Slashdot Mirror
Technology Spontaneously Combusts In Sicily
Zacronos writes "According to MSNBC, ever since mid-January, various electronic devices have been spontaneously combusting in the now evacuated town of Canneto di Caronia, Sicily; at this point, the fires are almost daily. The town has been disconnected from the larger electrical grid and was hooked to a generator, but that, too, caught fire. Even unplugged items have succumbed. Nothing seems to have burst into flame except where there is someone present to witness it, but the police no longer suspect a prankster -- after witnessing wires catch fire without cause. Scientists have yet to explain the phenomenon (although unproven theories abound), leading many people to look to supernatural causes."
I find this a good example of those phenomena that science can't yet explain. I'm often amused by science types that say something is impossible because it doesn't fit any current theory.
Seems to me any true scientist should always be watching for observations that don't fit the known theory, as they are indicators of a nedd for further refinement.
Sadly, scientists, like most people, are more interested in being right, and tend to look for confirming evidence, sometimes to the detriment of their conclusions.
Before you flame me as an anti-science zealot, let me confess that I'm a science guy as much as your average geek, and I think science is responsible for most of the good changes of the last few centuries. I just think that when we hold too tight to our theories, we leave the realm of skeptical science and enter the world of blind faith.
BTW, I have no plausible explanation for the spontaneous fires. But I am confident that someone will come up wih one that doesn't invole a tinfoil hat.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."--Arthur C. Clarke
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
What is magic, if not simply something we do not (yet) understand?
Finkployd
I'm italian and i followed the story with much interest. Unfortunately news lacked important details about phenomenons, when and how they happened and expecially which of them were true.
If it was an EMP so strong to burn power lines, why didn't it fry all the small electronics (including scientist's instruments) which are more susceptible to EM fields?
Or some evil, sinister military/CIA project. Do a quick Google seach on HAARP and/or weather control and you'll see.
The owls are not what they seem
It may be "magical" but it isn't "supernatural" or "paranormal". That is, just because you don't understand something should your first assumption be that "this can only be explained by rejecting all previous knowledge and making something up".
And I find the lack of citations from any of the alleged scientist disturbing. The press is in a sad state indeed.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."--Anon.
Corollary: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced." ;-)
[TMB]
Anyone else find it suspicious that Slashdot picks this up from MSNBC on the 8th of April, who ran this from Reuters on Monday the 5th. Reuters Italy then must have had it sometime around Friday the 2nd, which would put the first printing of the story on... Which day is that again?
The ______ Agenda
This has been reported on since February at which time, Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican's chief expert on exorcism said demonic forces cannot be ruled out. Now, of course, he has a vested interest in maintaining job security, so his opinion needs to be taken with a half-a-grain of salt.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
What is magic, if not simply something we do not (yet) understand?
An excuse for not understanding something.
Rather than being bothered to actually try and understand something you just shrug your shoulders and say "magic".
It all reminds me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips:
Calvin: Dad, what makes the wind? Dad: Trees sneezing. Calvin: Really? Dad: No, but the real answer is a lot more complex.
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
Life is too short to proofread.
Dude, you've got a seriously skewed view of religion.
I'm a network geek. I've completed my B.S. and M.S., both in technical fields. And I believe in God and Jesus. And:
You need to get out of that Middle Age's thinking about God. There's alot of us out here proclaiming the Good News and living our lives believing in God, educating ourselves, and working intelligently.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Why do you think some of the most religious people are often absolute morons, and many intelligent, well-educated people often aren't highly religious? Idiots need an explanation for everything, intelligent people seek answers and do not believe in what they cannot prove to themselves.
You know, I used to think that, too. Then I realized that there are an awful lot of really smart people that are extremely religious, too. Albert Einstein, if I recall correctly, was a devout believer. Isaac Newton, when he was developing calculus and his theory of gravity, was trying to understand God.
It is the desire to understand God that has driven virtually all of scientific history, from Galileo to Planck, and only recently has science been transformed into only the desire to undersand our world. And even then, anyone with half a brain would see that we're really juyst trying to understand what God has given us, if you believe in God (see below). Of the viewpoint that I'm trying to expouse in this paragraph, I can't think of anything that can articulate it better the the end of the movie Contact.
I have come to the belief that religion is not about whether you can explain it or not, or even if it makes sense. If it had to make sense, there wouldn't be any Mormons or Scientologists. But all it really requires for belief in God is exactly that -- belief.
