics 350 year old philosophers didn't know jack shit. > By that logic, we should have 10 Shakespeare's writing today > Perhaps we do. If there were only one excellent playwright alive today then he would be extraordinary, but if there were 10 then they'd just be OK. > A genius is someone who defines or redefines culture and thought. > If so then if you live in a culture that is dead wrong about nearly everything its easier to be a genius than if you live in a culture that has more things right. > You sneer at what you have no familiarity with > I sneer at ancestor worship; they were no smarter than we are and they were far far more ignorant. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
