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China's Earliest Modern Human Found
The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in China. The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonized the East. Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
fabricated by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Such gullible people.
The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonized the East.
What do you mean "our", pilgrim? My ancestors didn't colonize the East.
I'd be more interested as to how people in the region developed different facial features, such as smaller eyes and differing skin tones. If we all have supposedly come out of Africa as the Article suggests, what is the reason for our physical differences? Even as a child, our differences amazed me, now that I'm older and the current theory is that we all came from Africa, I'm left asking myself again, how did we get them?
Jonathanjk.com
i bet he/she never thought ending up on slashdot.
And he was lying there in the dirt only slightly longer than it took Slashdot to catch on to this news.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
If he's living in a cave, he can't be very "modern"...
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
> I dispute this nonsense, since as we all know, the Earth is only a few thousand years old, not the 42,000 years old that this skellington is supposed to be!
It really is that old. On the 8th day, god created a 40,000 year old skeleton and then buried it somewhere he knew we would find it. he does this to test our faith. god can do anything. Even impossible things or things that make no logical sense.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Would it have been so hard to mention the age in the summary? You made me RTFA! :(
China is known for its black market on falsified archaeological evidence... so as intriguing as this sounds, it has a very high likelihood of being a forgery.
"Theist philosophers of religion propose arguments, and their non-theist colleagues, though they critically examine them, nonetheless believe that the whole enterprise has value."
First you have to convince someone that modern academic philosophers have value, for this statement to matter.
Religion is interesting in the abstract, but theists tend to believe because that is what their parents believed and they simply indoctrinated the children. If not fairly heavily indoctrinated, most people would not be that religious.
I basically keep my wrist still and throw/slap my finger forward - it make a nice clapping sound. It always screw up people who have poised that question in front of me.
..........FULL STOP.
"Made in China"
Thats wasis!
If someone else submitted this same article, wouldn't it show up in the firehose?
This last week I submitted 15 articles to slashdot. 2 were rejected right away, and several sat pending. One that was voted quite well in the firehose was later rejected. One article, not including this one, was hijacked and redirect to another site.
I fully expect that most of the articles I submit will be rejected. My tastes are not universal, nor are all the press releases I gather and articles I write the quality that a good editor would except. I'm still learning how this process works, and expect a few bruises and blackeyes.
With that said, I don't see why I've been maliciously blacklisted by the editors of this site. I've seen 3 articles on this site this week from other web sites that collect and publish news in exactly the same way that I do. They haven't been blacklisted, why am I?
The Napoleonic method by which I was browbeat in the superbug article was uncalled for. I made a mistake, and immediate fixed it when it was brought to my attention. However, since then, my articles have been rejected or redirected to other sites.
I spend a significant amount of time scouring the internet for press releases and research papers on the topics I'm interested in. The ones I think are applicable to slashdot, and haven't been submit by others, I submit for review. I then watch those submissions in the firehose, to see which are interesting to slashdot users. People are obviously interested in the topics I'm submitting, why penalize me for doing you a favor?
I just discovered slashdot a few weeks ago. I've been suffering through the idiots at Digg ever since people learned how to game their system. At first slashdot was a bit daunting, because the submission system is quite different than any other user generated news sites I've seen. After my initial learning curve though, I realized the true power of this system.
Earlier this week I told a friend how much better I liked the slashdot editorial system. I told him how the system allowed people to vote on articles, but that editors still had the final say. I said "you don't get all the toilet humor articles on the home page about the scientific methods of wiping your butt." For me slashdot was the ideal news aggregator.
Now that I'm on the pointy end of the editorial process though, I'm starting to see problems. First off, if an editor has the time to go out and find a similar article to the one I posted, then they have enough time to tell me why they rejected mine to begin with. If you are just going to take the research efforts I've put in and redirect them at your whim, what incentive do you intend to offer so that I'll continue to submit high quality news?
I apologize for posting this letter to this article. I was unable to find a "Letters to the Editor(s)" section. If one exists, please let me know, and I will continue this dialogue their.
Just recently I ran across this at statscan: Page 7-9 of pdf. There is an interesting table on "Religiosity", part of it compared religiosity to parental religion Look at the low religiosity category. If both parent have the same religion (more consistent message) only 32% have low religiosity, if both parents just have different religions (less consistent message) low religiosity jumps to %50. If neither parent is religious, it jumps to %85. This has always made sense, but this is pretty clear statistical evidence that it is more a learned trait.
? catno=11-008-XIE2006001
http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/downpub/listpub.cgi
Religion of parents (vs outcome Lo Med Hi religiosity )
Both parents same religion 32 34 33
Parents from different religions 50 28 22
Neither parent religious 85 6 10
I like to think I was just born very skeptical and would have been a non believer no matter what circumstance I was born into, but it may just be that neither of my parents was religious and I was left to form my own ideas without being indoctrinated. Naturally many people will buck the trend but I think the correlation is clear.
