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Solar System Date of Birth Determined
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system — when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock — to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of these intermediary stages are well established. The article abstract is available from Astrophysical Journal Letters."
Of course it was. Even then, everything crashed on Mondays.
So to borrow from someone else's profound statement, all of our recorded history in well within the margin of error (by 4 orders of magnitude or so).
There's a nice political joke in there for those not yet in their holiday brain coma.
...to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.
Similarly, I've discovered my birthday to be defined as subsequent to July.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Clearly this is bad information, because the morons at http://www.answersingenesis.org/ and their 27 million dollar monument to ignorance (http://www.creationmuseum.org/) say the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and surely the universe can't be that much older than the Earth.
To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle. Light from distant stars does eventually get here, it just happens on timescales that are beyond imagination.
Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Can we break those intermediate steps into seven phases or so and declare each of those a "day", get a copy to the Pope, and settle this whole religion versus science mess now? Or at least build some bridges for the Bible folks and the Science folks to agree to something that makes a little more sense?
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Yeesh, you people are so negative! The hint is right there in his username!
I need to know the calendar date so I can convince my boss it's a holiday. In fact, why don't we make it an international paid holiday?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
So god made the earth about the time civilization was making beer...and the solar system is over 4 billion years old... man sometimes Im a little late to work but this guy takes the cake! Hes still pretty keen on taking the credit though...
Nothing to see here. It is not like the radiometric dating methods are completely speculative and saddled with risky assumptions at all. These dates are solid! 4Ma + or - 2Ma... or maybe + or - 4Ma or 40 trillion years, it is not like we are guessing at all.
Have you ever wondered why we haven't encountered intelligent life forms other than ourselves? An advanced race with regular slower-than-light starships would be able to colonize an entire galaxy within a few million years (barely an instant on a geological timescale). One possible explanation for our apparent solitude in the universe is that the number of planets with the proper conditions for developing life is vanishingly small. (Read about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox for other possibilities)
For example Earth's moon creates tides (and tide pools) and stabilizes the earth's seasons and axial tilt. According to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis the Moon was created as a result of a chance collision between the proto-earth and a Mars-sized object. Without the presence of the Moon the conditions might have been too harsh to support life.
As we learn more about how the solar system formed we will be better able to predict which stars might have life-bearing planets, so we can begin our own colonization of the galaxy (assuming humans can survive long enough to overcome war, disease and ecological destruction).
It explains it all.
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It's been amusing over the past 10 years to see young-earth creationists squirm about the fact that cosmology has become a high-precision science, with the age of the universe going from having 50% error bars to 1.5% error bars. Now these folks have apparently measured the age of the solar system to within .05%. For a long time, young-earth creationists (YECs) were trying to say that the science was all very uncertain, so you couldn't trust the science. Hmm...now it appears that Archbishop Ussher's date for creation is off by 2000 standard deviations. Oops!
It's unfortunate that the authors don't seem to be in the habit of posting preprints on arxiv, or on their university web site. TFA doesn't really explain very well, for example, how they know the primordial Mn/Cr ratio so precisely, and why the Mn/Cr ratio in the universe as a whole wouldn't change at the same rate as the ratio in asteroids. As a California taxpayer, is it too unreasonable of me to expect research funded by my tax money to be available freely?
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That's funny - where in the Word is there mention of a flat earth? It actually talks a lot about stars and worlds. About our sins tossed from God as far as East is from West (hint - eternally distant from God). There's actually nothing in there that refutes evolving critters, and nothing in there that stipulates six 24 hour days for creation with the seventh for rest, and certainly nothing in there that says that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Ironically, the Scriptures even talks against those who crunch numbers and bicker over words. The conflict is not from God or from the Scriptures - it's from preconceived and erroneous notions of people who claim to align themselves with God and the Scriptures and from those who follow cultural notions rather than the essence of the Word. These same people who charged Galileo for heresy were the true heretics against the Scriptures. Creation is a process. When you plant a seed, you have created a tree. But it achieves the status of tree over time. Ditto with everything... Big Bang - Light Be!
to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years
And on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day from all his work which he had made.
