KurtGodel77

My point--in case you didn't understand it--was that unless time worked differently for the quantum period than it has for the normal space period, the quantum period of the universe would account for little of the universe's age. This would be true even if you ignored the relativistic effect created by the universe's nearly light speed expansion. Basically what you are doing is assuming that, because there is no theory of time in a quantum state, the arrival of any such theory at a future point will disprove Shroeder's analysis. The book jacket for The Science of God states that Schroeder is a former MIT physics professor. I suggest you read the book before announcing to the world that Shroeder is a fraud.

I seem to remember Jacksonville making clutch plays against our defense in the opener. So did the Jets in our first game against them after our offense handed the team the lead late in the game. The Steelers had that back-breaking nine-minute drive against us that ended the Bills' playoff hopes. The defense allowed 21 points to Miami in the first quarter when we played them the second time, and Miami didn't even have a good offense. Add in the two New England games, and that's six performances in which our defensive performance was seriously flawed.

Considering that McNabb had 3 INTs, plus had terrible clock management at the end of the game, saying that he played better than Brady is going a little far. There were a lot of other players who played better than either Brady or McNabb.

We could franchise Jennings and use him as part of a package to send to San Diego--though I don't know whether San Diego needs a left tackle. I'd also be willing to add Clements to the package considering that he may become a free agent in a year anyway. Those two players plus our 2006 first round pick should be enough to get Brees. The problem is that Brees may not have the same success in Buffalo that he had in San Diego due to a weak arm. With the swirling winds of the Ralph, you really have to have a strong arm to get the ball where it needs to go.

Your point about the quantized theory of gravity is at least worth finding more about. However, I've heard physicists talk about the first 1/100th of a second of the Big Bang and so forth; as being the time when things were MOST quantum. Given the speed at which the universe expanded, I suspect that unless you have some reverse time dilation at work; the whole quantum phase of the universe would add little to its overall age. But it's an interesting thought.

To you, anything which contradicts your conventional wisdom is, by definition, stupid. That would be fine if there was some sense to your conventional wisdom; but as far as I can tell it's as much propaganda as anything. In the original series of posts which prompted our disagreement, I pointed out that FDR's first major foreign policy act was to recognize the Soviet Union. The Soviets were engaged in murdering 7 million Ukrainians at the time. FDR continued his pro-Soviet stance throughout his administration. FDR had several opportunities to de-Nazify Germany without having German soil come under Soviet control. FDR could have offered a fair peace to a de-Nazified Germany, thus encouraging the German generals to take the risk of overthrowing Hitler. Instead, FDR demanded unconditional surrender from any German government; and the surrender had to be to all the Allies--including the Soviet Union. FDR clearly refused to envision, pursue, or even accept any future that did not involve Soviet occupation of large sections of Germany. The inevitable result of this extremist pro-Soviet stance was the mass murder the Soviet government inflicted on the German people. Your response to all this was to draw into question whether Ilya Ehrenburg did or did not have the title of official propaganda minister. Some sources indicate he had this title; you claim to have found a reliable source that indicates he did not. Even assuming your claim is correct, it is a technicality. The basic point of my argument remains unchallenged: the Soviets engaged in mass murder, and FDR helped them do it. Add that to the mass murder that FDR was directly responsible for at Dresden; and you have a liberal Democrat record on mass murder which is the most lamentable disgrace in the history of this once-great nation.

NOBODY understood your proofs, because you offered no proofs. At least you need to offer a link or something.

There's only one way to find out if Losman is the answer, and that's to play him. Given that he couldn't throw the ball in practice for most of the season due to that broken leg, he may not be ready yet. So instead of throwing him to the wolves, we need a stopgap QB who eats up defenses with wolf-like ferocity. A player who has led his team to a Super Bowl win on the strength of his arm, his intelligence, and his iron will to win. A player who got a QB rating ten points higher than Drew's despite being surrounded by inferior offensive talent.

Given a choice, I'd take our late '90s defense over the defense we have now. IIRC, the late '90s defense finished 3rd in the league in points allowed; significantly better than our current defense. Moreover, that defense looked like an elite defense against the best teams in the league. It always seemed you could count on them in a pressure situation: you'd want more than anything to put the outcome in the hands of the defense if the game was on the line. Our present defense is the opposite: it's break but don't bend. It will throw a ton of pressure at you with blitzes. Inferior offenses get overwhelmed; making our defense's stats look good. But the better offenses pick up the blitzes and make us pay. I saw a statistic one time that showed that playoff teams were much more likely to convert a third down when the defense blitzed than when it didn't. The fact that these teams were apparently good at picking up the blitz probably is a reason why they're in the playoffs in the first place. Considering how heavily our present defense relies on blitzing, I can see why it looks a lot better against mediocre offenses than it does against efficient offenses like New England's.