Religion is just the brains legacy OS many people got stuck with.
I read a recent article - in US News & World Report I think - where they mention "modern" traits appearing for hundreds of thousands of years. Their stated theory was the traits failed. It doesn't take much of a thinker to realize the extent forms are not the result of a linear, constantly improving evolution function; so, to make claims of evolution based on "advantage" and to continue to hold those despite such clear "advantages" occurring much older than what is claimed as "modern" is simply bad science. It is great to research and to have theories but the evidence does not seem to point to these same conclusions. FWIW, I don't think the claim the Mongolians developed in or around China holds any validity given the stated need for separation. A more probable guess is they developed in the Americas and then emigrated.
Few people seem to realize how fast time will ravage a civilization. A city built in a desert may have remains after 4000 years but a city built in a fertile valley will probably be washed away after eons of floods. Not to mention cities built on hills which will simply crumble down after thousands of years. Even highways paved in the 1950's can barely be located today if they have been abandoned. Trees are very powerful at breaking up concrete and other human building materials.
Expect Freedom.
Wouldn't the oldest modern human be the oldest person currently alive? "Holy crap guys! Check out that old guy! I'm totally slashdotting this."
Hi
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Or maybe he just doesn't think the way you do?
Yes, please do think you're _God_. Not a king, not an emperor, but something truly omnipotent, at least in regards to the universe you created.
Ok, probably it's hard to imagine something like that, so let's simplify it some more. Think you're a hacker running such a universe as a simulation on your computer. You're as close to omnipotent as it gets in that simulated world you created. You can raise a mountain or boil the seas with just a click-and-drag of the mouse. Rearrange the continents if you want to. Make the planet spin backwards. Plunge it into the sun, if you want to. Raise the ocean level until only a mountain top sticks out, like in the biblical legend. Etc.
Or you can end the whole simulation with an ALT-F4 if you so wish, truly turning a whole universe into _nothing_. Not even ruins or asteroid debris or radioactive fallout, but truly into _nothing_. As if it never even existed. How's that for truly godly power, by the standards of those simulated people?
Now also realize the gap between you and them. You're God, they're bunch of simulated people and animals in the virtual world of your creation. They're not your peers, they're a bunch of created NPCs, and they're allowed to exist only because it keeps you interested or entertained. Maybe you're curious what will happen in the long term with that simulation, or maybe you're just bored, or maybe you just had an unused old computer and no better idea what to leave running on it.
Really? Why? Think at the above scenario again. What difference would it make to you whether those created people believe in you or not? Why would it matter at all?
For more power? You already have _absolute_ power over that virtual world. There's no way to go upwards from there. Whether those people believe in you or not, you still can do the same things to their world. You can still keep it running or reformat the drive, whether they're all true believers or all heretics or somewhere in between.
For popularity? Among whom? They're not your peers, they're just some NPCs you created. Who cares if you're popular among them?
Because "it's your job"... heh... _JOB_? Really? You're _God_ there. You don't have any job or duty towards those NPCs. They're in no position to actually expect you to do a _job_. How would they pay you for a "job" anyway? If you do anything for them, it's at most a _favour_, not some "job". Or you might as well ignore them and leave the simulation running on a server in the basement until something interesting happens. (E.g., they nuke themselves.)
No, seriously, think playing SimCity. You might feel benevolent towards those little simulated people, you might even want to make their lives easy, but... "job"? I don't think anyone would consider it a job or duty.
Why wouldn't you? I can think of plenty of reasons why I would do just that if I was running that simulation.
E.g., because it's a damn boring simulation if they all are stuck at the emotional level of children obeying the will of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent parent. Because likely that's what it would degenerate into, if I made myself an active and undeniable God in that simulated world. Think 1984 on steroids: they _know_ Big Brother
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Most QM interpretations hold that quantum superposition is not just a question of knowledge. Bell's Inequality specifically addresses that supposition.
Granted, this does not prove/disprove an omniscient God. Personally, I'm an agnostic with very strong atheistic tendencies. I'm just addressing the original comment about the possibility of violating certain logics.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I almost panicked when I read the title as "China's Earliest Modern Human Food", by accident.
Bad eyes and hi-res monitors don't mix.
Trees are very powerful at breaking up concrete and other human building materials.
They've even been known to kill a congressman or two.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
The black and white idea is pretty new kind of a, "yeah, well, god needs us too" reaction. It's certainly not how any civilization I know of imagined their gods. And it isn't quite the way an omniscient and omnipotent god would work. Omnipotent != limited by faith points
But in the end, all I wrote was just one example of one possible kind of deity would not give a darn if anyone worships Him/Her or not, and would have nothing to lose by misleading His/Her creations. Sort of a counter-example to the idea that a god _must_ want worshippers, or that it's his job. Well, that's one kind of god who wouldn't.