You just got troll'd!
Dude, how can this be possible? The Universe is only 5768 years old according to the Old Testament! For the sake of argument, we'll ignore the fact that time dilation will stretch the first six days of Creation into approximately fifteen billion years, according to the physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder.
It's written in the stars...
Maybe "slippery when wet"?
--
make install -not war
Instead of arguing the contemporary equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I'd be more concerned with religions that have twisted views on more practical and real world matters, like considering people who have the audacity to get gang raped as having perpetrated a criminal act (see Islam). Or musing whether their main mortal boy would have enjoyed marrying a blonde. Or marking for death anyone who no longer subscribes to their fiction.
Christianity is the grass snake outside your house. Islam is the cobra in your room!
Well with the whole global warming problem we are facing, no way am I lighting that many candles!
In that sense, I think that astrophysics, followed by geology, are the most melancholy of sciences.
sig sig sig siggy sig
The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.
It's supposed to be.
The MAD doctrine deters nuclear war by threatening a retaliation that would likely bring down civilization and possibly end the human race and much of life on Earth.
For it to work, US presidents have to put on a show, looking crazy enough that they'd actually do it - but sane enough that the won't shoot first and can be reasoned with on issues that otherwise would have been "solved" by the outcome of a war. (IMHO it's likely the term "Mutually Assured Destruction" was chosen at least partly for the acronym, to help put on this show. Psych warfare was pretty well developed by the start of the Cold War.)
MAD is pretty terrifying. But it reversed the ongoing escalation of wars right after the bombs were proven to work under battle conditions (and two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII). It's been over half a century and no nukes have been used in war since those two.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is good news! The Solar System has been bummed out lately 'cause it couldn't prove it's birthday to anyone. All of the other solar systems could get into the cool clubs, but not ours.
Now it's PARTY TIME and the drinks are on Sol!
-David
Interesting that no mention is made of other astrophysicists declaring that this model is out by several orders of magnitude using reflected radiation from this dwarf star [wikipedia.org]
It's a fucking *long* time until Sunday then.
The cake is a pie
Considering we've only had video capability for 100 years, it would be obvious that any alien that landed here would have video records of us. Imagine that, watching actual footage of Mozart performing, Christ's crucifiction (if some "event" like that actually happened), Charlemagne leading troops, etc. I'm sure they would have had tabs on every significant event that happened, and might have even documented it. Heck it might even be in hologram format. While we probably don't have the technology to view their files, I'm sure they'd have years of it.
The idea with evolution is that includes extinction, therefore making all sorts of implied statements about God. Like he let's his creations (even indirect ones) die, that he made mistakes etc etc. I'm not saying they're right, but that's where the big hubhub about evolution comes into play. Or at least that's what it was back when Darwin first published. Just because something is not litterally banned in the scriptures, if the logical conclusion from the scripture (god is perfect and benevolent) contradicts with premises and predictions of evolution (or cosmology or whatever), then there CAN be a conflict between the scriptures and science, even if it's not litterally in the scriptures. That all being said, I think the conflict is just silly.
Like how according to the bible the sky used to require pillars to stay up there?
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Come on, we all know everything was created by a flying spaghetti monster, not a freaking fairy!
You realize the Catholic Church is fairly liberal when it comes to interpreting the Bible, right? It's the Protestant evangelical fundies who are the literalists.
In some sense the smaller the are the most likely we are to survive and the less resources we are going to need to maintain ourselves. So maybe small size is a virtue (and ants or small microorganisms have more evolutionary potential to survive from a supernova or asteroid, maybe).
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's French-Canadian. For us, the comma is the decimal separator, so 4,568 million actually looks like "4.568" million -- whereas it actually is "4.568" billion.
...
Of course, the next sentence shows 2,080,000 and that just completely ruins this
Nevermind.
