David

Every now and then you see a fellow in this section asking help because he's "haunted by evil spirits" or "plagued by demons". Some sceptics will point out he should be on medication (which is harsh, but probably true).

However, I see many religious people (almost exclusively Christians) playing along, and recommending them to "pray to Jesus"/"study the Bible" or something along those lines, which will deliver them of those "demons". Have they no shame, trying to gain people for their religion at any cost?

Even if the Christian does himself believe in those "spirits" (which is worrying), do they ever consider it might really be someone mentally ill needing help?

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Assume I have two pdf's of random distributions. I want to determine the pdf of the resulting function, which represents the distribution generated by taking one sample of each distribution and returning the maximum of the two.

I.e., I'm looking for the pdf distribution Z, which takes the maximum of the two samples respectively drawn from known pdf distributions X and Y.

Does anyone know a formula for this?

thanks

I purchased a network drive, which I've connected to my LAN at home, which is also connected to the internet. But my question is: how would I be able to access this drive away from home via the internet?

What steps should I take/programs should I use for this?

thank you

In many religions (Christianity and Islam in particular), faith is seen as a virtue. Faith is, simply put, believing in a proposition in spite of little to no evidence, or even evidence to the contrary. So if someone applies this "faith" to the wrong religion (e.g. because he was raised in it), that person is doomed. It's seems like a game of chance.

Yet, some religious people claim to have "evidence" (which is very often not independently verifiable, like personal experiences), but they at least acknowledge the value of evidence. But you can't have it both ways: you either value evidence or you don't. I never understood how religious people reconcile these two, especially how faith is considered virtuous in the first place.

We often see, the world around, cult leaders claiming that the world will come to an end on a specific date. When that day arrives, of course nothing happens, but the cult members don't seem to really care. Never do we see (at least significant numbers of those) members doubt/self-reflect, and leave their cult.

Even after successive failed end-of-the-world predictions of the cult leader.

How can the human mind be that gullible sometimes ?

Hi all,

I would like to ask some advice for finding material for learning Japanese.

Currently, I will soon finish the Rosetta Stone program (level 3), and I've found a good book for learning Kanji (the 500 most frequently used), because Rosetta stone doesn't cover this.

Since I'm not a complete beginner anymore, it's less obvious what to do next.

Does anyone have recommendations ?

An interactive program like rosetta stone would be ideal, but good books are certainly welcome.

(Ideas for movies/tv series would be good too, but would serve more as an extra)

Thank you

In the category of "Religion & Spirituality" I often see questions completely unrelated to the subject, but preceded by "spiritually speaking" (like: "spiritually speaking, how can I improve my writing ?", "spiritually speaking, is this joke funny ?" etc.)

What does that even mean ? Am I missing something ?

I hear these two sentences being used interchangeably, so I was wondering if they do differ:

* "douka shimashitaka"

* "dou shitan desuka"

Thank you

Don't they understand that if we do not believe in the divinity of the Bible, citing it is utterly meaningless ?

Especially copy-pasting huge chunks of the bible as answers is annoying, and doesn't contribute anything to the conversation.

I've received a mail (in hebrew), but all symbols are represented in the wrong ASCII format (gibberish consisting of weird vowels). Do any of you know a (simple) program to convert it to unicode format ?

My windows should support it, it is the archaic online mail program that cannot read it.

I found such no program using Google.

thanks