Monday, November 27, 2023

Penrose and Hawking


Finland has closed four of eight border crossings with Russia because of Russian efforts to infiltrate Finland under the guise of amnesty-seeking.

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Americans don’t travel a lot (43% have passports) but that's a lot compared to Japan, where only 21.7 million people now have passports, not even a fifth of the country.

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Cowen writes: 
...intellectual non-Leftists, increasingly ... are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.
The person being religious is now a predictor of that same person having non-crazy political views. Classical liberalism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essentially religious movement.
Many strands of libertarianism are being left behind, and again this is a positive rather than a normative claim. It is simply how things are.
Aayan Hirsi Ali announces she is now a Christian.


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Penrose and Hawking

Penrose and Hawking did calculations using information from their research on black holes. Two of their conclusions:

“The odds against an ordered universe happening by random chance are 10^10^30th to 1, against."

And,

"The odds against life are 10^10^123rd to 1, against.”

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