Science-Based-Government

Hi, I learned programming a little while ago (Visual Basic) and I want to make a space-themed game with 3D graphics.What languages/tools/etc. do people typically use when doing this?

When Carl Sagan is talking about the Anasazi people (in episode 3, i believe), what is the name of the song playing?

It's upbeat, kind of exotic jungle-y tropical, jazzy pop, it's driving me nuts I can't remember the name or who it's by. And it's not some obscure song either, they play it in tv shows, commercials, movies, etc.

There's no lyrics as far as I can remember. Here's my very silly and poor attempt at writing the main recognizable rythym in text. Each note is a single "YA" with the note length being proportional to the "YA" length (each character being an sixteenth note in length). The bars represent bar lines in the music, and the commas are there to denote the beats. I chose "YA" because it kind of sounds like the music is saying that during this melody.

|YAAA,AAAA,AAAA,AAAA|----,YAYA,YAAA,AYAY|A-

I recently totaled my car and my insurance company declared it a total loss. In order to proceed, my insurance company is saying I need to send them the title. However, there's a lien on the car and the title is with the lienholder. The insurance company is insisting that I'm the one who has to send MY title to them. I live in Wisconsin, and according to the DMV website, the title is held by the lien holder until the loan is paid off (which won't happen until the insurance pays out). What do I do?

I want to write about a story about a hospital chaplain and an atheist who's in the hospital dying of cancer, who get into a friendly personal theological debate. My question is: are chaplains actually permitted to do such a thing?

In the story, I'm willing to have the atheist be the one who initially asks for a debate (the atheist enjoys debating and it improves his spirits greatly while doing it), so it wouldn't be the chaplain trying to push religion onto them (that certainly wouldn't be appropriate).

I know the Apollo astronauts had their capsule pressurized at about 34 kPa, but it was pure oxygen. People can survive on Mt. Everest with oxygen supplies. How low can you go?

I was pondering the idea of extraterrestrial life, when I realized a few facts that imply that we may be one of the first intelligent species to ever evolve:

1) It took our planet a very very long time to develop intelligent life. Life has been on Earth for over 3 billion years, yet only has at most 0.5-1 billion years left, before the Earth gets too hot and becomes uninhabitable. 80%+ of the life-bearing period on this planet is already over. This implies that making complex life is very difficult.

2) Even during all this vast time, no one else has bothered to colonize our planet. It was here, there was no one to get in the way to colonize it, yet no one did. Surely, if the galaxy has other civilizations and all that time to play with, someone would eventually have found our planet useful?

3) The life-bearing period of the universe as a whole is actually very very long. We evolved maybe 7 or 8 billion years after enough heavy elements were made for there to be planets and life, etc. But the stelliferous era of the universe is 100 trillion years long. We've only finished 0.008% of that time. If it were random, we would expect to have evolved maybe 20 or 50 trillion years after the big bang, not 0.014 trillion.

Therefore, since it seems advanced life is difficult, coupled with the fact that we still evolved extremely early in the universe's history, doesn't that imply that we may be the first, or at least one of the first?

Everyday, people always try to tell me about their lives, or ask about mine, like where I'm from or what kind of music I like or what I like to do for fun. Why? I don't care about them so why do they care about me? Whenever I ask them they just say they're trying to make conversation. Again, why? What is the point in making stupid conversation? It drives me nuts.

Why can't we just all be quiet until something important comes along?

What if you draw, like, a stick figure and say it's Mohammed. Is that still forbidden? What if you change your mind and say it's only "Steve" or something?

I found these two videos on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cz7xkWZrKk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkbQDEXJy2k

The actual division they do and the answer they get is a joke, of course, but look at they way it's written out, with the answer to the right instead of on top. Is that the way long-division used to be done back then?

Like: where did God come from? Or, why does your holy book love slavery and hate women so much?

People always go on and on about finding the right religion. But why believe in any of them? Why not a belief system that is self-critical and weeds out false claims, assumes as little as possible from the start, and is built to combat the logical errors that we are prone to make?

You know, like science?

It is often proposed that receiving prime numbers broadcast from space would be a very good indication of extra-terrestrial intelligence, since no function can produce all the prime numbers.

Dolphins are known to be highly intelligent, giving names to each other much like we do (though they apparently choose their own names), using highly sophisticated language and being able to retain learned information for years or decades.

So, anyone ever tried playing prime numbers, maybe through audio clicks, or maybe through some visual medium and see how they respond?

I am coding in Visual Basic 6.0 and when writing to a label, it will blink when written to infrequently (around once per second), but when it's being written to constantly (like, say, hundreds of times per second) it does not blink. I wish it to not blink at all.

I thought maybe it was because transparency was on, but even when I turned it off, it still blinks. Please help!

I mean, I always hear the refrain "There are different paths to the truth". But, all these "different paths" explicitly declare themselves to be the only path. Or when friends have differing belief systems, they seem to all implicitly believe that what happens after they die is going to be in accordance with what the individual believer believes. So...does each person have their own god/heaven/etc? Or do their beliefs simply warp the fabric of reality to their whim? If so, how can one person still say their beliefs are "right" and the others are "wrong" Isn't there only ONE universe that we all live in?

Why don't people actually think out the consequences of their beliefs?

I mean, you could have ended up in India and been Hindu or in ancient Rome and had to make sacrifices to Jupiter and Apollo, but, nope, you just happened to be born into the one of the many thousands of religions systems that have existed that just happens to turn out to be the correct one.

What say you?

What I want to know is, let's say I'm testing a program and I get an error saying that a variable doesn't have a correct value (say, an array where the index called is out of bounds). There's nothing wrong with the sub-procedure, it's just that variable is being passed into the procedure from somewhere else that isn't correct. How do I find where that "somewhere else" is?

Here's a sample to see what I am talking about

Public Sub X()

i = 5

Call mySub(i)

End Sub

Public Sub mySub(n)

Dim someVariable as Double

someVariable = myArray(n) '(myArray doesn't have an index of 5)

End Sub

When I go to debug it, it points to "myArray" in "mySub" saying that the index is wrong, but what I need to is find Sub "X" to fix it. How do I find it? There may be a thousand places where "mySub" might be called from, I don't want to have to go through them all.

Isn't it more moral to be good simply because its the right thing to do, even if there are no consequences for not being good, rather than being good because some sky pixie will reward you, or horrifically punish you if you are not good?

Ok, yeah, I was bored and wanted to see what would happen if I set my computer to 12/31/2099 11:59 PM and let it run. What happened was it froze and now when I try to start it up, it just makes three beeps repeatedly with nothing showing up on the screen. Nothing loads, nothing runs. It's basically just a $1500 paperweight now. Is there anyway to fix it? I was running Windows 7 and its a Dell XPS. Any other specs I don't know.

Sin requires knowing right and wrong, good and evil. But Adam and Eve didn't know good and evil until AFTER they ate the fruit. Yeah, they were told not to, but how did they know that following God was "good" and not following was "bad"?