I for one do not actually believe. But I can see the draws to belief, and they are so strong that I sometimes have think twice about my reactions. Am I particularly bright? I don't think so. But neither do I think I'm really dumb.
So what's my point? Well, I guess it's that the part of your post I'm quoting was idiotic and immature, born of a sense of moral superiority for your beliefs and contempt for the viewpoints of others. I used to be the same way; only recently, I saw the errors of that way of thinking, and have become more tolerant and open-minded towards people who beilve in God, Allah, Krishna, Zeus, Ra, or whatever faith you believe in. The rest of your post, on it's own merits, I belive to be accurate; however, in light of the point you were trying to make, is wholly inaccurate and inadequate as to what religion actually provides a society.
After all, after everything is said and done, you can't DISPROVE God; absence of proof is not proof of absence. Since you can't disprove it, you have to take into account that God is possible. Belief in God is just as credible -- not more than, and not less than (and that's the key point) -- as my belief that God does not actually exist, and is in fact a creation of our own minds.
Although maybe one of these days I'll be proven wrong. I look forward to that day.
Responses are welcome; this is the biggest area that I spend idle moments thinking.
weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
One of the alarming things about slashdot is the way it really brings out the bigots in the community.
Story about a sicilian village? Sure, they must be a bunch of superstitious peasants with a mental age of 11. Story about women? Cue for side-splitting 'jokes' about how dumb they are with computers and or crude sexual innuendo. (and then the authors wonder why they can't get a girlfriend). Story about India? Racial stereotypes alive and well.
I'm not worried so much about the existence of these posts. The attraction of
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
There's a few reasons. Firstly, there people are sitting in a hotel and tired of it, hoping daily that this isn't the day their family home (or entire town) burns to the ground. They're desperate for an answer and not in the mood to spend a few years investigating this interesting phenomenon.
Next there's the fact that to most people, technology itself IS a sort of magic. Just press that button and invisible forces spring into being to make the cup of water boil. Even if they take the nuker apart it still looks like magic. Just one moving part, and even that doesn't have to be there (but the heating will be less even without it).
If you look at the way many people without technical knowledge interact with technology, it's just a bunch of 'invocations' that they have learned will do something useful (usually they learned it from a book of a techie). For all the meaning it has to them, they might as well be burning incense and shouting arcane latin phrases. They know that when the incantations don't work, there's this 'reboot' that can restore order. That's why you see business DSL customers rebooting the router when the email doesn't work (but the web does) and rebooting their PC didn't fix it.
Sometimes, when there's no harm in it, I find it better to let people do those things while I figure out what the problem is. It lets them feel less helpless and occasionally, they stumble over the solution.
You'll also note that the local priest along with the residents did decide to let the scientists have the first crack at the problem.
'We don't know yet' is a perfectly valid answer right now, but it doesn't get them back into their homes. It doesn't help that things bursting into flames for no discernable reason is a recurring theme in movies about the supernatural.
It doesn't help that scientists aren't always all that scientific when presented with observations thay cannot explain. Too often, important phrases like "this is just a guess, but" get replaced with "I'm absolutely certain that" whenever coincidence is about to be invoked. The correct pronouncement would be "I have no idea whatsoever", but scientists don't like to say that either.
Add on top of that all of the 'scientific' pronouncements like 'eggs are bad for you', 'any wine is bad for you', 'oops, no, some wine is good for you, and so are eggs, but avoid fat at all costs', 'oops, people are getting fatter on low fat diets', etc, etc, and people start to think that the 'scientists' are just making things up too. They make the mistake of confusing various pseudoscientific nonsense from the FDA, NIH, and the AMA (or their own regional equivilants) for science. I call it pseudoscience because collectively they have a habit of stating working theory (complete with conflicting evidence) as if it were fact and flatly denying the existance of plainly observable phenomena when the correct answer is clearly "We don't know".
If we can't get scientists to abandon dogma and various forms of mysticism, how can we expect it from laymen?
So what is Weak Minded? It's this:
1. The inability to accept that other people have valid motivations, ideals or valuable knowledge that that are different from your own.
2. The inability to differentiate between what one person or one group do in the name of a cause, and the core purpose of that cause.
There are a lot of people who wrap themselves in religion who are weak minded. There are a lot more that are not. There are a lot of people who wrap themselves in science who are weak minded. There are a lot more who are not. There are a lot of people who live in many different countries, societies, cultures who are weak minded. There are a lot more who are not. And out of all of these, many among the weak minded also tend to be the most vocal, so that is a lot of what you hear from them.
