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Slashback: Retroaction, Breakeven, Kansas
Pardon me sir, are you going to finish that Apple? Marco van de Voort writes: "MkLinux now has official support for these much sold first Nubus based PowerMac generation, that is rotting away in basements. These machines make excellent X-Terms." And the same models can naturally run NetBSD, too. [Updated 6:26GMT by timothy] Reader vkulkarn corrects me here. Mea culpa, you're right -- only some of the old Nubus PowerMac models actually run NetBSD. But I bet someone, somewhere is plotting to change that.
Garage sales can now support Linux.GigsVT writes "Coollogic has released a new set-top box, this one with Linux already installed. Sounds like ripe hacking material to me. Blurb: The Internet Ready 7200 uses a National Semiconductor MediaGX processor, 16MB of flash memory instead of a hard disk, 32MB of RAM and has the ability to connect to the Internet via DSL, Ethernet or a modem. It uses a TV instead of a monitor and comes with Netscape's Web browser." And MrRobahtsu writes "Want a 64MB diskless 200MHz Linux box cheap? Try egghead. With IDE, USB, 10/100 ethernet, and Linux and Netscape in flash ram, it looks pretty cool. Even says "can be upgraded to a pc." Not bad for $129."
Toto, I don't think we're in the Pleistocene anymore! Claudius writes: "This cnn.com article reports that Kansas voters now support the teaching of evolution in their public schools, as evidenced by recent election results. They have voted to remove two incumbents to the Kansas Board of Education who have supported standards diminishing the importance of evolution, and a third, anti-evolution candidate was unable to defeat an opponent who opposes the current standards. The issue is still far from settled, however, since five of the ten seats on the board remain to be filled in November." For a refresher on the sticky state of evolution in Kansas education, see Hemos' story on it from a while ago.
Ha ha fooled ya good. TeacherReviews.com writes "Gervase just got voted off the Survivor island, meaning that RealWorldBlows discussed in a past story produced a false result and the actual winner of Survivor is still unknown." True enough. What was going through the collective CBS head when they failed to follow the directive of their own Web site?!
Still horrifying after all these days. chaidawg writes: "According to this article in the New York Times (free registration req.), author Stephen King's experiment with payment for e-publishing seems to be working. After the first of three promised chapters he has made back all but $10,000 of the more than $100,000 he spent on advertising." This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
It deals with models of the world at various levels of confirmation.
The theory of evolution is not "proven fact", philosophers long ago proved that to be an unattainable goal. However an intelligent person today who is familiar with the facts can no more reasonably deny evolution than an educated scientist of the 1700's could deny that the Earth was round.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
You said: "The Theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution" When will people stop spouting this drivel ? The word theory does not mean something is unproven, for example, I spent 2 years at university studying "Number Theory", including large slabs of mathematical proofs that what we were studying was _known_to_be_true_, and you don't get anyone more finicky about 'proof' than a pure mathematician. In fact, when mathematicians want to make it clear that something is unproven, they usually call it a conjecture. In general, most things in science are called theories, including such well established and uncontroversial things as "the earth revolves around the sun" (Copernican Theory). I went to a debate between a Scientist and Creationist on Evolution, and when the Creationist said "evolution is only a theory" the scientist produced a car-battery and set of jumper leads and said "wanna test the theory of electricity ?"
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
You are right o quite a lot of things but you forget one thing: We haven't observed macro evolution (the kind that gives birth to new species) so it is still a theory (or rather a collection of theories given the number of schools in this theory). And to help you have another view on science, math and religion you should ponder this saying:
If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
-- John Barrow
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
You are totally wrong. The theory of evolution is not a fact, it is just very likely to be true. You are confusing the mathematical, deductive reasoning of Number 'theory' with the inductive reasoning of science. (Event A has always been observed to occur under these conditions, B. Therefore it will always continue to occur under those conditions, regardless when or where those conditions occur. This is the central assumption of science) Go and read Karl Popper. BTW, the Copernican theory is wrong - the Earth does not revolve around the Sun, they both revolve around their common centre of mass.
Is it just me, or was removing the middle-leech supposed to bring down the cost of things like novels?
Looking over the FAQ for this King story, I see that it's $1 a pop (a mere few thousand words each time) for the first three installments, and $2.50 an ep after that, up to seven or eight payments total. That's $13-15.50 US for an approximately 350 page novel (being generous with his wordcount estimates, since King has tended to try and make up for lack of creativity with verbosity in the past, much as I'm doing right now). Plus you have to read the thing in installments (knowing at any point the author might pull the plug), forgo the possession of a nice compact paperback to take on vacation with you, and either bear the costs of printing it yourself (figure $2-10 US more) or make it through an entire novel on Acrobat Reader (meaning you'll probably be buying new corrective lenses later ;).