Al
The Canadian Shield is thought to date back 4.5 billion years or so, which corresponds to this date of creation of the solar system. If so, shouldn't there be some "exotic" content to the Canadian Shield? It's not just parts of Canada which date that old, there are zircons in Australia which date back 4.4 billion years. The Earth could hardly have been consolidated at that time, since I believe the creation of the Moon from a collision of something with Earth also dates back to about that time. That doesn't leave a lot of time for the accretion process to make something big enough that the Moon can get generated as a result of the collision.
There are plenty of examples of mainstream religious doctrine changing to accommodate scientific discovery. It doesn't happen fast but it is more or less inevitable.
Unfortunately it isn't all progress because there are people making up new religious bullshit all the time.
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you commie.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Ironically if you see the imaginary figure that everyone believes in but can't see or hear you then become a saint.
God's word maybe never changes. Unless some bible thumper takes it and twists it around, of course. It's amazing how you try to "defend" the words of the Bible by quoting it wrongly.
Twice.
In a single sentence of just seven words.
First: Nowhere in the Bible, it says anything about the world being flat. We read about the waters being divided and the water being told to recede so land can form, but I can't remember a single word stating anything about the shape of Earth.
Second: The bible never ever mentions anything about a timeline or a date for the creation. What happened is that some Bishop in the 4th or 5th century tried to puzzle together a creation date for Earth, based on the various stories told therin and the acting figures, as well as their relation towards each other. Now, first of all he only had a rather bad translation of the original text to work with, second he tried to rely on the dates given (which also were a bit contradicting in the various books) and finally he took human life spans of his time as a standard. He made so many assumptions and filled the blanks with the information and rumors available to him about the ancient kingdoms of the east (which were spotty to say the least, and wrong in many cases) that as a statistician I can only dismiss his "calculations" as guesswork.
So, if you really want to rely on the Bible as the sole authority, you can neither claim that earth is flat nor that it's 5000 years old. Neither is by any means supported by the Book.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm curious, where does it say that?
if you know the exact date' we can have a public holiday!
Yet it does talk about a rabbit chewing its cud - which is false.
± 2,080,000 years? I thought they'd say something like "March 12, 4,568,422,12 BC"...
mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today.
Another slashdot article about a month ago suggested that the type of collisions needed to create our moon were relatively rare, based on dust analysis of new systems. However, 20 Mars-sized proto-planets seems like it would create pretty good chances for moon-creating collisions. (Although gas giants probably hog most.)
Table-ized A.I.
And then came Patch Tuesday...
Extinction is our word, not His. To us, it means the end. To nature, it's just another step. When a seed germinates, it ceases to be a seed and becomes something else even better. Similarly, when a grass-fire burns off the grasses, it makes way for the forest. What kind of God would put His special people in an arena with apex predators against which we cannot withstand? Think a few men with spears can ward off a T-Rex? And yet, we, the hairless monkeys that are impossibly weak, have no canines, have no claws, have no shell or armor, can't run fast, can't climb well, can't swim well, can't fly at all, don't hear well, can't see well during the day and hardly any at night, can't smell stuff well, we who are least of all nature in capabilities when compared to a balanced wilderness ecology, we who physically simply cannot survive regular predation - we were placed in an arena that not only does NOT have a dedicated apex predator preying on us (tho we can succumb to any number of predators, no predator depends on human flesh for sustenance and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that there ever was such during our time here even tho the opportunity has always been there), we were placed in an arena where we are able to resist the existing apex predators if thru cooperation, and in all the history of the world, we were placed in a time where we could survive from our intelligence alone where virtually every other creature has lived or died by the claw or tooth. If anything, our own weakness is evidence that there is a God - because by all means, we should have gone extinct ourselves a long time ago and yet, here we are as the dominant species of the entire planet and beyond.
