I like it - do you know if the space added for the camera extends past the bottom half of the laptop when it's closed? If yes, it feels like it would make it easier to open the laptop by grabbing it.
Unless God actually exists and revealed himself to them. Obviously, you are free to not believe that, but believing that goes along with believing what you are dismissing.
He revealed himself to them and only them, ignoring the rest of humanity all over the globe. In all the universe he chose just earth for his people, and over all of earth, he just chose a tiny section to reveal himself to. Omniscient and omnipotent but a very human scale for his messaging.
Who said he ignored the rest of humanity? That's not what the record shows. Most people know about God. Who said that in all the universe he chose just earth?
You're assuming too much about the motivations. I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans.
So that...you can comprehend the communication? Are you going to forget how to write or speak with your mouth when there is telepathy available and the next thing? Does Telnet still work?
The topic here is scale. I only talk to a small group of people because they’re the only ones I can reach. If Donald Trump can reach a billion people, why couldn’t God? The technology didn’t exist but that’s not supposed to be a limit for this particular entity.
We aren't all powerful. We can't reach into their brain or ear to communicate. Supposedly God is all powerful. And doesn't speak directly to everyone, just certain ones.
Not everyone cares or listens. But the original point of the question you were responding to was that it seems strange that God would communicate with people in an intelligible or familiar or baser way. So being all powerful is irrelevant, because if we do it then why couldn't or wouldn't God do it? There's nothing wrong with communicating in the way that the targets in question will comprehend. That's the point of communication.
People now know about god, but they wouldn't have 3,000 years ago. And it's only one particular culture that was being communicated with, or did the Chinese and Native Americans just ignore him when tried to message them?
> I do not see what the issue is with a "very human scale" for messaging. That's...how you communicate with humans.
It's because its messaging seems to have originated from a very small and region specific group of people, instead of, you know, being communicated across the world.
They would've known about God 3,000 years ago. No, Chinese and Native Americans and etc did not ignore him. Abraham was of a pagan land when he first encountered God.
In any case, it was definitely communicated across the world. If you're picking a specific point in time when first contact was established according to a specific tradition, that might raise a question of why first contract there and in that way. But we in 2025 have the hindsight of seeing what happened globally after that and spread it did.
I don't think it is a coincidence that specific groups of people received revelation the way they did, when considering things like the quality of their oral and scribed history. Would you pick a region of people who don't know how to write and barely know how to talk, or a region of people who are highly skilled in both?
> They would've known about God 3,000 years ago. No, Chinese and Native Americans and etc did not ignore him. Abraham was of a pagan land when he first encountered God.
What do you mean? Did the non-Judeo-Christian faiths know about him or not? What was their relationship to it?
> But we in 2025 have the hindsight of seeing what happened globally after that and spread it did.
Sure, it only took thousands of years and a co-opting of the original message by an apocalyptic Galilean preacher changing the message and constant re-envisioning through history. And if the end game is half people in the world still not believing (if we generously assume that both Christianity and Islam are equal and valid in the eyes of the Hewbrew god), I guess mission accomplished.
> I don't think it is a coincidence that specific groups of people received revelation the way they did, when considering things like the quality of their oral and written history. Would you pick a region of people who don't know how to write and barely know how to talk, or a region of people who are highly skilled in both?
But in the case of a place like China, writing was definitely in the cards. Ancient Babylon had writing long before that as well, so that's not a good reason.
> He revealed himself to them and only them, ignoring the rest of humanity all over the globe
That's absolutely not true. First of all, there was an enormous crowd of people: 600,000 families--millions of people--who received the revelation on Mt. Sinai. And secondly, G-d offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world. (https://www.sefaria.org/Sifrei_Devarim.343.2?lang=bi)
It's a fundamental principle of Judaism that all righteous people will be in the world to come, unlike Christianity.
All that being said, I will not be wagering that "Jesus" will come again.
> That's absolutely not true. First of all, there was an enormous crowd of people: 600,000 families--millions of people--who received the revelation on Mt. Sinai.
It's true that it was very regional, within the reach of a group of people's ability to communicate.
> And secondly, G-d offered the Torah to all the peoples of the world.
Did he? Did all the other cultures of the world about that time simply not answer the door?
You are reading too hard into the specifics. The general themes are remarkably conserved across faiths. Even between monotheistic and polytheistic faiths, we see what is a pantheon of gods in the latter become just different forms of the monotheistic god in the former. The same myths when they are distilled. Zeus is Yahweh is Ahura Mazda is Indra is Thor is Itzamna is Baiame, fundamentally all the creator sky god. Of course the most ardent supporters of each faith might be blind to this parallelism, but it is obvious from an outsiders perspective.
Sure, if you squint enough everything looks the same, but then you can't see. For instance, in your example Thor is not a creator sky god, and he's limited. He's not even the leader of his pantheon. Zeus, another famous sky god, is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Yahweh, especially the later Christian incarnation of him, is pretty unique if you compare him to polytheistic religions.
