Everybody just has a good time

I expected the punchline to be the complaints getting more specific until it’s clearly targeted at the other woman who also happens to be her roommate.

You’re right, it’s what you fear it is; or something close.

He says “I cry when angels deserve to die”. Which means if he isn’t crying, angels don’t deserve to die. Have you ever seen Serj Tankian cry?

I’m no expert, but don’t think so. It’s mostly non-artists who flock to stable diffusion and the likes, so it doesn’t affect the number of artists or the offer of man-made art. The demand wouldn’t really increase either. There won’t be more people who need art, and even if a significant amount prefer human-made art, the predencr of some people satisfied with AI means a decrease of demand.

Apparently this condition exists and is called “locked-in syndrom”, tho I don’t know about the specific case mentioned here.

Closest match my quick search revealed was Martin Pistorius Not everything matches, this one was had locked-in syndrome for “only” 12 years, but the symptoms check out. Apparently there’s a book about him called “Ghost Boy”, so maybe that’s where the other details are from.

Christine Waddel was the longest case of the syndrom I could find, paralyzed for 15 years.

I also found something closer to the 30 years claim, Rom Houben’s story… Which was a horrible hoax. A man had been in a coma for 23 years, and a psychiatrist claimed that he was actually conscious. He was provided a communication facilitor, used to communicate via a keyboard, and he shared his whole story… But that was all fake, the psychiatrist or someone working with him was writing these messages. But for several years, people wrote about this and believed it, you can still find articles from 2008-2009 that don’t really question the story. Maybe they’re quoting this story without having seen the refutations; but this still would involve some additions or errors on their part (Rom never recovered, for one).

Yes.

The thoughts experiment are no different from the maths and wouldn’t have occurred in any context, or at least wouldn’t have come close to yielding the same conclusions. The most famous one was Einstein imagining himself riding a beam of light iirc. As you say, he imagined time and space stretching. Why would someone have imagined that in the 1600s? What reason was there to think riding light was any different from riding a very fast stream on a boat? Who knew then that you couldn’t just add the speed of lights to other speeds like you do in every galilean frame in Newtonian physics? You conceded that Fizeau’s experiments were a starting point. These experiments would’ve never happened without the questions raised by the discrepancy between Newton and Maxwell’s laws! And if they had, someone with no prior knowledge of Maxwell’s laws wouldn’t have had any interest or use for these results.

I think several other people have a better claim to that title, like Galileo Galilei and Roger Bacon. Bacon is one of the first to spell out the scientific method and Galilei… Well, you know what he did. I’d say Galileo is more Jesus-like because he was persecuted by the dominant church. And Galileo moved things a lot. Remember, Newton was born around the time Galileo died, he was born in a period of scientific upheaval. Galileo also introduced concepts that played a big role in Newtonian physics, like Galilean frames, the relativity of speeds, the idea that speed is conserved in the absence of a force…

You could argue there was also a slow acceleration of progress before Galileo 's time, and also that Copernicus is another good candidate for example, but if you really wanna emulate the Christ-like narrative, Galileo seems better. He’s even named after a region where Jesus might’ve lived.

A lot of what Newton used in Principia was already more or less in the air, it was just a matter of someone picking up the pieces and seeing the big pictures. It couldn’t have been more than a few decades at most until someone found out if it hadn’t been Newton.

No it shouldn’t? Without Mercury’s orbit having been noticed, there was no need yet to question Newton’s theory, they simply worked as far as anyone could see; so why complicate it? And without the Lorentz transformation, the math Einstein used wasn’t there. And without Fizeau’s experiment, the fact that the speed of light is the same in every frame wasn’t known, and that’s a huge part of the theory. And if he had intuited it somehow, the Maxwell’s equations were even there either. Special relativity is at it’s core a way reconcile Maxwell’s equations with the core tenants of Newton’s theory. There was no way special relativity could’ve been found even half a century earlier, let alone over two centuries…

Most of them are buried, so I’d say they die again.

Oh right, that explains the segmented horns and the face looking fluffy, I should’ve thought of that…

Cute! Is it a giraffe?

Nah, Dark Empath was never in the Dark Triad. She was part of the Sinister Sextet, before her affair with Groupproject Slacker caused the band to break up. The two then formed the Black Binome, while the rest of the band kept operating as the Darker Quatuor, before Coffee Nonsharer left and became known as the Melanic Monad.

The darker quatuor?

Calvinism still has a notion of divine will, even if there’s no divine judgement. Maybe the notion of “will” can be dissociated from the notion of “feeling”, but that’d be a debate in itself, I personally tend to think that it can’t: Awareness can only indicate what is, not what should be.

As for all the religions with an intermediate between God and men, either they represent God’s will… In which case, God does have a will; either they have their own will. And this just displaces the question, because if God has no will but his angels do, then the angels are effectively the Gods: They’re the ones whose favour prayers are supposed to get.

Also, when I mention the “societal use” of a religion, what I mean isn’t how the religion is useful to the believer, but how it makes the believer useful to the state and/or clergy. My point was that religion with a personalized God who directly judge human actions tend to dominate because they’re most useful as tools to influence people’s actions.

The answer differs depending on which religion/sect/philosophy you adhere to, but God is usually attributed some sort of emotion, or at least a will, because without it the belief in God can’t serve a societal use.

Say you assume a God without emotions. From this it results that nothing we may do or fail to do would impact them, so there are no sins, no divine laws, prayers and rites are useless… So your belief can’t be a religion; nor can it be used to control people. There’s no physical use to preaching belief in God, and not much of a metaphysical need either since God doesn’t care whether you believe in them. “God” becomes a concept like the laws of physics, there’s not even much meaning in considering it as a being. There’s little difference between an emotionless God and no God at all. So all religions will personify God to some extent.

Very cool

…And then the gorilla’s hand held up one more finger.