The Scriptures has indicated that if you don't see God thru His Words, then the least you can do is pay attention to His creation - for God's fingerprints are all over it. He's not against science - science is the act of observing the works of His hands! Whether we understand what we see or not - that's our business and we are blessed to have so much to discover. Billions of years - it is like one big book that God has written and it pleases Him enormously to share that book with us as much as it pleases us to share our works of creativity with each other. So much color, so much drama and history. Impossibilities becoming possibilities. The suspense of being on the knife-edge of life where a little this way or a little that way would make us like Mars or Venus. Where we almost didn't have a moon - which would have also rendered the Earth barren of life. We have the planets to visit and the stars to gaze at in wonder. We not only have the immense mass of the Earth we stand on - and yet dwarfed by some of our neighbors - to humble us, and the unimaginable age of the rocks we so casually walk on, we also have the vast stretches of space so vast that we are even now only barely brushing against what we may imagine could be the limits of viewable space and yet perhaps not.
And in all this, we are but a shadow of reality. Time and space - we are just a bubble. Existence as we see and feel it, as we experience it - it's like a Chinese box. You look at the galaxies and see hundreds of thousands if not millions of stars. They look so dense. And yet enter one and suddenly there are vast distances of space inbetween its components. A solar system seems like it's so compact from the distance - we're looking at planets wobbling their stars. But enter one and for the space that a solar system occupies, there is impossibly little mass. A few chunks of rock and gas and liquid and a burning star all spread out so distant from each other that they are but spots in the sky to their neighbors. Move closer in to the atom and you see a core orbited by satellites much like a solar system and again - for all the influence an atom exerts it is mostly empty - it's is nearly nothing. As we dig deeper we may find the same within the sub-atomic particles. There may come a time when we go all the way down to what we really are - a word called "Be" and the creative fai
"Get off my lawn!"
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You mean the universe didn't start on 01-01-1980?
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Its coming out I tell ya! Better believe it!
It always amuses me to see something like this get reported as certain. Inevitably someone will come out next year and make it older or younger. It's like being a deserted island for one year. Then seeing a large carved boulder and saying "we can be certain that the bolder has been here for around 500 years by calculating the amount of erosion around it and the fact that it only rained once this past year". Then of course next year it rains 50 times, making the calculations just a little bit off.
I'm curious, where does it say that?
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and on them he has set the world. 1 Samual 2:8
Who shakes the earth under heaven from its foundations and its pillars totter Psalm 75:3
He has established the world; it shall never be moved Psalm 93:1
The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at his reproof Job 26:11
Who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars remble. Job 9:6
Want flat circle talk too?
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Are there any interesting scientific facts that you can deduce from the bible? Or is it all just pseudo-moral stuff and metaphorical mumbo jumbo that cannot be rightfully interpreted in any meaningful way?
Does seem that the writers made it just vague enough that people will fail to directly contradict it with newly discovered truths, but seemingly close enough to saying something that people do try to read meanings into it.
I believe it is inferred from certain passages, for example when Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a mountain to tempt him, and shows him the whole world laid out below. On a spherical world, you can't see everything from the top of a mountain but you can if it's flat.
In the same, if read literally the Bible also says that pi=3.0 (from the passage about a container measuring 10 across and 30 around).
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Whatever happened to just using billions of years? If they are attempting to keep the years and tolerance in equivalent units they could have just said, 4.568 billion years within a range [tolerance] of 0.00208 billion years and let people do the math.
So today would be Stardate 4 billion five hundred sixty eight million one hundred seventy thousand seven hundred twelve point twenty, take or leave a couple of million!
Not much info on how to "accurately" cimpute our suns' stardate on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate, someone care to update?
It's not necessarily meant to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The problem is more that with the changes since its conception, people forgot what the various idioms and parables mean. Not to mention that the original text was in Hebrew (OT) or Aramaic (NT), which was translated to Greek, then this translation was used to convert it to Latin, and this finally to English. COULD it be that SOME parts MIGHT have been translated wrongly? Especially since the people who did those translations did them century or millenia after the original text was written, long after the original meaning of it was already lost to the people who could at least read (I do not say understand) the original text.
