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SOMMSon The Multiverse: Science, Religion, or Pseudoscience?

Thank you for this article. It is so refreshing to see a level-headed and sensibly epistemological take on the ever burgeoning buffet of sensational multiverse fare.

It's not that the multiverse is nonsense (it may or may not be I don't know)...its that it simply isn't science.

SOMMSon Holocene Extinction

'Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented "global superpredator"'...

</sigh>

SOMMSon Birds Are Vanishing from North America

It's pretty, but your post in a nutshell: We are too full of ourselves to admit the transcendental beauty and value of our world soooo...drugs.

SOMMSon Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World [video]

Yes. This exactly.

SOMMSon Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism?

Out of curiosity - why was the above post flagged? It didn't violate any of the HN commenting rules. It didn't advocate for/against atheism/religion (this was explicitly stated), and it didn't state anything that was not factual.

SOMMSon Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

Socialism. /thread

SOMMSon Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

But then there's the small matter that social media doesn't actually make anything better...it just makes a bunch of things worse.

SOMMSon Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

The point still stands: soldering-iron wielding neo-hippies having an orgy in the desert for a week isn't a model for society. It's more of an indication of boredom in a society blessed with extreme abundance, yet lacking a clear sense of purpose.

SOMMSon Quantum Gravity’s Time Problem

Actually its just the opposite - most folks who invoke 'the universe is a simulation' view this as a 'scientific' way of positing a creator of the universe that is not God. Rather it is a program being run on some fantastical computer.

SOMMSon Flow-based Programming

Hey Paul,

Glad to hear FBP is going strong. You may not remember me but I had a chance to work with you many years ago on getting the Java based FBP framework to input/output HTML (ie like a servlet node). Always loved the paradigm, the parallelism and genericness of the whole concept. I wrote many, many networks and eventually wrote an FBP parser that would create programatic FBP networks from XML files. I was wondering if this sort of thing (interpreter/parser/language) was ever incorporated into FBP itself? If not - are their any plans? Nowadays JSON would be the way to go. Thanks again - hope all is well. Chris S