But, yeah, it's not the only kind of God that can be imagined, that much is obvious. For all I (don't) know, it could just as well be the B&W kind, or something completely different, or nothing at all. I don't pretend to know what's up there.
For the purpose of that discussion, though, and of questioning the assumption that god _must_ need worshippers, it's the kind of example that serves my point. Hence using that one instead of the B&W one.
Very much so. We don't even know what's up there, much less what their motives or logic would be. Even if their logic as such was the same as ours, logic in the end is a tool towards an end. It's used for example in figuring out a way to a goal, with the available tools/facts/whatever, and within some given constraints. E.g., I want warmth, I use logic to find a solution to that, like turning up the temperature on the heater's thermostat. So as long as we don't know what a deity's goals for that simulation are (worshippers? a power trip? an interesting empire building game because he's bored? something else?) we can't really talk about what would be logical for that deity to do.
Personally I'd probably be a little amused. And, if I'm the one who wrote that simulation, it's just a signal that I need to debug it some more. But what would someone else do, much less a deity, yeah, I can't possibly know.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You must be kidding, with all the propaganda waged against muslims, and more generally, !WASPs in the last centuries (KKK, GW Bush, and the NRA are from USA, no ?), why would it be so surprising there is scarcely any other religion in US, except christianity ?
... no mention of Allah, Buddah, Jehovah, or any other one, just plain god with a capital G .. am I mistaken or is that a Registered TradeMark of christianity ??? ...
And, btw, US's motto is 'In God we thrust', or something like that
Aside from that, I believe that not many religion can freely (that is, without some form of coercion, or social pressure behaviour) grab some other believers (for jews, your mother would have to have been converted), except for the more philosphically-inclined of them, such as Taoism, or Buddhism.
-- foreach(($deity,$hell) in $Religions){ self.goto($hell) unless self.believe($deity) }
I did a study checking the mortality rate of parents vs the mortality rate of their kids. I found that in all cases that one or more of the parents died, their offspring also eventually died. It has led me to believe that death is indeed a hereditary trait.
Again, REALLY? I don't know where you even found that definition.
That's certainly not the definition they use in the Bible, for example. I don't recall them saying anywhere that God would stop existing if you stop believing. In fact, au contraire, God is perfectly able to be an ominpotent god:
- without _any_ worshippers during Genesis, before making Adam. And even afterwards, he doesn't seem to have any problem because he had only 2, and even those didn't seem to have _that_ much faith. It sure didn't stop them from going and listening to the snake instead.
- during the flood, when again the world population was reduced to almost nothing
- IIRC during the Apocalypse, when most of the people will follow the antichrist not God, but God is supposed to have no problem winning that fight anyway
Neither did any other religion I can think of. E.g., yeah, the Norse believed that Odin will die, but not for lack of worshippers, but in battle during Ragnarok.
E.g., for a lot of other religions such an idea doesn't even make any _sense_. Most early religions didn't even have anthropomorphic gods. For the early Romans, for example, before they got taken over by the Greek gods, Vesta wasn't an anthropomorphic goddes of fire, she actually was _the_ fire. You know, not human shaped, but flame shaped. The element itself. Others worshipped the sun, the desert, whatever. It doesn't even make any sense to believe that those would stop existing if you stop worshipping them.
The very recent idea that maybe God needs your faith points makes for some good novels, but that's not the God described in the bible or anywhere else.
More importantly: that's not the God that a real christian believes in. So if you're going to argue "your God is stupid" with creationists, then please argue about the God they actually believe in, not about some completely different idea of God. Basing your "what would make sense for God to do" on some 20'th century novels kind of god instead of the bible God, is as silly as basing it on what would make sense for Zeus or Odin. Well, they don't believe in that one, so who cares if it wouldn't make sense for that one?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What is this kind of rebuttal called? Surely there's a name for submitting a rebuttal which is an obvious but unrelated inference that makes a statement having parallel structure but no parallel meaning to the statement being contested.
First guy: So, what do you do then?
Second guy: I'm a philosopher. Of religion.
G1: Oooh. How did you get to be one of them, then?
G2: Well, I did a degree in philosophy then a masters in religious philosophy on the way to a PhD. I had to read all these books and stuff.
G1: So, er, who taught you on these courses?
G2: Why, professors of philosophy mainly. My supervisor for my PhD was a specialist in the philosophy of religion.
G1: And how did they get to to be philosophers of religion then?
G2: Dammit, they studied philosophy of religion at university of course!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's based on radio-carbon dating, when the amount of C-14 is known to not be constant. They have charts that are supposed to correct this but they're based on things like a tree's annual rings (which aren't always annual) and ice core samples (where the markings dated WWII planes at thousands of years old). I can't comment on the other methods used (deep ocean sediment cores, lake sediment varves, coral samples, and speleothems (cave deposits)), since no one has ever explained how they work, but I can't imagine them being any better since they use two methods known to be inaccurate.
The technical term is "Bullshit".