This is how we got dogmas like the virgin Mary (which was in the original most likely meant to mean "the young girl/woman Mary") and the seven days of creation (which is in the original more akin to "seven chapters" or "sevel daily tasks").
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bad example. You take the Devil and Jesus together and then you go and say they couldn't do something. According to the book, either of them could already do what they please, now imagine them together.
And if you take away decimal calculations, which were by no means invented in those times, then yes, Pi=3.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know what you try to do.
1. Announce DNF time and again.
2. ???
3. Prophet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It would have been better if they had found out it was 4,567 years ago, or at least it would have been easier to remember, though, not entirely correct.
It's a shame they can't give us an exact date. That would be one hell of a birthday cake :-)
Supposedly, our solar system was formed from the remains of another solar system with a short-lived sun that went supernova.
Was that theory invalidated and I missed the news?
Should we not trace the "birth" of our solar system to the explosion of that star?
Because a billion means different things depending on where you live.
You mean, "qui donne une merde concernant ces culs muets", surely?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
4,568 million years is a decimal number (4.568) for most of europe,
why do you use the comma in that manner anyways?
That's what I was refering to. The Bible is full of figures of speech, parables, allegories and hints, sometimes because freedom of speech was not really part of the human rights package back then, partly because back then, what was said made sense to the people but just isn't understood anymore. "You are the salt of the Earth" made sense to the people listening to Jesus. Today you have to wonder, salt in the earth? That's decidedly not a good idea. It means nothing will grow, why should the good people be the ones that ruin the crops? But back then, salt was worth its weight in gold, it was essential, it was the stuff needed to keep food from going bad in the pre-refrigerator times. Especially in a hot land like the middle east. So salt was precious, essential, no life and no prosperity could be possible without it.
Now, take it literally and this parable means you are supposed to ruin the land you live on. Of course, nobody would claim that's what Jesus had in mind. But it's a pretty good example how things can be twisted around when you take the Bible literally.
So yes, the word used in the Genesis was "day". But it is likely that it wasn't meant to mean "24 hours, one rotation of the Earth", what we consider a "day" today. It is more likely that it was supposed to mean a "day's work". For a God, that is, of course.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Best Slashdot Co
Are you serious? "It says pillars, see? Right there. Pillars. That means pillars, ya know."
What about the mayor, the city council - the pillars of our community? I guess they're tall, round, and made of stone too.
Everytime I read something like this I cannot help but wonder how they claim to have figured it out. To me it always sounds like they're just making up yet another wild number to keep the funds flowing.
...or something like that...
Scientist #1: crap, it's evaluation in a week
Scientist #2: so?
Scientist #1: well, the people who are giving us all our money will want to know what we made of it and we have nothing to present
Scientist #2: ah, well, let's just make up some wild number on how the universe is more or less exactly 4 billion years old...noone can really prove that wrong anyway...
Scientist #1: hmm, this might just work...
Scientist #2: and just to top it off we'll even admit we're wrong by a few million years...just so noone asks how we can be so sure
Scientist #1: My dear Scientist #2, you are a genious!
Not really, the sun is down half the day
....isn't that far off then?
4568 million years vs. somewhere around 6000 yrs. That's only 6 orders of magnitude, I mean, really they're just ZEROES.
-Styopa
"suck Satan's cock!" - bill hicks
I am made of the dust of the stars And the oceans flow in my veins ...
'Only a Barbarian believes that his tribes customs are the laws of nature'
Actually, the way I know it - Everything crashes on Friday. Afternoon. Preferabley after 17:00 when you are just about to put your foot out of the front door of the office.
So, this pretty much proves that the creationists were right. The earth was created only 4,000 years ago. They were just a little off by a few billion years.
Secondly it proves that the Earth's a Libra and according to today's horoscope says: More planetary changes bring the focus back to home matters and yet more change. A makeover for your room might appeal, but the planetary line-up could be a lot better than it currently is. Hold on to your ideas and wait until you have more time and a healthier looking budget!
which is mostly correct.
