gehringer_2

In all the years I've watched the 4 pro teams in Det, this team may well be the one that least looks like it even belongs in the arena with the teams they are playing. The Lions went winless in '08 but were still within 10pts in 7 games. The Tigers lost 119 but on any day with a good starting performance they still could still look respectable.

Weaver

A SOS that not a leader he ever talked to could trust to be telling the truth. Sounds right in tune for a Trump admin.

Hronek was the only player that I cared they gave up and the return was more than fair so the Yzerplan has been tracking pretty well in my book.

who goes out? None of the Dmen appear to be very much in the doghouse currently. Maata might be sitting at the bottom of the stack right now I guess..

Seider from the slot on the PP. 3-0.

Off-season looking pretty good at the 1/4 mark. Four of the Wings top 6 scorers are off-season acquisitions: DeBrincat, Compher, Sprong, Gotisbehere

True enough, but even that shouldn't buy you unlimited rope.

Questionable strategy to challenge a mod to leave the site. 🙄

Kant wrote a great treatise arguing that you couldn't resolve transcendental questions via empirical knowledge (Critique of Pure Reason), but then later shot his philosophical standing with posterity in the foot by trying to make an exception to his own prior conclusions in an attempt to prove the existence of God with some logical jujitsu starting from the Golden Rule (Critique of Practical Reason). The first work is pretty famous. You never hear much about the second. 😉

actually I like the way the quote is excerpted: "What came before?" No matter..."

"Steady State" was probably the prevailing theory for most of civilization. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation and the Hubble constant for red-shift blew up the possibility of Steady State. I suppose the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics argues against SS as well, but so few people (including scientists!) know anything about Thermo it probably doesn't have much traction in any other field....

There are many naturally occurring radioactive elements that produce positrons when they decay - they just annihilate themselves pretty quickly. They have a machine at CERN that can generate anti-protons.

It's more the problem of the logical regression. In the current cosmology, the big bang is the beginning of time. You both can't but can't help ask "What came before." No matter how many levels you regress on that the question just re-appears again at the next level.

the counter argument is that he could have quit, and ratted out his org. But that's easy to say in hindsight, The truth is that being right is no protection against being blackballed out of ever managing again anywhere by the 'old boy's club'

but No-Land? Not sure I want to be a receiver on his team.

Last comment on the topic then back to our regularly scheduled programming. There is only one set physical laws for the entire universe. There are no different rules for what goes on in a human brain vs what goes on in the roots of trees or the inside of stars or the egg in your frying pan. You appear to be arguing the brain plays by different rules. The only 'ghost' is consciousness itself and both physical scientists and psychologists are chasing it.

??. I think if there is any overall argument it's that origin questions are pretty pointless no matter what your theological perspective. The two questions: "Where did the big bang come from?"; and "Where did god come from?" are exactly equal and neither theology nor science can answer either. The bottom line is that there are unanswerable questions no matter what you do or don't choose to believe about them.

I'd put that under Campbell the plantation mentality was strong and the org was too cheap to keep winning right up there on their list of sins.

you have two 'inconceivables' up against one another. The first is the depth of complexity and organization we see in the world we inhabit. Not very likely things could have gotten to here. But other is how long the 10+ billion years is we've had for things to get here. In the end it's sort of a fools errand to try to assign a probability to the observed outcome.

no - I've already talked about this - but it's all happening after the fact so to speak. It's the 'thought' part. You can go to the lab and tell the researcher what you are thinking and they can track the result, but if you don't tell them from *your consciousness* they have no way to make that connection - there is no access to your consciousness in any of the apparatus - and at the molecular level, how the though causes the release of a neurotransmitter is not accessible. It's not inconceivable it may be figured out, but they aren't really getting much close at a fundamental level. It's all "watch and describe science". A number of years ago Douglas Hofstadter laid out the thesis that the problem is just one of the depth of complexity burying the possibility of observation of the mechanism. The example he gave is that if you track a pinball's motion over any short term, you will be very hard pressed to see that there is some intelligence controlling it or how. That is one way out of the problem. But that still doesn't give you any solution to how a thought causes a chemical reaction, only that it does. And again, you can report that you 'made a decision' but in the end how would you prove that your thoughts are independent and not just the result to stimulus response outcome. You may believe they are, but that does nothing to prove they at any objective level because there is only our subjective reporting as evidence. Your beliefs may all be part of the same stimulus response conditioning.

This is true, but if a guy can make good hires, then from a practical standpoint that's pretty much as good as him having talent himself. But even given that, I will still be calling for Hinch's head if they come out of the gate all hitting below their averages again. That just can't happen three times in a row.

Why are you not considering the Neural Patterns THEMSELVES as the chemical process that changes the physical state of stasis? In chemistry, every reactions system obeys fixed rules. Every subsequent state of matter is the direct consequence of the prior states an the material and/or energy crossing the system boundary and the relationships are immutable. Maybe I'll reverse the thesis to approach from a different angle: According to chemistry and physics, what happens chemically in your brain simply can't be influenced by something like a thought because a thought doesn't exist in any process definition in chemistry/physics. But you can actually can draw the conundrum out even further: as far as science is concerned, there is no difference between a living chemical process and a dead one. Both are following the exact same rules, and there is nothing you can point to in a living process in terms of the physical laws that it is obeying that separate it from a dead one, which is another way of saying that chemistry and physics don't recognize what we call 'life' as being something definable or distinct in chemical or physical terms at all.

You lock him up because if he left you could do a lot worse? In general I think Hinch is fine - he seems to have a real talent for managing a bullpen, which is probably the most important thing a modern manager has to be good at. The one caveat is that if they start another season with all their hitters in the tank, then you have to lay that at Hinch's door because your outlier occurrences are proving themselves to be trends.

LOL - that's what I was thinking. Man is actually damn lucky it hasn't killed him yet. You have to be born with a lucky gene package to be that resistant.