Posts by Hadyn Green
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Nigel:
the content is provided via a bidding/tender process
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
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Darn it, I did it again. The baseball story is in no way linked to the Bob Clarkson comment. Roll on that edit function.
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Here's an interesting article from the US on new stadiums for baseball.
Bob Clarkson is an idiot who makes me more ashamed of Tauranga than Winston ever did. He built his frikkin stadium on a swamp for goodness sake! So of course it cost a lot of money.
(Side note: not a bad little stadium when it's all said and done though. Go the Bay)
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I'll have to do a bit more reading, but my initial reaction is that "life retroactivley working on the fine tuning of the universe" seems to be a little too homo-sapi-centric (a word I just made up).
As I said, that's just a knee-jerk reaction to the statement. But don't worry, we're only on page 6 of this discussion. We should have the whole thing solved by at least page 8 ;)
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Oh I see what happened!
The comment about the Pastafraians was separate to the one about Paul Davies. My bad for not putting in a bigger space
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Neil (back on page 5):
Hayden, you might like to check out Paul Davies' background before dismissing him as a "Pastafarian".
I'm not dissing no one, aren't the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster called Pastafarians? Did I put in the wrong link?
That the universe happens to be just right for life and that even an extremely small variation in the fundamental constants would mean no life what so ever - not different life - is a bone fide puzzle in physics circles.
Well that's the kicker isn't it. Let's take a constant, say Plank's Constant. It's roughly 6.626x10^(-34).
Planck's constant is used in measuring energy emitted by light photons, such as in the equation E=hν, where E is energy, h is Planck's constant, and ν is frequency.
Now if what if Plank's constant was 9, say. If you held all of the other things constant life would be severly buggered (by which I mean, wouldn't exist). In fact it is quite likely that the universe would fall apart. But that's not generally how things work.
If we made Plank's Constant equal to 9 we would have to do it right at the beginning but then we would have to change all of the other constants about until things worked then away we'd go.
The skinny is that you CAN change a physical constant, but if you change one you have to change ALL of them. If you're interested it's based on Simplicity Theory (similar to Chaos Theory)
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Now that I got the grumbly bit out of the way...
Are the designs for the waterfront on the council link posted by Sam (above) the final ones or is there a range of ones to choose from?
Because even for a stadium it is slightly boring.
Tom, what'dya reckon?
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build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it build it etc
but please God (gods), just shut up about it.
Stop calling it the "bedpan", it'll never be as clever as the "caketin". Get over the fact that it is round, that's a good shape for fitting in more seats. Understand that wherever it goes in Auckland that it will cause MAJOR traffic problems (which may in turn cause Auckland to invest in more public transport). But please finish this part of it.
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I'm very surprised it took until page three of this discussion before some mentioned the Pastafarians.
In a recent New Scientist podcast (I don't know how to link to it) physicist Paul Davies discusses the problem of how the universe appears to be just right for life. If any of the fundamentals of the universe were just a fraction different then no life could have evolved.
I love the discussions about the universe being perfectly suited for us and why that is so. I come from a mathematics background and so we often look at pi to answer this.
Can a universe where pi=3 (or 4 or 1,000,000.987) exist? The answer is: yep. but then everything else changes too. The life that eveloves in that universe may then think "why is it that our universe is so well suited to us?"
If you catch my meaning, we're looking in the wrong direction. The universe isn't suited to us, we are suited to the universe. Thinking about it the first way makes humans a universal constant.
I still don't understand how Collins in the original arguement can say that [his biblical] God is outside the system but acts directly upon it? If he was doing experiments with gas in a sealed chamber would he claim any amazing results were caused by something in the other room? It makes no sense.
Still I'm sure we'll solve it all soon. :)
ps. don't pick on the Hari Krisnas and the Satanists, they seem to be the only religions that can have fun with non-believers (and the Haris cook a mean feed!)
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COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time.
Well if that's the case then God is outside of our system (i.e. the universe) and hence can be removed from all scientific equations.