Stand facing north or south magnetic pole. If you lack a compass use stars, moss on the trees or satellite antennae (they are facing the Equator) to align yourself.
Now, standing like that, one of your hands is your east hand and the other is your west hand. Shake hands with yourself to congratulate yourself on a job well done in bringing the east and west together. About our sins tossed from God as far as East is from West (hint - eternally distant from God). Here is a fun experiment.
Stand facing north or south magnetic pole. If you lack a compass use stars, moss on the trees or satellite antennae (they are facing the Equator) to align yourself.
Now, standing like that, one of your hands is your east hand and the other is your west hand. Shake hands with yourself to congratulate yourself on a job well done in bringing the east and west together.
Now that you know how to do that, you can do amazing things like twiddling your thumbs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You do realize that you can't see "the entire world laid out below" even if it was flat. The atmosphere alone prevents that. This would infer that either the devil was showing him a "vision" of the world, or that they had some sort of superior overview that transcends normal vision - being the devil and Jesus and all. I'm not really arguing, I'm just pointing that out.
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
well said.
Do we know its sign?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Wow, how in the holy hell did THAT happen? Can we get this fixed, already? Also, convert the US off of Imperial ...
Most of the US likes Imperial and has no desire to switch. Yes it's just because we all grew up using it, but that's something that can't be easily undone. Imperial isn't like a cubit or something where it varies from person to person. All of the measurements are a very specifically defined amount and work perfectly fine for everyday use, and would technically be fine for scientific use if people wanted to utilize them.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
My favorite little hypocrisy among large groups of otherwise well-meaning Christians is a literal reading of the Creation story in Genesis taken together with an insistence on a very loose, figurative reading of the Revelation. You simply can't say that something in Revelation is about a tank or a nuclear missile and still insist that a day in Genesis is one Earth day.
My reading of the Bible is that it tells us the fact that God created the universe, but it says nothing of how. Christian faith is entirely compatible with modern science - they are orthogonal.
Explains why my drill index has THREE different measuring systems, then, all for Imperial. Fractional, numeric for sizes in between those expressed as fractions, and lettered sizes. Any system where it's not immediately obvious without a few years of experience what size is the next smallest after, say, 1/4", is a pain in the ass and a confusing, antiquated barrier to entry. I'm an American, I like Fahrenheit because it works just fine, but Imperial for tools and shop measurement is plain counterproductive. Pisses me off every time I have to go to two different hex driver sets because an unknown bolt might be metric or Imperial.
I think the science was just a cover-up to find Duke Nukem Forever's original release date.
-
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
Bah, that's easy when the majority of your system is just running their idle loops! Out of the whole dang system only one core has any active clients, and it's been starting to look a little flakey lately as the client process is gobbling up all the resources.
The enemies of Democracy are
Makes you wonder what was lost in translation sometimes.
Shouldn't that be current stage?
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Don't you think what you've said can apply to any religio-mythological text? How come here, in Slashdot a comment like this is made in reference to Judeo-Christian belief? As far as I know, Genesis says it was dark (the void), then there was light (Big Bang?) and then Earth and the Heavens (not necessarily in that order). Then the oceans (yep those came first) and the beasts (several waves of species, apparently by the fossil record), then G-d got lonely/smoked some crack and created man from dust(early storms primordial clay and amino acids?). It's a little out of order but it follows the "boomstick" rule; how would YOU explain the scientific understanding of creation to early civilized man, fresh out the trees? If you tried by explaining that all of creation was at one point in time packed into an area possibly no larger and a pinhead and there was this hyper-rapid expansion, continuing on... blah blah blah. It sounds just as fantastic IF NOT MORE.
What amazes me is that one would think we'd get past the point of trying to be absolute in the first place when it comes to belief versus science. My own personal preference is to realize that science provides the answer to HOW things happened and the measurable forces behind it. It permits us to truly understand on a equal, quantifiable level regardless of philosophical/theological belief. Belief has its place in how we see things as well; it deals more with the philosophical WHY and how/what we decide to focus this brief existence on.
