A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science

IMO Chopra isn't saying much of anything. If you go through the comments here you will see many people point out fundamental flaws in his article. If you can't get the basics right, then you have no business going into extended speculation as he does.



This stuff is possible to understand if its presented right. I plan to read Hawkings' book but in the past I didn't think he was that great at explaining this stuff to people who weren't physicists. IMO two people who ARE very good at explaining this to non-pros are Brian Greene and Sean Carroll. Greene is my favorite. I had to read most of the chapters in his books twice to really understand them but it was well wroth the effort. I felt as if I understood things like relativity and space-time as I never had before after reading his books The Elegant Universe and the Fabric of the Cosmos. Carroll's book From Eternity to Here (deals mostly with the concept of time) is also quite good.
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Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org (VIDEO)

I used to like Microsoft Office but IMO its been bloated with so many features that most people don't use and in the case of Powerpoint I think when they are used (e.g. animation) often end up distracting rather then adding to the presentation because the emphasis gets to be on bells and whistles rather than on what the speaker has to say.



Also, in the case of MS Word I find it very difficult to use for large multi-person documents because it is so easy to mess up the formatting. Someone copies a section of text from another document and if they aren't careful they end up copying not just the text but the fonts, styles, etc. I've spent hours going over a document tweaking it to adjust all the various styles that were indadvertently added.
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Microsoft Ad Trashes OpenOffice.org (VIDEO)

I haven't used Open Office for several years but when I did last use it about 5 years ago I liked it a lot. The reason I stopped using it was that there were compatability issues with MS Office and since the company I was with used Office as the standard as did virtually all of our clients it turned out to be more work to use Open Office (think it was Star Office back then). I didn't see any dates on these quotes and I notice many of them came from Europe which was very aggressive in using Open Source several years ago. I think it would be very interesting to know when these quotes were obtained. My guess is they might be very old and that Open Office has fixed a lot of the compatability issues which is why Microsoft is getting worried.
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A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science

I agree about the energy and matter. It is still essentially true that energy and matter can'tt be created or destroyed because they can be converted into each other and the net amount of energy/matter is constant (if you "destroy" matter you create energy and vice versa).



But the information part is just flat out wrong. I'm a bit over my head as well, I'm not an expert in the field but I know enough about Information Theory to shout BS at the idea that "information can not be destroyed". In fact the initial impetus for Information Theory in the first place I believe was to mathematically model the loss of information that occurs naturally in any message system.



And from the stand point of entropy my understanding is that Information can be equated to a decrease in entropy. I.e. , the more information the more order you have and the less entropy. Hence, the law that says the net entropy in a closed system is always increasing says that the net information in a closed system is always DECREASING. I may be saying some of this poorly, I'm just an amateur so if anyone wants to correct feel free but I really can think of no justification for the statement "information can't be destroyed" from a scientific standpoint. It just seems flat out wrong and I would be interested if anyone can provide an argument to say otherwise.
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A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science

"Just as matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, neither can information."



First of all that's not actually true about matter and energy. That's a newtonian view of physics. Einstein showed that in fact mass can be converted to energy and vice versa. e=mc2 But even worse is the statement that information can't be destroyed. Where in the world did that idea come from? Its simply false. Informatin can absolutely be lost.
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A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science

Well said. To me that is one of the fundamental differences between the spiritual or religious approach and science. Spirituality creates stories that make people feel they are attaining some wisdom. Science actually develops theories that need to be tested. Science will always be harder and will always have certain questions that are yet to be answered. Spiritualists will grab on to those questions and say "ah ha science can't answer this it must be God!" There really is no new "crisis" its just the latest version of people grabbing on to the undefined boundaries of science and claiming that for religion.
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Rand Paul's 'NoZe Brotherhood' Secret Society Blasted Christianity: Report

"Both are hedonistic, don't you think?"



Not really. The good that utilitarians usually define is not what most philosophers define as hedonism. Its defined as happiness in the broadest sense which includes basic rights such as free speech, basic human rights, etc.



"And neither is Christian"



As for what is or isn't Christian IMO that's really impossible to determine. There are countless different interpretations of Christianity from the essentially fascist mind set of The Family who view money and power as the ultimate indication of who is chosen by Jesus to the very liberal revolutionary interpretation of liberation theology. If you read the books by Jeff Sharlet (sp?) on The Family its really amazing. They openly praise people like Hitler and Stalin and want to immitate the tactics of fascists and communists.



And it doesn't even make sense to argue what Jesus "really thought" since even the writings of the gospels were by people who never knew him and were already adding their own interpretations and bias into the words they claimed were said by Jesus.
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