I do like the concept of electronic distribution and micropayments, but what's "micro" about these? Seems like the reader is paying a lot, and King makes out like a bandit since he no longer has to pay a publisher. If the cost of advertising is the issue, then the experiment is already a failure, since only this precise sort of mediocre bestseller author could ever afford it (King is surely not hurting for cash), and ending the overpopularity of middle-of-the-road crap is supposed to be one of the main benefits ascribed to direct distribution.
Even if it were an author I liked and respected, I can't see why anyone would want to pay these rates. I think this one is just capitalising on the brief novelty most people see here.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
Canar dun said:
To be honest, on reading this I'm smelling a furry critter with horns who lives under bridges and has a strange craving for Cuban cabra sandwiches :). If so, good job. You got me. :)
If this is NOT a troll, though...well, it seems someone has never been to a farm or a livestock show. :)
There is an entire class of mammals--the Arctiodactylia or "even-hooved" animals--that has lost one, and sometimes three, of the original five toes mammals had. Probably the most common member of the order in the US right now is the common cow; just to to a farm or a petting zoo, and count the number of toes on a cow. (Or deer, or any such critters. It's only the largest order of herbivorous animals on the planet; I'm sure you can find a member or two.)
For that matter, the second-largest order of herbivorous mammals has a large family that actually has lost two to four toes in its history. (I'm talking about the equines. In fact, we have one of the better fossil records that detail how they've lost toes throughout their evolution--they went from five to three to one toe. In fact, you occasionally have the rare "throwback" horse born with three toes; the loss of the last two toes occured fairly late in horse evolution. At least one "cousin" of the equines, the tapir, has three toes, and rhinos have five. If you want to see examples, just look at a zoo or at a horse-farm or go down to the track. Heck, watch the Kentucky Derby if you want. :)
For that matter, the entire "felid" branch of the Carnivora (which includes cats, "civet cats" and "genet cats", hyenas, and some older forms like Smilodon) has lost the fifth toe on its hind feet, and their front first toe is reduced to a dewclaw (which is the state of fifth toes in canids such as wolves, dogs and foxes, too; expect them to lose the hind dewclaws in a few million years). The main reason cats still have dewclaws on their front toes is that kitties can use them fairly well as thumbs, especially if not declawed (if you want them to demonstrate, get a can of cat-treats and let kitty fetch her own out). I will leave out the obvious joke about what will happen when cats evolve opposable thumbs and thus no longer need humans as their thralls for world dominance. :)
For that matter...we'll take it beyond mammals. The other major group besides the synapsids (one of the two great lineages of land animals besides amphibians; synapsids include mammals, theraspids or "proto-mammals", and "mammal-like reptiles" like Dimetrodon) happens to be the same group that reptiles and archosaurs belong to, including birds. They, too, have a fairly extensive history of digit-loss:
Last toe digit (our equivalent of our pinkies) lost sometime near when archosaurs first evolved; even modern crocs, which are the modern representatives of one of two branches of the archosaurs (the other being the bird/dino branch), only have four toes
Fourth toe (rough equivalent of ring finger turns non-functional in theropod dinosaurs during early evolution (about the time they separated from hererrasaurs, in the late Triassic)
Fourth finger lost in most theropod dinosaurs around evolution of the Maniraptora (the subclass of theropods that includes birds, as well as most of the meat-eating cast of the Jurassic Park movies besides dilophosaurs and compys), around early-mid Jurassic
Third finger (equivalent to the "flip the bird" finger) lost in tyrannosaurs
Fourth toe lost entirely in ornithomimosaurs
Sometime during development of powered flight (late Jurassic-early Cretaceous) finger claws lost and second and third fingers fuse while thumb develops as alula
In surviving theropod dinosaurs (aka birds) all have lost except thumb and first two fingers on front limbs and first two fingers were fused (there may have been a reversal in phorusracoid birds, which largely hunted as large land predators in the Americas until 2 million BC to 100,000 years ago); many, if not most, ground-running birds have lost the fourth toe entirely, in most birds it is a dewclaw, and only a very few birds (perching birds) use the fourth toe at all as a functional digit
I won't get into snakes. There is recent evidence they evolved from mosasaurs (a type of swimming reptile), and they not only lost digits but limbs altogether (the only snakes with limbs today are boids, which have claws used for mating attached to very tiny legs; early snakes have more substantial limbs, but nothing huge).