I've heard it many times, but it also assumes that there aren't other ways to explain similarities, such as cultural cross-exchange of ideas (which happens prolifically even in the Bible, hence why Israel is supposed to avoid inter-marriage and the like), and the fact that most myths begin to explain observed phenomena, which itself tends to be very similar and repetitive. I personally think this is an extremely weak argument that is only compelling if you have already presupposed that God revealed himself and his revelations were bastardized by civilizations around the world. It's classic Confirmation Bias.
When Michael Jackson does a concert, it’s really only in a few locations. It’s up to the world to spread it. As others have mentioned, he could show up in the sky like Mufasa, but he could also just brain wash you in an instant and fix all of it.
Faith is a concept, like so many other concepts. It is a unique creation that has properties, one of them is that it’s not meant to be provable that easily.
Yeah, I don't really buy that. God revealed himself directly to Moses and Moses was still able to ignore him or go against his wishes and still had to come to faith on his own terms. Both faith and free will are a great bottomless pits to throw any philosophical or logical incongruities into.
> When Michael Jackson does a concert, it’s really only in a few locations. It’s up to the world to spread it.
In this example, what is up to the world to spread for Michael Jackson? Is god a singular entity with a specific location? I'm sure Michael would have happily shown up in every place on earth if he could have sold tickets.
If ever there were a post-hoc rationalization, this is it.
It's funny how the faithful are generally happy to use any evidence that they think supports the faith, but once it gets too difficult then suddenly it's not supposed to have too much evidence for it.
Sure, but in that case the supposed fact that God revealed himself to this particular tribe is the key thing supporting the belief, not "reality is unexplainable, it must be something else."
> I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.
Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
Seeing as one of the founding idea is that DEI is cancer, I don't think removing someone who wants to have a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of DEI is betraying their stated position.
That's a non-sequitur. Stone is not considered a renewable resource, which is typically defined as a resource which naturally replenishes itself over time at a meaningful rate compared to the rate of consumption.
My point is that "renewable resource" is a fairly meaningless term when applied to stone. Sure, we technically have a finite amount of it on the planet, but we also can't possibly use it all up. Not unless we have technology that would allow us to travel outside the solar system, at which point the limited amount of stone is also moot.
Sure, it doesn't fit the definition, but there is also no reason to care that it doesn't.
It's my assumption based on the fact that we continually mine new portions of the earth over time. Trees and other life exist within regenerative chemical cycles, whereas rock formation is a physical process that consumes some limited supply of material on Earth. I would love to know more about this as well, if you come across any resources.
Not to mention the people who actively vilify anyone who "snitches" on the person by turning them in to suffer the consequences of their own actions. Luigi anyone?
Seeing as mathematicians proving things in math has minimal relation to the real world, I'm not sure how important this is.
Mathematicians and physicists have been speculating about the universe having more than 4 dimensions, and/or our 4 dimensional space existing as some kind of film on a higher dimensional space for ages, but I've yet to see compelling proof that any of that is the case.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not attempting to minimize the accomplishment of these specific people. More observing that advanced mathematics seems only tangentially related to reality.
You might consider reading Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. It gives an argument for studying math for the sake of math. Personally, reading a beautiful proof can be as compelling as reading a beautiful poem and needs no further justification.
However, there is another reason to read this essay. Hardy gives a few examples of fields of math which are entirely useless. Number theory, he claims, has absolutely no applications. The study of non-euclidean geometry, he claims, has absolutely no applications. History has proven him dramatically wrong, “pure” math has a way of becoming indispensable
I have no problem studying Math just to study Math. I read the title and jumped to some conclusions, I'm afraid. Was talking to a friend about String Theory and their 11+ dimensions the other day and that is immediately where my brain went to with this one. The article is interesting even though I have zero desire to personally study math just for math's sake.
There is a huge amount of mathematics that initially seems as though it could not possibly have any practical application that later turns out central to all sorts of things in the real world.
The most obvious examples are number theory and group theory, which are respectively the study of numbers and how they behave under basic operations like arithmetic, and the study of a type of set with a single operation that satisfies very basic rules[1]. How could this possibly have any relevance or practical application? And yet it turns out they are central to cryptography and information theory. Joseph Fourier trying to solve the equations that govern how heat diffuses through a metal came up with the theory that forms the basis for how we do video and audio compression (and a ton of other things).
Finally mathematicians don’t speculate about how many dimensions the universe has, they study 4- and higher- dimensional objects and spaces to understand them. This theory is used all over the place. You can’t have a function like a temperature map without 4 dimensions (3 for the spatial coordinates of your input and one for the output).
[1] this turns out (non-obviously) to be the study of symmetry.
> More observing that advanced mathematics seems only tangentially related to reality.
You might be surprised; there have proven to be a number of surprising connections between abstract mathematical structures and more concrete sciences. For instance, group theory - long thought to be an highly abstract area of mathematics with no practical application - turned out to have some very direct applications in chemistry, particularly in spectroscopy.
When you try to solve one problem involving two objects in three-dimensional space, you have a six-dimensional problem space. If you have two moving objects, you have a twelve-dimensional problem space. Higher dimensional spaces show up everywhere when dealing with real-life problems.
