Urist

It is a work of art!

It is a triangle. The abstraction of lines in non-Euclidean geometry are geodesics and just like three lines form a triangle, so do the geodesics. If you walked along the earth's surface from the equator to the North Pole and back, taking 90 degrees angles every time, you will have felt that you made a triangle by walking straight in three directions.

The reason the angle sum can be more than 180 degrees is that the sphere has a positive curvature. If you want one with negative curvature and less than 180 degrees angle sum, try to make one on the side of the hole on a torus (look up its curvature if my explanation was lacking).

EDIT: Picture for reference:

The answer is obvious. Depending on the curvature of the object the triangles have higher or lower than 180 degrees angle sums. Flat space just happens to have 0 curvature.

Did not know about this site. It was a nice read and their mission statement is cool. Thanks for sharing! :)

It is nice where possible and can help locally, but on scale it will not force through any changes. To see why, we only need to consider the historical material conditions that allowed the development of the current capitalist form in the first place. Small businesses where defeated by capitalists that could employ tactics the others couldn't answer.

In order to answer to the consequences of our current mode of production, we have to force changes to how production is carried out. Saying we want our products locally, ethically and environmentally made will only change their branding, not the fundamental exploitation in search of surplus value.

When you have to spend on things like haircuts, repairs, etc, keep the money in your social network.

While I agree with the idea of not buying garbage, there is absolutely no way we can unconsume ourselves out of the capitalist ploy to extract surplus value. Do not put the blame on people who try to (often) satisfy legitimate needs, but on those forcing labor to be spent at the cost of both the environment and workers themselves.

Ecofascism (not accusing you here) is not going to solve the climate crisis.

I like people who think critically themselves (and are sometimes weird in lovely ways). Often I find them to be leftists and/or Linux users. I encourage your independent thought as to why.

Yeah, hearing about how hard it would be to get tenure dissuaded me from pursuing my original dream of doing a PhD. In retrospect I think I am much happier where I am now than I would've been, which really is what matter the most to me now. Freeing myself of the obligation of attaining my goals was actually quite nice.

I misinterpreted your comment and was very pleasantly surprised that something named "rational wiki" would call him out for the crackpot that he is.

I am not claiming to have some deeper knowledge of metaphysical reality than anyone else. On the contrary, this is precisely what religious people do. I base my understanding of reality based on what I can observe and interact with: the material reality.

This does not mean I cannot do imaginative things: I have a background in theoretical mathematics that does not really care about material reality other than the logical predicates that exist within it.

Actually, I am quite dumbfounded by the assumption of any symmetry of typical religious questions such as believing in a creator or not, because in my view any such kind of dichotomy presupposes an original creation in the first place: Why would there be? Because the bible or some other text written by humans says so?

If humanity never developed eyes, everything else remaining the same, we would never imagine seeing colors but we sure as hell would have religions. This is because as a tool for understanding the material world, and in my opinion of philosophy as well, religion is a creative and analytical show stopper.

If you want to make conclusions about matters humans can barely comprehend

We do not know everything about the universe, sure, but to say it is outside our scope of comprehension is a stretch that I would argue follows from religious dogma: "God works in mysterious ways" and all that. In fact, the developments of the last centuries have shown that most of the things we thought were mysterious, we could actually explain with science.

Most religious people claim to know more about the world than atheists: After all, they are the ones having some sort of relationship with some ethereal/omnipotent being.

Atheists mean by the second that they find as little material basis for believing in god as in [insert whack theory here (teapot, spaghettimonster, etc.)]. We do make a judgement one way or the other, we say that our default position is not believing literally incredible things without proof.

The bar for what needs to be proven unless assumed false is higher the more that is claimed. Since god (especially to monotheistic denominations) are by definition the highest being claimed to exist, there is a huge burden of proof required for believing in it. Since there exists none, we choose to assume that the statement is false.

The reason we make all these stupid analogies is to hammer through the point that we, like everyone else, make a lot of assumptions that unproven things are false. The question of god is not really special in this regard, except for the historical and biological conditions that makes people inclined to believe in the fairytale absent of any good objective reason.