But perhaps, well, mere synapsid/reptilian split critters aren't enough. Let's throw amphibians in, too. :)
At least one sub-branch of amphibians has lost limbs as well (caecilans); there are several branches of frogs that have reduced digits to four per limb, too.
For that matter...the main reason most animals have five limbs is that five limbs is an incredibly ancient structure--literally coming about before land animals (we are now starting to find fossils of animals at around this time--we now know they evolved as swimmers first and evolved limbs to scoot about on bottom, and early "tetrapods" had varying numbers of digits per limb (some with five, some with seven or even eight digits per limb).
For more info on this, including some good lineages, you might want to go here or here.
As for Pascal's Wager...well, the wager relies on five very big assumptions:
that such a thing as God exists
that such a thing as Hell exists
that a God would be enough of a ratbastard as to throw someone into a place of eternal torment just because the poor sot hadn't ever heard of aforementioned God and/or disagreed with the "official" account based on empirical evidence
that what folks see as God might not be the processes of Nature, or that God may well have created stuff by evolution
that people are meant to blindly follow a leader instead of use the brains that God and/or evolution gave them in the first place so as to better understand the mysteries of life :)
Myself, well...if there is a God (which...if there is one, I think it might be Nature, but that's only my viewpoint) Sie either honestly doesn't give a damn one way or the other (in which case God is basically Nature, and the whole idea of appealing to a God is moot unless you mean something like apologising to cows before you eat them), or isn't enough of a ratbastard to chuck someone into a pit because the fossils pretty much show not only that horses evolved from tapir-like critters but that birds evolved from very close cousins of Deinonychus and we all came eventually from fishy-looking critters. If Sie is such a ratbastard, I'm not afraid to say that not only would I gladly burn in Hell in such a case, but such a ratbastard neither deserves my worship nor my respect. :) (And no, I don't buy the whole "Fossils were there to test us" crap, either...that makes God out not only to be a complete ratbastard, but a troll and a cruel ratbastard who gets his jollies off sending people to Hell for basically his idea of a practical joke. In which case, He can go straight to Hell, if you pardon the expression.)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Jamie pointed out to me via private e-mail that the crux of his prediction is that King will never have to finish his novel under the terms of his agreement -- 75% of people have to pay for each section. The possible stopping point, as best as I can tell, was the 3rd section. But the site confuses me, to be honest.
Anyhow, I stand by my comment that that particular portion of Jamie's prediction was wrong. But I was viewing his comment too narrowly. Jamie meant that people simply won't continue to pay over all 10 sections. I agree, I don't think that they will. By that logic, as he produces each section, the average percentage of people paying will go down until, eventually, it may hover around Jamie's predicted 15%-30%. Making Jamie right.
-Waldo
-------------------
I think that Stephen King should have voted for the set-top PowerMac to stay on the island, despite its theological heresay.
This it wonderful, now i can put a terminal in the kitchen, and use a network drive to store recipies an stuff. then once i get dsl i can run an eggdrop on it, ang setup a totaly 1337 channel!
The SCovery looks nice, but it's not $129.
There's a minimum shipping of $19.95 from Egghead, for UPS ground, so it's $148.95.
I didn't see the disk option priced.
I, for one am glad to see that the Constitution means something. It's time that all this talk of "school prayer" and "equal time" gets taken out of the picture. Do I get equal time on the pulpit at a xitian church to teach evolution? Then why are they invading the minds of children to teach them religious rubbish? Evolution is a confirmed, Objective fact. Religion, and creation "science" is pure fantasy.
I agree that the news from Kansas is good. But its dangerous to overstate the case for Evolution. It isn't accurate to characterise this theory as "confirmed, Objective fact". There is a lot of very good evidence to support Evolution. There is no rival theory that has any signficant evidence. Religious "explainations", especially those of creationists are so riddled with errors and run so counter to all the evidence that they do not deserve serious consideration. So certainly, the intelligent response is to accept Evolution as the best explaination out there, but it isn't proved fact.
Sailing over the event horizon
and I'm leaning toward the latter. They didn't just let everyone get misled by their website (which they went as far as to take down for a few days after the story broke), they also intentionally mislead the public in at least two other ways. Someone leaked that Gervase would win to MSNBC even before the website thing. Furthurmore, a scene in the introduction shows four people sitting at the tribal council, Gervase among them. CBS now claims that was intentional. So either CBS lucked out and had a number of coincidences fall perfectly into place, or they are master con-artists. They fooled us, didn't they?