Different people accept religion for different reasons. And different people abuse the name of religion for different reasons. David Koresh claimed to be Jesus. Few Christians believe or supported him. Osama claims to work in the name of Islam. Few Muslims believe or support him. Some Catholic priests have sexually assaulted children. Few Catholics support them. There have certainly been bad things done in the name of religion, but that does not mean the religion was the cause. Most often the cause was dangerious people doing bad things, and claiming religion as their cover.
As for why people believe what religion teaches them rather than "modern science". That is probably because modern science is not taught as widely as you would like. It takes money, knowledge, political support, lots of people power, and strong social support to spread new knowledge. Churches have been around for centuries. They already have the structures in place to teach their docterine. Church schools exist in almost every town and country around the world teaching religion. Modern educational institutes in remote places are few and far between. This is not the fault of the people who live there. They learn what is available to them. And for many centuries, that was from the local church.
Knowledge is relative. With all your great scientific knowledge, If you were dropped naked into the middle of the Amazon rain forest, you'd probably die of poison or starvation inside a week. All the while those stupid savages who worship their sun gods have been surviving there for generations just fine.
We all learn and accept what our society and parents teach us. If your parents and society teach you science, great for you. If you are too ignorant or weak minded to accept that other people have different educational backgrounds, different social and physical needs, or different ideas about the unknown, AND THAT THESE DIFFERENCES ARE NOT EVIL, STUPID OR WRONG, then that's too bad for you.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
what makes you think my religion, the religion of the oldest know civilized people is not right?
Albert Einstein, if I recall correctly, was a devout believer.
If you mean devout believer as in Christian or Jewish belief, no, you do not recall correctly at all.
Einstein did not believe on the stupid "man-on-steroids" god of most religions, Einsteins belief was pantheistic, that universe itself is God, he believed in a "God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men".
After all, after everything is said and done, you can't DISPROVE God
I can't disprove the tooth fairy either. Is it just as likely to exist then, than not?
> Dude, you've got a seriously skewed view of religion.
7 31&dict=CALD )
One might argue that it's atheists who have a less skewed view of religion as they're not part of it.
> And finally RELIGION != FAITH IN GOD
Religion = "the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship:" (from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=66
Anyway, to many people who are not religious, the belief in a god, and particularly the common varieties that send their children to earth, seemingly arbitrarily bless or smite people etc. are as real as Father Christmas or Zaphod Beeblebrox.
The mere fact that a lot of people believe it is no convincing argument, especially when those people proclaim their belief being due to faith rather than any evidence. For 1000s of years everyone believed the earth was flat.
Even today, a lot of people believe summer is warmer than winter because the earth is closer to the sun then, or that the entire world is only 6000 years old because some religous nut tells them so, or any other number of demonstrably wrong things. The number of people believing something is not sufficient reason to assume it is true.
This is precisely the reason i trust science more than tradition or religion: Scientific dogma is subject to revision in the face of new evidence, religious dogma usually isn't. It's 2000 years out of date.
> If you're dumb enough to turn over your thinking to a religious
> Pope/Evangelist/whatever, that's your idiocy, not God's.
So who did you turn your thinking over to? What made you a "believer"? A charismatic person? An old book? Indoctrination from your community? Peer pressure? Anyway, i completely agree with your statement bar the last two words...
It would perhaps be more correct to say that "There's lots of stuff that science hasn't yet explained". The term science doesn't refer to some fixed body of knowledge. It refers to a methodology for finding and refining explanations.
Wow, that's one of the best slashdot posts I've ever read! I'm tired of religion bashing on /. (I mean, obviously it's their right to do so, it's the moderators I'm more upset with). Atheistic humanism is as much of a religion as anything else, and to be honest I think the most logical (although boring) choice is to be agnostic.
I'm a Christian and I study physics, and people so often ask me how I can be a Christian and believe so much in Science... I think for some people science has become the new religion - it gives us all the answers, except to the most important questions (why are we here? what is right/wrong?). I work on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission and I was upset to see so many posts on slashdot saying that finding life on another planet would mean the end of religion... I don't get this! Many people working on the mission are Christians (or also some other faiths) and they are all very excited by the prospect, as am I! People assume too much about things they do not understand.
Thanks again for a great post!
Cheers,
Justin
If he substituted "Buddha" and "Tao", would it make a difference?
You are condemning him as a "nut-job" just because he used two key-words specific to his religion. You sound Jesusphobic.