Posts Made By: Mike Hart

Like Descarte or Kant, Pascal was just working backwards with the best knowledge he had. He was trying to build a logical arguements against the skeptics. If you are down to a "single if,then, else" proposition about the existence of God, I think Pascal was argueing in favor of the unknown door #1 (marked Religion) if the assumption is that the other two doors are marked "permenent emptiness" and " eternal damnation."

I think this points to the problem of converstion driven by fear of consequences, it doesn't have to be strongly held.

For a more amusing variation on proofs of God's existence, I always in enjoyed the lighter side of logical arguements presented by Douglas Adams.

http://ling.ucsd.edu/~bakovic/images/babelfish.html

I recently listened to a lecture on Pascal and the ultimate wager concept is from Pascals unfinished Christian apologetic Pensees (Thoughts on Religion) edited by his Jansenist friends in Port Royal (a convent eventually razd by the French to stop the anti-papal revolt).

Pascal was playing on the common fascination with gambling that was very much in vogue at that time. In Pensees, Pascal proposed his famous "ultimate" wager.

If you bet God exists you stand to gain everything and lose nothing. However, if you bet the opposite, you stand to gain nothing and lose everything. It isn't so much a proof, but a challenge to incite thought and consideration to the people of his day.

Pensees covers other themes - Mans misery without God, the absurdity of the human condition (murder is a crime on one side of the border yet soldiers are considered heros on the other), and man's many limitations and intellectual weaknesses that can all be overcome through faith in Christ - the prime purpose of our existence according to Pascal.

Pascal was definitely one of the leading fideists (like Bayle) who agrued for salvation by faith alone - human knowledge being too weak to rely on. He was probably the 17th centuries leading skeptics of the dominant belief in Aristotilian scholasticism.

With that, this post pretty much exhausts my knowledge of Pascal.

Question:
The D10 offers File Sizes: 3072x2048, 3072x2048, 2048x1360, 1536x1024, and 1536x1024.

Does anyong know if this is accomplished through the equivalent of binning (with the subsequent improvement in light gathering)?

I love the idea of a flat tax or better yet a simplified progressive tax. Just add up your income from all sources, look up your bracket, multiply and write a check. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

They could let you itemize the sources of income, but who really cares if it is interest, capital gains, dividends, salary, etc. Its the total income that matters.

No offense to any CPA's out there, but I would mind seeing the entire tax preparation industry go belly up for a one-page form.
Should that be on the platform of the third part we AstroMarters are going to start?

Not asking for much are you? 8^)

1) Yes, in complexity theory, the soul would qualify as an emergent characteristic. Where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and cannot be reductively analyzed.

2) Subscribing to #1 would lead me to believe it is transient phenomena and only arises when the component parts are all together. To persist beyond that would require divine interention, which has always troubled me, but if I accept its continuity, I think memories would have to go and it would be preserved strictly as an image made up of the sum of moral choices and actions.

3) The underlying moral "code" that makes a given individual choose their actions (including actions of faith, compassion, humanity, etc. ). In other words, if the sum of our colourful existence were an image, the soul is the reduction of that image converted to grey scale.

In Christian theology, the acceptance of Christ would further process the image into pure white. Don't know if it will really work that way, but that is what faith is for. Even if Christianity works differently, following the model of Christ as the archetypical perfect moral actor improves your greyscale image as well. Is it faith or works? My answer is Yes

That's my initial response.

I am curious which stacking software you use and how you select the images to stack. Are you letting the software do the chore or do you hand pick the images to stack? Also, I would be curious to see what two individual images from the stack (one representative low-end quality and one representing the high-end). Also, what sharpening settings have you been using? Do you process (sharpen, etc.) and stack each color separately?

Finally, what shutterspeed, gain and framerate combination are you using with the ToUcam?
I know stacking does miracles, but here at 45 degrees N. latitude, Mars doesn't get much above the burble zone so I need all the technique tips you have time to offer.

Outstanding images!!

I use a red rope light plugged into a rheostat. You can get both at Home Depot. If you mount the rope underneath a lip of some sort, it really is unobtrusive and won't interfere with night vision.