This is one of the best posts I've ever seen on these boards.

Not only that, did you guys see what he did to the Colts? Bruschi is a guy who loves winning.

You and Schroeder clearly disagree about physics. There are two ways of deciding who is right: credentials/qualifications, or looking at the actual equations in enough depth that I fully understand both your lines of reasoning. Schroeder has you beat in the first department, and you haven't shown enough work/reasoning to beat him in the second department.

It seems you missed a few points I made; but at least you seem willing to discuss actual issues instead of using blanket, unsupported declarations and name calling. To address the points you've raised: the usual meaning of the word "day" is the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis one time. This CANNOT be the meaning of the word "day" for the six days of Creation, because the Earth didn't exist at the beginning of the six day Creation period. Therefore, Shroeder argues, the word "day" means a period of 24 hours when applied to Creation. The question is, 24 hours from whose perspective--ours or someone physically present at the Big Bang? As for the figure of the universe being 15 billion years old; I've seen that in websites about general science. The 15 billion year figure appears more widely accepted than the 72 billion year figure, let alone the 10^30 figure. Calling Schroeder a fraud for accepting mainstream Big Bang science--which is what you appear to be doing--is going a little far. "The Bible says Adam lives 130 years... " This is inaccurate. The Bible states that Adam lived for hundreds of years.

All you ever do is call me or my ideas idiotic, while never providing a single reason why they are so. Because your posts contain no new information, reading them is not a good use of time for the people on these boards.

I never said that I fully understood the mechanism by which the patriarchs were kept alive as long as they were. I agree that, based on what we know about science today, the probability of a substance that could keep them alive to age 900 seems low. If, tomorrow, scientists discovered something that could keep people alive that long, I'd obviously have to rethink that probablistic estimite.

This is exactly what I've come to expect from you: plenty of tough talk, nothing to back it up with. If you COULD do a point-by-point refutation of things I've written, why don't you? Or am I supposed to be stupid enough to simply accept your claim at face value? As for Schroeder, I believe I've already addressed the issue of his qualifications by pointing out he's a former MIT physics professor. The types of calculations necessary to support his theory--such as calculating the speed of the universe's expansion using red shift, calculating the relativistic effect that said expansion would have on the passage of time, etc.--seem well within the ability of any qualified physics professor, let alone one from MIT. You complain that I don't prove things. What more do you want? For our history discussion I cited several sources, including Shirer, Toland, and Laffin. For this discussion about religion and science, I've cited a former MIT physics professor. You, on the other hand, have made so many sweeping statements that you've become an honorary member of the Street Sweepers' Union, yet the only time you cited a source to support anything was when you were arguing about a technicality.

I'm not drawing any conclusions about what did or did not happen. Different animals age at different rates. A rat will die of old age within a matter of a few years, while a parrot can live 50 years or more. This is because the DNA in the parrot's cells has a greater resistance to attacks from harmful compounds. If you could increase your cells' resistance to harmful compounds enough, or if you could eliminate enough oxidants/toxins from your system, you too could live 900 years. Such a dramatic improvement is clearly impossible given the current constraints of science; but you can make smaller achievements. Any food with an antioxidant in it will slow the aging process somewhat. I've heard that experiments are underway with a substance that apparently creates a dramatic slowdown--about three fold--in the aging process for very small organisms. The next phase of the testing will be on animals. Given all this, it is at least possible that Adam and the other patriarchs had access to some food or other substance similar in nature to modern known antioxidants, but far more powerful. I'm not saying this did happen, just that it's possible. You are correct to point out that the selection process of which books would appear in the Bible was political, and probably flawed. In fact--and I know I'm going to make some of the people who have agreed with me unhappy--there are three different religions present in the New Testament. - Paulist Phariseeism - Gnosticism - Jacobitism Hillel, when asked to summarize the Law while standing on one foot, replied, "that which is hateful to you, do it not unto your neighbor." Paul's summary of the Law was similar, "love your neighbor as yourself." (see Romans 13). In both cases, the Law was summarized without reference to loving or obeying God; indicating that Paul had not changed as much as widely believed from the teachings of his Pharisee teachers. Paul indicated that he'd deviated from the written law because of the liberation of Jesus; the Pharisees deviated from the written law because it was overridden by the oral law--which later became the Talmud. I'm not saying that Paul and the Pharisees were identical--they weren't--just that Paul represents the Christian branch of the Pharisee faith. Paulist works include his own writings, the book of Acts, and some of the minor non-Pauline epistles. Gnosticism was a form of mysticism. One came to God neither by James's works nor Paul's faith, but by a difficult to define mystical experience. "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes to the father except through me," John 14:6. The Gospel of John variously describes the process of becoming one with Jesus as believing in him, eating his flesh and blood, being children of the light, and being born again. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you will not live," John 6:53. "Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God," John 3:3. Jacobitism--for the lack of a better word--was the Christian group led by James. Its presence in the New Testament is represented by the Gospel of Matthew, the Epistle of James, and the book of Revelation. "Blessed is the man that endures temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him," James 1:12. Not only is loving God said to be the key to salvation, but Paul's alternative--faith alone--is specifically rejected. "You believe that there is one God: you do well: the devils also believe, and tremble. . . . but faith without works is dead," James 2:19-20. The law of Moses is to be upheld: "Until heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law, until all is fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach others so, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven," Matthew 5:18-20. So anyone seriously considering becoming a Christian needs to carefully consider which of these three general schools to belong to--Paulism, Gnosticism, or Jacobitism--and then select the New Testament books consistent with that school. The reason that examples of all three schools are included in the New Testament is because each of these three sects had numerous followers when Constantine ordered the Biblical council convened. The Catholic Church has traditionally adopted an embrace and extent approach to the people it dealt with--giving them enough of whatever they were used to so that the conversion to Catholicism wasn't as dramatic a change.

Last night, I saw signs of weakness on the Patriots' part. I saw a lot of missed tackles, penalties, and drives that went three and out. Had they played like that against Pittsburgh, they probably would have lost. Let's hope that next year, they finally start buying into all the people around them telling them how great they are. Let's hope that they lose their sense of hunger and urgency, and that the loss of Crennel and Weis proves difficult to adjust to. All they need is one bad year--at least by their standards--and the Bills' position as the only team ever to play in more than two Super Bowls in a row will be safe.

Speaking of humor, I've always found it amusing that Belichick refuses to express any emotion on gameday other than a scowl. Even when he won that major challenge--the one that allowed the Patriots to keep the ball after it was ruled his knee was down--Belichick didn't even crack the slightest hint of a smile.

I'd be interested to know the names of the scientists who "laughed at" Shroeder. I mean, the guy's a former MIT physics professor, so you'll need to name some names if you want to destroy his credibility about physics. It wouldn't exactly shock me if some of those who laughed the hardest were, coincidentally, working to promote atheism. As for the rest of your post; the Bible took its present (Catholic) form in the 300s when Constantine forced Christian leaders to come to an agreement about which books were scriptural. The book of Genesis is much older than that agreement, of course; large chunks of it were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls area, meaning that it predates Jesus by centuries at least. It is quite possible that Genesis is much older than any extant manuscripts, and that the oldest manuscripts have been destroyed by chance and by time. As for some of the patriarchs in the Old Testament living to be hundreds of years old, a company named Geron is (or at least was) working to replicate the feat. The process of aging is caused by the gradual breakdown of your cells' DNA. This breakdown can be eliminated by causing the telomeres at the end of the DNA strings to regenerate. Cancer cells have such regeneration; which is why no tumor will ever die of old age. If you could control telomeres, you could make the cancer die of old age, while at the same time causing your normal cells not to age.

Thanks for writing this.

lol. I was actually rooting for the Patriots. I figure that it's time for the rest of the league to see what we have to deal with twice each year. I really, really, really hope the Patriots don't make it to the Super Bowl next year though. Only one team has made it to more than two Super Bowls in a row, and I'd just as soon things stayed that way.

I appreciate the support, Pete. Actually Tom doesn't bother me, because he's hardly the first person I've encountered who only knows how to express disagreement by attacking the intelligence of the person he's disagreeing with. It's a cheap and easy tactic when you really think about it.

I have the feeling that most of the people on these boards were . . . aware of your dislike for me before reading your post. Considering that you haven't actually managed to refute any of the points I've made in our recent discussions--despite your pitiful attempts to do so--I can see why you'd dislike me. If I were you, I'd be jealous of me too.

Or like Jimmy Johnson without the Herschel Walker trade.