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Theism of some kind _can_ be a very useful 'meme' when you have the tendency to behave as though you have to control the world and everything around you. You can call that codependency, you can call it typical of drug addicts, you could call it a very common trait that _creates_ drug addicts, but the fact is there are many people who are neither cowardly or stupid, yet who habitually interact with the world in a controlling, manipulative way that just doesn't produce helpful results.
There's a hell of a lot of evidence that, for people whose heads are wired that way, developing a faith in some kind of God is a very helpful 'mental judo' that gets them out of their own way- whether or not this faith is at all logical or provable or justifiable. As a result you get into a situation like this:
- I don't know whether there's a guiding power greater than people (i.e. me)
- When I act on the basis that I must master my fate, I get hung up and tangled in my own schemes and cause chaos
- When I act _as_ _if_ there is a 'God', I cause less chaos, and things mysteriously work out better than when I was mucking them up
- When I do this without belief, it's like walking a razorblade and I'm fighting my instincts to muck things up all the time
- When I do this with the trick of the mind called 'belief', I likewise avoid mucking things up, but I sleep better and worry less about stuff.
Just how valuable is your pride, anyhow? It may be that controlling your surroundings with cold rationality works dandy for you. Some people don't have the knack of that, which doesn't mean they're dumb- they might be overly stressed, or too perfectionistic, or kind of obsessive- which aren't always bad traits. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that 'theistic faith' can be quite an advantage in these cases- even the humility of accepting that 'the pattern of life' is too complex for one person to grasp can be a real breakthrough, and once you've accepted that you can no longer 'disprove God' any more than you can disprove space aliens or galactic wormholes or anything else that you wouldn't be expected to understand.It always kind of annoys me to see these fervent attacks on any form of theism. Usually I let it pass. This time, though it's 4 AM and I should be heading to bed, I felt like speaking up just a bit. Yeah, I have vague theistic notions. I consider it an intrinsic quality of my relation to this God that I can't possibly understand it- it is by definition (my definition) entirely beyond my ability to comprehend. It is, however, a pretty good reason for me to leave some things to it, and concentrate on just trying to do the best I can with what I have. I know that this works better than my previous need to be the master of my fate- I do _not_ know that this is because there's an old guy with a beard 'up there'. I could be wrong- I could be looking at pure chaos and projecting an order that doesn't exist (on the other hand, look at the scientific definition of chaos....). But the bottom line is, my relation to the world is saner and less dogmatic when I _do_ have faith in whatever the heck my God is.
If you don't like that, sux to be you ;) because your arguments will not change the fact that when I believed as you did, I was _miserable_ and pretty dysfunctional at life. Sorry- atheism didn't work well for me. It didn't tend to make me good at patience or tolerance- never mind peace. I'd rather not know and quietly expect some higher order in the universe, than convince myself that I'm _it_.
"If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing" --- Bertrand Russel
Also, to quote from a proof that Hell is exothermic (don't ask):
"Many religions have a belief that if you do not belong to that religion, you will go to hell. The number of these religions is greater than one, and, as someone cannot belong to more than one religion, all souls go to hell."
Kansas voters now support the teaching of evolution in their public schools, as evidenced by recent election results.
FUCK! i figured if one state, out of all our glorious fifty, could hold on their illusions about life on this planet...it was going to be Kansas!
damn this rationality! That state is going to burn in hell with all their new fangled scientific idears! Next they'll probably remove all board members who belong to the flat earth society! (yeah right...like the earth is ROUND?!?!) that's when the whores and the crack move in!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
you said: "Do I get equal time on the pulpit at a xitian church to teach evolution?"
A church is a private organization. A school is public. A private organzation sets its own rules without the interference of an outside force..ie..govt.
A public organization has strict rules it must abide by.
The theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution. It's a theory.
> I talked to professor of genetics of the local Uni here, University of Hohenheim about this and he said he is not very interested in evolution since there is *no way* to prove it scientifically. For that you would have to be able to reproduce the whole thing. He is much more interested in theories that can be proved.
/. readers), and the other pointing out the most common bad arguments and tricks of internet rhetoric that are encountered here so often (in both scientific and non-scientific topics).
That would be sensible for a mathematician, but it's a rather odd position for a geneticist to take.
You don't prove scientific theories; all you can do for any scientific theory is show that it is not contradicted by any currently known evidence, and then argue that it is more efficient/elegant than any other theories that pass the same test.
As another poster has remarked, most of the natural sciences do not work like mathematical logic. You can't use modus ponens or mathematical induction to deal with much of the material the various natural sciences deal with. The grounding is on observations, not axioms, and progress is made by accumulating observations and making and testing hypotheses, not by applying formalized rules of inference to a collection of previously proven theorems. Therefore "proved" is not possible in any literal sense for the natural sciences.
