Ouch! That was a good one! :up::up::up:

-S

Well, this:
Did seam to infer that you considered reality and belief to be the same thing, but I shall put that down to a mix up of words/meanings if that is not what you meant.


I agree that we can have no direct experience of external reality and any
knowledge about an external, non-phenomenal/non-nominal reality requires a
blind acceptance of several axioms needed to provide a foundation for any other
useful "facts". I would also agree with you if you put it to me that many of the
axioms that are taken most for granted (i.e. that our senses are effected by
an ontological world or that space exists in three or more dimensions) are
arbitrary and no more than beliefs as is anything that is built upon them as you
pointed out.
However, I claim there is one foundation we must take as given; our rationality:
our ability to process information in a way that corresponds to reality to some
extent. Of course, you could deny that we can take our rationality for granted or
claim that it has no correspondence to reality, but to do so with a rational
argument would be more than a little ironic, if not paradoxical.
Given that we posses rationality and can apply it to our arbitrary or
hypothesizes, we are able to determine which of those beliefs is most rational
and therefore which corresponds best to reality. In this way our undeniable
rationality gives more (although not, I concede, perhaps total) justification for
the beliefs we hold wich stand up to it.

Where did you find that graphic? I have a co-worker who would love that on her desk

:eek::eek:FOOLS!!! It is the Great Old One Cthulhu!!! He lives in the depths of his dark spaghetti lair beneath the dark stars!!!:eek::eek: Believe in Him and surrender to a squishy spaggetti-tentacled death!!!!:D

IA! IA! CTHULHU F'THAGN! :rotfl:

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Welcome abord SS107.9Mhz!

A good "logical" and "rational" explanation. I would propose however that to use rationality and logic to prove rationality and logic is, well, irrational and illogical.:D

Just kidding, this discussion could go on forever and all we would do is to speak in circles. You're certainly entitled to your opinion/faith (or lack thereof) as am I.

And a hearty welcome aboard to Great Old One Cthulhu:arrgh!:

I think I went to highschool with him....

Hehe, thats certainly got a ring of truth to it. However I only try to say that it does
not make sense to deny our rationality. Not to deny some thing is certainly not to
prove it.

Hows that for a paradox? ;)

Google is your friend.

Well, since the whole religious/metaphysical discussion has grown cold, how about a serious (not intending the previous discussion wasn't!) debate about what the hell this article means!
The other day I was watchingin a doc on TV , and at one point they said that even though black holes devoured all matter, simultaneously they we're "ejecting" subatomic particles, although very slowly, thus losing some of it's mass... Is it the same phenomenon here?

Oh and unfortunately turns out FSM wasn't the one in the foto, since is in germany visiting some relatives www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL7FcvEydqg

I'm not quite sure what you are referring to here, but I will take a guess...
Black holes do eject gravitons (if they exist; we are waiting on the LHC for that
one), but gravitons must be massless to fit in to our theories so far.
Perhaps I am off track there and thee is another ejection, although I don't see how
anything of mass can escape the >0 mass event horizon.

But that is not what is happening in the formation mentioned in the article.

In the article there is a black hole surrounded by a dense cloud of gas. As the
hole sucks in the gas it excites pockets of particles like bubbles of steam in a
boiling kettle. Because the excited pockets are less dense than the surrounding
gas cloud they move away from the black hole. They can move away from the
hole because they are no where near their event horizon(s).
As they rush away from the hole they leave a trail of gas in their wake. These
thin trails would normally diffuse into the surrounding gas and space as they
moved back towards the hole, however they are held in place by a weak
magnetic field as it takes more energy for the charged particles in the gas
strands to move through changes in a magnetic field than it does for them to
move through space with out a magnetic field.

*edit* Err....I'm just repeating the article in the way I find easiest to understand here.

Okay, thank you Letum, I should've read the article more thouroughly, I was actually thinking about Hawking's radiation (the whole thing about subatomic particles ejecting from the blackhole itself, until it actually evaporates or "uncolapses" itself eventually), and it seems the article was talking about matter ejected in the regions adjacent to the black hole (in't that also refered to cosmic dragon or something of sorts?), not on the event horizon itself... So what we have here is a tenuous magnetic field isolating these filaments of cooled down matter (gas) from the accelarated heated cluster gas... but shouldn't the stringss actually be denser than their cluster gas counterpart?

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster