Posts by Francis Boyle 2739 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007
If there is rigid online censorship in Australia I have yet to come up against it. The reality is that there have been persistent failed attempts at online censorship. Failed, because no one supports them except a few unrepresentative lobby groups which unfortunately have the main political parties running scared.
The clue's in the name. Since WIMPS interact with ordinary matter only weakly you can't weigh them. (They'd pass right through any scale). Indeed so far we can't measure them in any way. Ergo they can't affect any measurements of mass. The only way we know of their existence is through their contribution to gravitational effects at very large scales. As to why their gravitational effect is not apparent at smaller scales - well you have to remember that that matter in the universe is near to non-existent. O.K. maybe not non-existent, but on average the universe approximates a pretty good vacuum. Assuming dark matter is not clumpy like ordinary matter (i.e. that WIMPS don't strongly interact with anything including themselves) space with WIMPS in it is effectively just space but very slightly less tenuous. It's net effect on anything on a human scale is going to be zero.
Of course, anything that anyone says about dark matter is ,of necessity, highly speculative but the basic idea is actually pretty straightforward.
Are you seriously suggesting that protestants never feel that they're entitled to tell others what to do? Have you been paying any attention to what is happening in the US lately. Rick Santorum may be Catholic but I can assure you that his brand of self-righteous arrogance comes straight out of the fundamentalist protestant playbook.
Now I don't want to get into a Catholic versus protestant debate (the differences are far smaller than the similarities to my mind) but it strikes me that your comment is a good example of something I've frequently observed. When someone, religious or not (and these days, it seems, more often they are not), criticises atheists for lacking understanding of religion what they are really saying is "your criticisms don't apply to my experience of religion" as if the fact that there are some nice CoE vicars somehow cancels out the existence of the Taliban.
The thing is, critics of religion generally have taken the time to acquire at least a passing knowledge of the full range of religious practices. They're arguing from facts not personal experience. Questioning their "understanding of religion and their critical faculties" on the basis of unexamined anecdotal evidence is the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting "I can't hear you".
As for the tired "critics of religion are like religious fanatics" canard - XKCD
In the plane of the ecliptic points 93 million miles from Earth form a circle passing through the Sun and out beyond the orbit of the Earth. Since that circle intersects the orbit of Venus, at some time, Venus will be 93 million miles from Earth. It's just a a matter of waiting long enough.
The Q is as they say in Japan "kawaii" (cute). It should sell bucket loads to the sort of people who post videos to Youtube in the wrong aspect ratio (i.e. clueless wannabee geeks). If that's what it takes to keep Pentax alive and producing brilliant, affordable cameras like the K-5, I'm all for it.
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