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SMH online and the local rag that gets delivered for free. I used to read The Australian online too, but a while ago it stopped working in Firefox, and I cbf making like goatse man and opening IE just to read it, then I never started reading it again /shrug. Also, Pharyngula.

\frac{1}{\overline{z}} \frac{1}{z} = \frac{1}{z \overline{z}} = \frac{1}{|z|^2} = \left|\frac{1}{z}\right|^2, \text{ so } \frac{1}{\overline{z}} = \overline{\left(\frac{1}{z}\right)}.

I don't think Japan has that much leverage (happy to be convinced by some numbers though). Sure, it might sting if we put our foot down, but we have a lot of stuff that a lot of the world needs. Whether the sting is worth the whales, well ... maybe it's too late for me to get into that.

Yeah, right after the crocoduck you spec.

The government is the result of 100,000 years of ongoing fine tuning within our species, fine tuning that included evolutionary ethics, and ideas that existed long before your prized religion existed. Turning it around, society would uphold itself without your religion, and would likely still...

Evolutionary ethics? You don't honestly think they come from a booming voice from the sky do you?

Hahaha.

Well, maybe you're right, but I still think studying the bible is worthwhile, and I'm not willing to dismiss the idea because a religious nutter suggested it. As far as choosing the bible over other religious texts, well, I don't think that's so hard to justify actually. In studying the bible...

Mmm, we can't go the other way on this though and try and "circumcise " history by avoiding mention or discussion of the bible from syllabi. From a literary point of view, sure, the bible isn't so great, but its influence is undeniable. It was a bad influence, but this will be clear with a...

I didn't get the impression from Abbott's comments that he had "just reading" in mind. Do I have the wrong impression? I know Abbott doesn't have a secular / comparative religion view of this either, but classes that are nothing but read read read? Surely not?

No, that does not compute at all. I'm an atheist to the bone, but I see value in examining the bible from a secular viewpoint - those writings intertwine the last couple of thousand years of history, and few other things can boast that, so the least we could do is be aware of it. So how exactly...

How the fuck does someone give a group a bad name without representing or admonishing that group? Edit: Unless you alone constitute a representative of all Christians?

Not really, at least not any more than it would be arrogant for a bacterium sitting on a petri dish to think that humans are interested in how it's going.

I don't think so, because that would be the same size as the original paddock, and if you draw a two circles, one centred on the perimeter of the other, it won't cover half of the other circle.

If the point of attachment of the leash is fixed (so it can't move around the circumference of the paddock), then my understanding (not necessarily right) is that this problem reduces to finding how to overlap two circles (one small and one large) such that the large circle centred on the...

The body cools to 70 in 10 mins (with a surrounding temp of 20), so: \begin{align*}&\hskip 1.5em x(10) = 70 - 20 = 50 = 80e^{-10k} \\ &\Rightarrow k = \frac{\ln(5/8)}{-10} \\ &\Rightarrow x(t) = 80e^{\frac{\ln(5/8)t}{10}} = 80\left(\frac{5}{8}\right)^{\frac{t}{10}}.\end{align*} Now, the...

Fair enough buchanan, it's just that I don't think we should be so keen to throw away any mathematical object as useless when we can't predict the future so well, and when preconcieved notions of useless have been shown to be wrong in the past (eg. complex numbers) ;)

Thanks God. Your friend, Cazic.

My teacher told me that we can divide by zero, we just can't divide zero by zero. In this case, we get the real projective line or the Riemann sphere, and both of these definitely are useful. The real projective line, for instance, can be associated with the ratios that we learn in early high...

Many many many people said exactly the same thing when it came to "a number such that its square is negative". Cool factoid: Lewis Carroll was one of those people, and he expressed this in disdain in Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, why must numbers not have zero divisors? I'm not arguing with...