Personally, I've never seen the conflict between the two and look at those on both sides who never miss an opportunity to bash each other and prove the other wrong as both amusing and tragic.
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
The flat earth is 5000 years old.
Is it possible this post is missing its <irony> tags?
we can have an astrologer create the appropriate charts and divine it's future
God created the lights in Heaven on the fourth day. And the seventh day was Saturday when he rested.
4 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning--the fourth day.
When they say 6000 years, they're rounding the numbers: 6000 years plus or minus 4500 million.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The bible states what a day is. It says that he called the light day and the darkness night. It says there was darkness and then there was light making one day. Every day after that specifies morning/evening making a second, third, and so on. Making pretty certain that it is one day like we have today. Plants were created before the sun. These plants would have died if not for the sun. If you think the "light" that was there could be enough for the plants then think that insects weren't made till day 5 and they pollenate the plants. God said let there be light, not the sun. There was just light until day 4 when the earth moon and sun were created. The gap theory and the day age theory's don't have any feet to stand on. They are just trying to fit evolution in with the bible. One more unique point is that he gave all things that have the breath of life plants. Plants were also not created the same day as the things that were given the breath of life. This pretty much says that plants aren't the same as the living things. And this is what living things ate. Giving perfect reason to "nothing had died before man sinned." The bible is based on Jesus. There is a lineage of christ that isn't broke and can be recorded all the way back to Adam. We know Jesus existed and if we can trace it back all that way to the first man in the old testament then I would have to say you are incorrect on the statement of christians being orthogonal.
On a spherical orange you can't see everything from one side, but this wouldn't stop you from claiming that you're viewing the whole orange.
Besides, this is Jesus and Satan. I'm not sure that the same LOS rules apply to those two.
I think it is safe to say that God's word does change.
>"the word of God is living and active" - Hebrews 4:12
If it is living then it too must evolve.
Nah, that just means God created it.
'though, it would be a hilarious twist if we could somehow make up something about an evolving word of God and try to force it into religion. Hey, THEY started breaking down the wall between church and state!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In Engineering terms, 10^9 in SI or Imperial is still 10^9 and if you prefer I say 5.xxx x 10^9 years with a tolerance of .002 x 10^9 so be it. Then people reading the units of time would know the ratio of .002xxx/5.xxx = a very small difference.
Let me rephrase it:
If someone believes that Firefly documents events that take place in our physical reality, then they would not make good rocket scientists.
that, it might have been born at night, but it certainly wasn't born last night!
Galileo was not actually persecuted for claiming a heliocentric solar system per se- he was put on trial for interpreting biblical scripture (by himself) in order to make his views jibe with the cosmology of the church.
His crime, then, really was in the realm of the church. His science was never really questioned. Play with fire, get burned, i guess.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
It's good to read of the fruits on another person's life's work, and I appreciate the effort and good intentions of the intelligent people who make these "When did the universe begin" and "When does life begin" and "Physics geeks say your math is off" arguments.
... when the latest theory is disproved by another scientist's bold assertion, or by revelations that much of what this kind of science asserts as fact is not factual.
It's also disappointingly typical of many scientist, though, to doggedly pursue an answer without a sound, logical question, or in this case, a question based on theories with fundamental flaws.
If you insist on linear thinking and pursue the beginning of everything, you duck the question of what was there before the beginning. If everything started somewhere at some time, logically it must have had a place to start in. Is that what you're telling us? Can you give an accurate address of a home by listing the city but not the state?
We can't make sense of the question's premise so we decide that's a kind of science we can't comprehend but we'll proceed with the question anyway. Worry about the details later
It's not unlike the scientists who once believed the earth was flat. In this case, we seem to believe in a linear universe, and for some reason, we feel a need to attach another troubled concept -- time -- to this belief. And we accept it.