This fact applies to genetics every bit as much as it does to evolution. If your professor really said what you cited, and thinks otherwise about genetics, please tell him that he is a dumb fuck. Anything he "knows" about genetics is subject to change at the drop of an observation, just as it is for evolution, cosmology, quantum mechanics, chemistry, astrophysics, or any other field of science. When a hypothesis passes many, many tests we take it as a well-established given, but it is never "proved".
And among the various sciences, evolution is as well-established as atomic theory or the heliocentric solar system is. None are proven in any formal sense, but all are so well supported by the observations that any changes above the level of details would be as shocking as discovering that the earth was flat.
For those who haven't caught on yet, "science" is about a method of acquiring knowledge, not about a list of proven theorems. You set forth the best theory you can devise, but you change it whenever new evidence so demands.
And that is what distinguishes the theory of evolution from the claims of creation. Sure, when new evidence comes up you examine it, question it, try to fit it in to the standing theory as best you can rather than throwing away the accepted views. But at some point you've got to admit it when you can't make the new evidence fit. Thus scientific theories have evolved, expanded, and even been discarded over the past 500 years, whereas every generation of creationists goes to the grave believing the same thing, and failing miserably to muster any convincing evidence.
That's because the creationists are trying to reconcile observations to an unquestionable axiom rather than reconcile them with a malleable theory like the real sciences do. Science works from observations to a theory, and changes the latter when it conflicts with the former. Creationism works toward observations from an axiom (aka revelation), and changes the former when they conflict with the latter. This is not science.
> Anyway I urge ppl to read read and read stuff about this from both sides, only that can enlighten you and lets you make an informed decision.
I see stuff from both sides all the time. Alas, I probably hear more from the creationists than I do from real biologists. But their arguments are almost always ludicrous a priori stances, and sometimes outright deceitful. (For a recent example of deceitful misquotations of scientific literature in support of a young earth, visit talk.origins, find the thread "Wow! Reading a Jack Chick tract actually paid off!", find the response by Elmer Bataitis dated July 29, and read away.)
Sorry 'bout the soapbox; I just have slim patience with pseudoscience masquerading as real science.
Suggestion: Rob, how 'bout providing a couple of pages on Slashdot, one defining what science is and how it works (since it is so often misunderstood by a largish minority of
It might be possible to create the pages by the "slashdotific method", i.e. open a thread, take comments, and hope the moderation does a 90% effective job of separating the jewels from the trash.
(As for the bad arguments / lame rhetoric page, we could number the items and invoke them by number in the threads under the regular articles.)
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Timothy wrote:
:)
This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
Jamie wrote:
I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.
Looks to me like Jamie *was* wrong. See Monday's news on Stephen King's site, in which he reports 76.38% payment. Now, 19.8% of the 116,200 that he counts as having paid have actually just promised to pay, but haven't actually paid. 80.2% of them paid via credit card. That means that at least 61.3% of downloads have been paid for, which is more than twice Jamie's most optimistic estimate.
King goes on. In response to the question "Are you go for Part 3 in September?", he replies, simply, "Yes."
Sorry, Jamie.
-Waldo
-------------------
NetBSD does NOT support the 5200/5300/6200/6300 (except for the 6300/160 and the 6360 which used differant motherboards). These are the old school Apple systems that didn't use PCI, or Nubus for that matter... According to http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/m odels.html NetBSD does not support these machines.
Although I agree with your (and many others) posts on the principal that religious teachings have no place in a faith-neutral place like a public school, I do take exception to this statement. I personally do not partake in religion anymore, but it certainly does have a place in public life, to the extent that it does not intrude upon my rights. Kids should have moral guidance, preferably instilled in them by their parents, but religious institutions in general do a good job as well.
That's a load of crap. Religions instill a system of morals that they approve of, not ones that necessarily society approves of. And who decides what the difference is between moral 'guidance' and 'subversion'. I mean, hell, even on Slashdot, we see the constant battle between people with morals that say, "Be a law-abiding citizen" and people with morals that say, "You must do what you want and if it means breaking the law, so be it." Who's right? Who's wrong?
It's not even that clear. But what is clear is that the 'moral guidance' of religious institutions has led to more hatred and human suffering than any other factor in history. 'Moral guidance' (and those that tried to counter it) brought us such heavenly moments as the Crusades, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Spain and south France, the Salem witchhunt, the house-arrest of Galileo, the decimation of American Indian culture, and our current little squabble in the Mideast.
As far as I'm concerned, religious institutions can stick to providing the masses with something to look forward to and stop telling people how to live their lives.